Many cities worldwide face the prospect of major transformation as the world moves toward a global information order. In this new era, urban economies are being radically altered by dynamic processes of economic and spatial restructuring. The result is the creation of informational cities, or their new and more popular name, knowledge cities.

For the last two centuries, social production had been primarily understood and shaped by neoclassical economic thought, which recognized only three factors of production: land, labor, and capital. Knowledge, education, and intellectual capacity were secondary, if not incidental, factors. Human capital was assumed to be either embedded in labor or just one of numerous categories of capital. In the last decades, it has become apparent that knowledge is sufficiently important to deserve recognition ...