During the 1980s, many policymakersfacing decreasing revenues and increasing unemployment looked to technology-led development to pump new life into their sagging regional and national economies. One of the ways they attempted to promote this high-tech strategy was through the creation of science parks. But although these parks have demonstrated some potential for enhancing economic growth, they are hardly the economic quick fixes some policymakers believe them to be: successful parks often have taken a decade or more to become economically viable, theirfailure rate is high, and their regional and national economic impacts have been exaggerated. State or governmental support is essential to the success of a science park. This assistance may take many forms-from direct state subsidy, to provision of infrastructure, to simply directing government-related research and development contracts to science park tenants. Locating a park near certain urban features-good transportation linkages, a high-quality residential environment, a university, and a pleasant working environment-is also essential. Science parks are not, in themselves, the answer to promoting regional or national high-technology-led economic development, but they can be one of a number of options available to planners and policymakers as part of a well-thought-out and coordinated development strategy built on regional or national strengths, rather than artificial supports for costly and uncertain high-technology strategies.

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Information technology (IT) was conventionally viewed as a process that affects the spatial organization of production significantly yet has little impact on technical and managerial structures. Specifically, IT was said to encourage decentralization and centralization in space because the new infrastructure, ‘the electronic superhighway’, both compresses space and reduces turnover time. Regional policymakers were then advised to design measures to enhance the decentralizing effect of IT. Only recently has attention been directed toward the impact of IT on industrial processes. However, such contributions remain limited because of their view of IT as a process phenomenon. We argue that IT is better viewed as a process and as a productive force and that from this perspective its impact is not limited to spatial organization of industries as it also alters production methods. Beginning with this understanding of IT, we have identified and presented two emerging technospatial tendencies, namely, integration and disintegration. Whereas decentralization disengages production stages from a centralized hub of productive activity, disintegration actually alters a centralized production hub into new fragments, each of which incorporates every necessary production stage to create a comprehensive and self-sufficient structure. Likewise, whereas centralization simply collects production stages together, integration restructures groups of production stages into a new whole and leads to comprehensive resource-sharing among diverse industries. The implications of this new formulation for regional development policy are far-reaching. There are also ramifications for the existing theory of new international division of labor, a subject that is not treated in this paper. Regional planners will need to restructure ‘innovation techniques’ specifically to accommodate disintegrated firms and to design policies that correlate with the industrial objective of competitive advantage. The most significant ingredients in this process are the establishment of an intelligent network, high-quality labor training, and support of productivity strategies designed to meet the needs of firms in the 1990s. Policymakers must also introduce regulations to promote universal access to IT and prevent integrated firms from becoming oligopolies, including the creation of countervailing local forces.

Tehran, the capital and largest city of Iran, has witnessed two parallel trends: a rapid and multi-faceted socio-spatial growth, and increasing separation among social classes. The former is manifested by population increase, physical expansion, concentration of institutions, and administrative centralization. The latter is indicated by rapid accumulation of wealth and capital by a tiny layer, poverty of most of the population, and spatial segregation of social classes. These phenomena reflect the transformation from a pre-capitalist city in the 18th through the early 20th century to a transitional capitalist city in the 1920-1950 period, and to a dependent capitalist city after the 1950s.