Model of Tomorrow : Author Sees County as Preview of New Industrial World

Ask Allen J. Scott, professor of urban and economic geography at UCLA, where America’s industrial future lies and, like newspaper publisher Horace Greeley a century ago, he points to the West.

But Scott takes Greeley’s directive a step further, isolating Southern California and especially Orange County as places where the future can be seen.

Scott has just published a book, “Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form,” in which he argues that a substantial--but largely ignored--shift in the industrial base of the United States has taken place since the late 1960s.

As a result of that shift, he said in a recent interview with Times staff writer John O’Dell, Southern California now ranks as the biggest industrial region anywhere in the world.

In one chapter that takes up nearly 20% of the book, Scott points to Orange County as a model of “the new patterns of industrialization and urbanization that are now being laid down on the American economic landscape.”

A native of England, Scott did his undergraduate work at Oxford and was awarded a doctorate in geography by Northwestern University in Chicago. He has taught at a number of major universities and came to UCLA from Toronto in 1981. Scott is the author of several other books and numerous academic papers on urban and economic geography.

Q. You say Southern California is the national center of industry. Where does Orange County fit in?

A. With the kind of interest that’s been sparked by places like Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128, it is interesting that nobody mentions Orange County. It’s not widely known, but Orange County is not only a major high-technology center, it is the largest high-technology center anywhere in the world and it is growing rapidly. It’s not a lateral extension of Los Angeles anymore. It really is now a metropolis in its own right. What is extraordinary about this is that in something like 20 years, a suburban agricultural backwater has grown into what is now the 15th-largest metropolitan area in the United States.

Q. The industrial base in Orange County also is a a bit more diverse than in most other high-tech centers, is it not?

A. Yes. More diverse than Silicon Valley, certainly. Silicon Valley is focused on semiconductors and more recently on computers. The economic base of Orange County is very much more diverse. And hence, I think more more viable in the long run.

Q. So why is Orange County overlooked?

A. Well, I think part of the reason is that until recently, social scientists of all kinds have not really paid very much attention to Southern California. They think of Southern California as palm trees, sunshine and surf. But in fact it is the major industrial region in the world. And the industrial activity that’s developed here is very different from that of the old manufacturing cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh. I’m talking first about high-technology industry and second, and something again that’s not widely appreciated, of low-technology, design-intensive forms of production like clothing, furniture, printing and publishing. But people doing urban studies have tended to see Southern California as a sort of exceptional case. An aberration. What I claim in the book is that while this used to be true, Southern California has become the classic case of urbanization and regional growth of the late 20th Century.

Q. Does that make the Chicagos and the Pittsburghs the aberrations?

A. Yes. The has-beens.

Q. I guess it’s a question of terminology, but most people still think of auto builders and steel mills--huge factories with thousands of employees--as industry. You are talking about industry that is not dependent on huge factories and tremendous labor forces, are you not?

A. In fact, a lot of it is very labor-intensive. It differs a lot. Some is very capital-intensive, a lot of it is very skill-intensive, and there are other forms of manufacturing in Orange County which use large quantities of immigrant labor. Hispanic and Asian in particular.

Q. But you are not talking about tremendously large plants, are you?

A. No, you’re talking about plants that employ maybe 50 people and do very specialized work.

Q. Economists who look at the county talk about its rapidly developing service industry and say there is a shift away from a manufacturing base. How does that fit with your contention that manufacturing employment here is growing?

A. There has been a tremendous growth of business and financial services in Orange County, but this hasn’t dampened growth in manufacturing employment. And a lot of those other businesses, in particular in retail and personal services, are really a derivative part of the economy. They are dependent on the wages generated in the manufacturing sector of the county.

Q. What kind of workers are demanded by the kind of small companies that form the base of industry in Orange County?

A. The labor force is composed of two very different segments. On the one side, you have the very highly paid scientists, engineers, technicians. And on the other side, you have essentially immigrant labor. The economy of Orange County operates on two different levels: a level of skilled work and super-high-technology forms of production and production processes, and another level which is quite labor-intensive, unskilled, very often quite dirty forms of work using a lot of toxic materials.

Q. You talk about Asians and Hispanics filling a lot of jobs in the county. What about the county’s black population?

A. In the book I point to the paradox that while there’s been a tremendous growth since 1970 of the county’s Hispanic and Asian immigrant populations, there has been virtually no growth of the black population. The speculation I make in the book is that the immigrant population actually undercuts blacks in the labor market in Orange County because the level of the labor market in which blacks are most likely to to be found is the same level where competition from immigrant workers is most intense. The consequence is that blacks have been consistently, I think, left out of the growing job opportunities in Orange County and other places in Southern California.

Q. Do you see this as caused by overt political or social attitudes, or simply as an economic reality?

A. The base reason is economic. It’s not a crude racism here, but it is racism in the very definite sense that there is a systematic discrimination against one segment of the population. I don’t think blacks would have been kept out of the housing market, for example, because the growth of the immigrant population suggests that there was always the possibility in housing markets of Orange County to accommodate low-wage workers. So I think it’s at the level of jobs in the labor market that this problem exists.

Q. Convenient that you should mention housing. Orange County is one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation, and it has some of the worst traffic congestion. Don’t these two things make it difficult for lower-paid people to live in the county, and doesn’t that have a negative effect on the labor pool?

A. Yes. There have for a long time been complaints about labor shortages in Orange County. That’s a symptom of growth. The fact that it is growing so rapidly means that it is continually outstripping the available supplies of labor. Any fast-growing area is likely to face rather severe labor shortages on occasion. And we know that the high housing prices and the terrible transportation situation also contribute to the labor shortage. It makes it more expensive and more difficult to get labor.

Q. Are there other areas where these same problems have cropped up and been fixed?

A. I can’t think of any any good examples, but while the points you mention constitute a crisis, it’s a crisis of success. Not a crisis of failure.

Q. But cannot a crisis of success turn into a failure?

A. I have some faith that there’s enough leverage somewhere in the system for some of these problems to be dealt with. I wouldn’t anticipate that these problems are going to be so bad for so long that they will choke off Orange County’s growth. If the decline comes, I would expect to see its origin somewhere else. Reading the lessons of what happened to traditional manufacturing cities in the United States and in Western Europe, the real crisis, should it ever come, will be more related to the phenomenon of radically new technologies, radically new and different kinds of manufacturing processes that call for a complete restructuring of the whole manufacturing base and relocation of the manufacturing base into places that are more suitable for those new technologies and manufacturing processes.

Q. Earlier, you referred to Orange County as a metropolis. In fact it’s not one city but 28, and it looks like before long it may be 29 or 30 cities. Is that a problem?

A. Yes, it is. What you have is an area that is functioning more and more as an integrated space. Whatever happens at Place A in Orange County has some effect on Place B, which in turn affects Place C. And the fragmentation of the county into so many municipalities impedes effective coordination of local government and planning actions. The reason people want to carve out cities is because they have special interests that they want to protect. But this exclusiveness frequently causes some kind of inequity or inefficiency. The fact of the matter is that in things like industrial development and housing and infrastructure provision and above all, of course, transportation, some wider frame of reference enabling effective coordination of the whole is essential.

Q. Why have you singled out Orange County as the premier example of what industry is becoming in the United States.?

A. What happened in Orange County was a process of growth that’s been observed in a number of other parts of the world since the 1960s. The part of the world that most resembles Orange County in this pattern of growth is the so-called Third Italy around Venice, Bologna and Florence. Now, the Third Italy is a center of craft production, not high-technology production. But it shares in common with Orange County a steady vertical disintegration of economic activities.

Q. By that you mean . . . ?

A. What has been happening is that there’s been a steady fragmentation of production processes into more and more specialized units and smaller units. The consequence is that the average size of manufacturing units has tended to decrease while the flexibility of the whole system is enormously increased. In other words, Orange County is one of the premier cases in the world of the formation of new flexible industrial complexes.

Q. When you say flexible, you’re talking about their ability to respond to changing economies, changing consumer tastes?

A. The ability very rapidly to shift from one product to another and from one production process to another. They secure their flexibility by this process of fragmentation, because if the production system is a network of independent producers rather than one single assembly line, it’s very much easier for the whole system to to change course. And that is complemented by extremely flexible labor markets. Flexible in the sense that you don’t have union labor, particularly in Orange County, which has one of the lowest rates of manufacturing unionization in California, if not the entire United States. This means that producers in Orange County have that much more flexibility in redeploying workers from job to job and in layoff and recall processes, so they can fine-tune their use of labor to the ups and downs and changes in their production process.

Q. Is this a situation that is hard on the labor force but, in the long run, produces a more stable economy?

A. Well, I’m not so sure that it produces a more stable economy. but it is certainly hard on that bottom segment of the labor force. There’s a big debate now going on about these flexible production systems. They represent both progress and regression simultaneously. On the one hand, they are the basis of much new economic growth and in the case of Southern California are fundamental to the rapid economic growth. But in certain respects they resemble sort of 19th-Century sweatshop economies, and indeed there is a significant element of the sweatshop economy in Orange County and throughout Southern California. . . . I’m talking about job shops that are employing immigrant labor at the minimum wage or below the minimum wage with little or no fringe benefits and often under conditions that are less than ideal in terms of exposure to toxic materials.

Q. Doesn’t this argue for unionization or for some kind of organization of the labor force to protect itself?

A. Well, of course, when workers face negative conditions they very frequently want to be able to deal with those negative conditions. What is peculiar again about Orange County and other places like it is that there is no traditional working class with an acquired experience of unionization.

Q. So do these conditions simply continue? Or does the employer ultimately come to a realization that it’s better to treat your people a little better and put up with the extra costs than to have the alternative of strikes and labor unrest?

A. Yes, I think that many employers do come to that realization. I think that part of the process of building over the long run a viable industrial and economic community in Orange County would in part involve efforts to ameliorate in significant ways some of the labor market conditions faced by the more marginal workers in the county.

Q. And will those efforts bear fruit?

A. Nobody knows the answer, but my own prediction is that Orange County will continue to grow as a major industrial and economic center--at least to the end of this century. I can’t see anything that suggests to me that a radical change of course will occur over the next two or three decades. But we know that other centers that grew with great rapidity eventually began to decline, like, for example, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was the center of the steel industry and the metal trades in North America, but it began to lose plants and jobs in a massive process of deindustrialization. So the interesting question is, yeah, will Orange County one day be a kind of Pittsburgh?