ABSTRACT
California of the 1980s has seen a flowering of human settlements based upon the newest wave of forced draft technological innovation. Much of the evidence presented in this chapter was assembled from a wide range of trade and commercial publications and by personal communications from consultants. At the beginning of the decade these sources revealed the findings of a survey showing that insurance could decentralise to the metropolitan periphery because its daily decisions were very largely dependent upon documents, whereas banking, which seems to be doing much the same kind of paper work, cannot safely move out to the low rent areas on the periphery, because basically its important transactions depend upon trust, and trust arises from face-to-face interaction. In Silicon Valley, and to a somewhat lesser extent Orange County and San Diego, the social networks of individual participants in the industry have become highly evolved, almost always crossing company boundaries.
