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China has many cities that specialize in specific products. Like Detroit for cars, they have Cixi for hair dryers, Wenzhou for lighters, and Ningbo for home appliances. We’re familiar with this idea for cultural sectors, like NYC/Shanghai for finance, Silicon Valley/Shenzhen for tech, DC/Beijing for politics, and Hollywood/Hengdian for movies. But of course spatial concentration works for many industries. We’ve written about this already for drone zones and biotech boroughs, but specializing around an *existing* sector is an interesting concept for startup societies and network states. Perhaps obvious, but a chosen specialization for a city (like hair dryers) is very different from a given specialization (like a coal mine). The former is manufacturing, the latter is mining. You can’t choose the distribution of natural resources, but you can make the best of what you have. Original video: See also this older piece[1] on revitalizing Detroit by turning it into a drone valley. This actually arguably happened[2] in nearby Columbus with the Anduril factory. [1]: https://t.co/G4pK3sFJ45 [2]: https://t.co/oEtXVSCWGM https://t.co/yhc0jGtb7D