Against the backdrop of today�s climate of economic globalization and the rapid development of information, this timely book explores the complex concept of competitiveness between cities. The expert contributors illustrate that innovation is a
Global trends such as climate change, digitalisation, enhanced concepts of democracy and the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis are changing the playing field of cities across the world. Urban development objectives are shifting away from being purely concerned with wealth creation and competitiveness, to increasingly combining social and environmental dimensions. In this context, how can cities influence and sustain their competitive position over time? Which new types of urban strategies are emerging, and which organising capacities are proving the most important? This book provides insight into the complex issue of delivering sustainable competitiveness by analysing a number of innovative urban development strategies in context. Questions and topics addressed include: how can new legacies of city events be secured; how can clean technology industries be nurtured through urban regeneration initiatives; and how can the impact of urban safety strategies be enhanced? These and other pivotal questions are explored through close attention to the enabling factors linking ideas with results, such as distributed leadership, collaboration, communication and experimentation. Combining case studies from Europe, Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, the book provides a truly international perspective on the potentials and limitations of a new generation of urban development and competitiveness strategies.
Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth—luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor—do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does? The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components—economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors—to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.
Plenty has been written on the competitiveness of megacities, capital cities, and regional hubs. Cities in developing countries have not yet received the same attention – this book fills that gap. An international team of expert academics have come together to present a comprehensive study of the competitiveness of cities in the developing world. Spanning Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this book homes in on specific city cases and examines how they relate to the rest of the global economy. The focus is on acknowledging their unique contexts, while drawing out commonalities, and ultimately identifying ways for them to enhance their competitiveness, wellbeing, and sustainability. This volume will be valuable reading to advanced students, researchers, and policymakers in urban and regional studies, economic geography, and economic development.
This open access book represents one of the key milestones of DESIGNSCAPES, an H2020 CSA (Coordination and Support Action) research project funded by the European Commission under the Call "User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation". The book demonstrates that adopting design allows us to embed innovation within the city so as to arrive at feasible answers to complex global challenges. In this way, innovation can become disruptive, while also sparking a dynamic of gradual change in the "urbanscape" it acts within. To explore this potential, the book puts forward the concept of "design enabled innovation in urban environments" and examines the part that the city can play in promoting and facilitating the adoption of design among public and private sector innovators. This leads to a potential evaluation framework in which a given urbanscape is assessed both in terms of its capacity for generating innovation, and of the nature (more or less design-dependent or design-prone) of the innovative initiatives it hosts. This thread of reasoning holds many promising implications, including a possible "third way" between those who dream of an alternative economic model where revenues and growth are sacrificed on the altar of social and environmental respect, and the supporters of the traditional market-based view, who feel it is enough to add a touch of responsibility and concern to a system that should continue rewarding the profitability of innovations. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
Providing a state-of-the-art overview of research on regional competition and co-operation, this title attempts to fully develop the understanding of the new role of regions and their behaviour, addressing questions such as how and why do regions compete.
"Innovation and entrepreneurship are ubiquitous today, both as fields of study and as starting points for conversations among experts in government and economic development. But while these areas on continue to attract public and private investments, many measurements of their resulting economic growth-including productivity growth and business dynamism-have remained modest. Why this difference? Because not all business sectors are the same, and the transformative gains of some industries have been offset by stagnation or contraction in others. Accordingly, a nuanced understanding of the economy requires a nuanced understanding of where innovation and entrepreneurship occur and where they matter. Answering these questions allows for strategic public investment and the infrastructure for economic growth.The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth, the latest entry in the NBER conference series, seeks to codify these answers. The editors leverage industry studies to identify specific examples of productivity improvements enabled by innovation and entrepreneurship, including those from new production technologies, increased competition, new organizational forms, and other means. Taken together, the volume illuminates whether the contribution of innovation and entrepreneurship to economic growth is likely to be concentrated, be it selected sectors or more broadly"--
Culture and creativity have untapped potential to deliver social, economic, and spatial benefits for cities and communities. Cultural and creative industries are key drivers of the creative economy and represent important sources of employment, economic growth, and innovation, thus contributing to city competitiveness and sustainability. Through their contribution to urban regeneration and sustainable urban development, cultural and creative industries make cities more attractive places for people to live in and for economic activity to develop. Culture and creativity also contribute to social cohesion at the neighborhood level, enable creative networks to form and advance innovation and growth, and create opportunities for those who are often socially and economically excluded. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a deep impact on the cultural sector, yet it has also revealed the power of cultural and creative industries as a resource for city recovery and resilience. More generally, cities are hubs of the creative economy and have a critical role to play in harnessing the transformative potential of cultural and creative industries through policies and enabling environments at the local level. 'Cities, Culture, and Creativity' (CCC) provides guiding principles and a CCC Framework, developed by UNESCO and the World Bank, to support cities in unlocking the power of cultural and creative industries for sustainable urban development, city competitiveness, and social inclusion. Drawing from global studies and the experiences of nine diverse cities from across the world, the CCC Framework offers concrete guidance for the range of actors -- city, state, and national governments; creative industry and related private-sector organizations; creatives; culture professionals and civil society-- to harness culture and creativity with a view to boosting their local creative economies and building resilient, inclusive, and dynamic cities.
Smart cities are a fast-growing species, and a fascinating field for new experiments in a number of critical areas, ranging from urban planning, sustainable energy, and transport strategies to social integration and talent attraction, to name a few. As leaders and citizens around the world continue to assess, design, implement and improve on ways to create better cities, they often find themselves confronted with a multitude of decisions and a wide range of partial solutions to specific problems such as traffic congestion, waste management and crime. Unfortunately, they have precious few tools to enable them to define the strategies required and take advantage of the experience of other smart cities around the world. In such a context, metrics can play a significant and constructive role: by quantifying efforts and results, they increase the ability of decision-makers to identify where their priorities should lie as well as the relative merits of various approaches.