Place-making and Policies for Competitive Cities E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 652

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Urban policy makers are increasingly striving to strengthen the economic competitiveness of their cities. Currently, they do that mainly in the field of the creative knowledge economy - arts, media, entertainment, creative business services, architecture, publishing, design; and ICT, R&D, finance, and law. This book is about the policies that help to realise such objectives: policies driven by classic location theory, cluster policies, ‘creative class’ policies aimed at attracting talent, as well as policies that connect to pathways, place and personal networks.

The experiences and policy strategies of 13 city-regions across Europe have been investigated: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Birmingham, Budapest, Dublin, Helsinki, Leipzig, Milan, Munich, Poznan, Riga, Sofia and Toulouse. All have different histories and roles: capital cities and secondary cities; cities with different economies and industries; port-based cities and land-locked cities. And all 13 have different cultural, political and welfare state traditions. Through this wide set of contexts, Place-making and Policies for Competitive Citiescontributes to the debate about the development of creative knowledge cities, their economic growth and competitiveness and advocates the development of context-sensitive tailored approaches. Chapter authors from the 13 European cities rigorously evaluate, reformulate and test assumptions behind old and new policies.

This solidly-grounded and policy-focused study on the urban policy of place-making highlights practices for different contexts in managing knowledge-intensive cities and, by drawing on the varied experiences from across Europe, it establishes the state-of-the-art for both academic and policy debates in a fast-moving field.

Leseprobe

Contents

Contributors

Foreword

Preface

Part I Introduction

1 Policies and Place-making for Competitive Cities

Policy progress

Economic sectors

Questions and approaches

2 Prevailing Policies versus New Tailored Policies

Introduction

Infrastructure, communication, tax and cluster policies

Creative class debates and policy hypes related to technology, tolerance and talent (3Ts)

New tailored policies linked to pathways, place and personal networks (3Ps)

Three parts

Part II Pathways

3 Policies Built upon Pathways

Pathways and urban development

Capitalising on layers of development

Power centres with sustained positions

Post-socialist policies and the struggle with the past

4 Policies towards Multi-Layered Cities and Cluster Development

Introduction

Multi-layered cities

Path dependence of cluster development and the role of policies

Multi-layered cities in Western Europe and in Eastern and Central Europe

Conclusions

5 Capitalising on Position: Policies for Competitive Capital and non-Capital Cities

Introduction

The function of capital versus non-capital cities

Selected capital and non-capital cities in the ACRE study

Capital cities: development pathways and policies

Development pathways of non-capital cities

Policies for competitive non-capital cities

Conclusions

6 Addressing the Legacy of Post-Socialist Cities in East Central Europe

Introduction

Key features of post-socialist cities affecting urban policies

The role and structure of the creative and knowledge-intensive sectors

Challenges and policy responses

Policy recommendations

Concluding remarks

Part III Place

7 The Importance of Places and Place Branding

Introduction

Sense of place and placelessness

Place-making, place marketing and place branding

Shifting focus of place-making in competitive cities

8 Policies towards Place Attraction and Policies for Place Retention

Introduction: place-making and the creative knowledge economy

The evolution of ‘place-making’

Developing policies oriented towards the retention of creative and knowledge workers

Policy reorientation: a focus on place retention

Conclusion: place-making policy formation

9 Urban Regeneration and Housing as Potential Tools for Enhancing the Creative Economy

Introduction

Links between urban regeneration and the creative economy

Housing for everyone and housing for creative people

How can regeneration and housing support the creative economy?

Conclusions

10 Successes and Failures in City Branding Policies

Introduction

Theories on place branding: the role played by cultural and creative industries

Some empirical evidence

Conclusions: evaluating city branding processes

Acknowledgements

11 Policies for Small and Large Cities

Introduction

City size and the creative knowledge economy

Does size influence the decisions of skilled employees in the creative and knowledge economy?

City size, governance and policy-making

Conclusion: different dimensions, different challenges

12 Creative Knowledge Strategies for Polycentric City-Regions

Introduction

The city-region concept

From mono- to polycentric city-regions

Geographies of creative knowledge companies

Geographies of creative knowledge workers

Towards competitive creative knowledge regions? Examples of city-regional collaboration

Conclusions and policy implications: the added value of city-regional collaboration

Part IV Personal Networks

13 Personal Networks

The personal touch

From networks of firms to networks of people: the role of personal networks in the creative knowledge economy

Possible policy interventions focusing on personal networks

14 Networks and Mobility: the Policy Context

Introduction

The importance of personal trajectories and personal networks

Cultural and institutional constraints on mobility

Challenges for policy-makers

Conclusions

15 Internationalisation and Policies towards Transnational Migration

Transnational migration of the highly skilled

Transnational migration of highly skilled professionals

Identifying and monitoring target groups for effective policies

Developing effective measures for highly skilled migrants – good practices

Conclusions

16 Policies Aimed at Strengthening Ties between Universities and Cities

Introduction

The changing nature of university–city relations

From university in, to the university of or for, the city: tensions and dilemmas in university–city relations

The university as an enabler of the creative economy

Case studies

Challenges and bottlenecks surrounding university–city relations

Conclusions

17 Governance of Creative Industries: the Role of Social and Professional Networks

Introduction

The creative industries: definitions and characteristics

Important strands of policies

Governance of the creative industries

Networks in the creative industries: theoretical approaches and empirical findings

Examples of promoting networks in the creative industries

Conclusions and suggestions

Part V Conclusions

18 Tailored – Context-Sensitive – Urban Policies for Creative Knowledge Cities

Three building blocks for new urban economic policies

New urban policies put in context: ‘PPP-CC-T’

Building on the past?

Tailored policies to create smart places

Policies building on personal networks

Conclusions

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Place-making and policies for competitive cities / edited by Sako Musterd, Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Zoltán Kovács, Geographical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Department of Economic and Human Geography, University of Szeged, Hungary.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-67503-8 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-55445-6 – ISBN 978-1-118-55442-5 – ISBN 978-1-118-55458-6 – ISBN 978-1-118-55457-9 (ebook)1. City planning. 2. Urban policy. 3. Community development, Urban. I. Musterd, Sako editor of compilation. II. Kovács, Zoltán, 1960– editor of compilation. HT166.P5225 2013307.1′216–dc23

2012041232

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Cover image: © Pieter MusterdCover design by Meaden Creative

Contributors

Austin Barber ([email protected]) is a Lecturer in Urban Development and Planning at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS), University of Birmingham, UK.Marco Bontje ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Julie Brown ([email protected]) is a Research Fellow at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK.Caroline Chapain ([email protected]) is a Lecturer in the Department of Management, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, UK.Evgenii Dainov ([email protected]) is Professor of Politics in the Centre for Social Practices at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria.Denis Eckert ([email protected]) is Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and head of the Interdisciplinary Center for Urban Studies (LISST-Cieu), University of Toulouse, France.Tamás Egedy ([email protected]) is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Geography, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and Lecturer at the Budapest Business School, Budapest, Hungary.Kornelia Ehrlich ([email protected]) is a Researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig, Germany.Olga Gritsai ([email protected]) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Michel Grossetti ([email protected]) is a Sociologist, Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and member of the Laboratory “Solidarity, Society, Territories” (LISST) at the University of Toulouse, France.Sabine Hafner ([email protected]) is Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Geography at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.Kaisa Kepsu ([email protected]) works as a Researcher at the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki, Finland.Zoltán Kovács ([email protected]) is Scientific Advisor at the Institute of Geography, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and Professor in Human Geography at the University of Szeged, Hungary.Bastian Lange ([email protected]) is Professor of Cultural Geography, at the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Metropolitan Research, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.Philip Lawton ([email protected]) is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Urban and Euregional Studies, Department of Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University, The Netherlands.Hélène Martin-Brelot ([email protected]) is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Geoarchitecture, University of Western Brittany, Brest, France.Michał Męczyński ([email protected]) is a Lecturer and Researcher in the Institute of Socio-Economic Geography and Spatial Management at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.Silvia Mugnano ([email protected]) is Lecturer in Urban Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Milan Bicocca, Italy.Sako Musterd ([email protected]) is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam, and connected to the Centre for Urban Studies of the same university. He coordinated the ACRE research programme, which formed the basis for this volume.Anders Paalzow ([email protected]) is the Rector of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Latvia.Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona, Spain.Heike Pethe ([email protected]) was a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Rómulo Pinheiro ([email protected]) is a Senior Researcher at Agderforskning, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Educational Research (PFi-HEIK) at the Faculty of Education, University of Oslo, Norway.Marc Pradel i Miquel ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor at GRC Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation, Economic Theory Department, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Barcelona, Spain.Declan Redmond ([email protected]) is a Lecturer in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, Richview, Ireland.Carla Sedini ([email protected]) is a Researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Milan Bicocca, Italy.Krzysztof Stachowiak ([email protected]) is a Lecturer and Researcher in the Institute of Socio-Economic Geography and Spatial Management at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.Anne von Streit ([email protected]) is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Geography, University of Munich (LMU), Germany.Tadeusz Stryjakiewicz ([email protected]) is head of the Department of Regional Policy and European Integration, and Professor in the Institute of Socio-Economic Geography and Spatial Management, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.Mari Vaattovaara ([email protected]) is Professor in Urban Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Foreword

The world of the early 21st century is already markedly different from the world of the late 20th century. Economic and social relationships are being revolutionized by digital technologies of computing, data storage, and ­communication. A new cognitive-cultural economy based on sectors like technology-intensive production, business and financial services, and a broad range of creative industries is rapidly coming to the fore. Globalization continues to advance at a rapid pace. New kinds of interpenetrating political institutions are multiplying at many different scales and in widely varying topological forms. And all of these trends ramify in large cities and their ­surrounding regions, which, contrary to many earlier predictions, continue to spread and to grow. Indeed, city-regions have now become one of the essential foundations of the new world order.

Place-making and Policies for Competitive Cities is devoted to a ­consideration of how these trends are manifest in the quintessentially 21st­century phenomena of “creative knowledge regions,” with special reference to thirteen European cities ranging from Dublin to Sofia and from Riga to Barcelona. The research underlying the book was sponsored by the European Commission, and its eighteen chapters were written by a fully pan-European cast of authors under the inspired editorial direction of Sako Musterd and Zoltán Kovács. The book is focused on a wide range of conceptual issues regarding contemporary urbanization processes, but it is particularly ­concerned with questions as to how planners and policy makers can deal with the many threats and opportunities faced by cities in the current conjuncture.

The findings presented in the book are highly insightful and remarkably ­consistent. Something of their overall meaning and importance can be ­conveyed in terms of three major themes that recur throughout. First, cities are caught up in path-dependent trajectories of development, meaning that their past is always discernible in their present. Partly as a corollary of this, cities are resistant to any kind of overall logic of convergence so that they remain highly differentiated in terms of function and form. Second, cities represent distinctive places engendered by agglomeration effects, and they are accordingly replete with common pool resources. The dynamics of these locationally specific phenomena are critical to rates of urban growth and development, and policy makers can do much to enhance their operation through various forms of infrastructural investment and institution-­building. Third, cities are sites of dense social and economic networks through which enormous amounts of information are channeled. The ­structure and content of these networks have major implications for ­learning, creativity, and innovation in cities, and, again, policy makers can achieve significant improvement of their operation by means of appropriate social infrastructures.

In the new economy of the 21st century, with its leading edges based on ­digital technologies and the cognitive and cultural capacities of the labor force, these three themes capture some of the most critical aspects of a ­modern urban problematic and point directly to some of the most daunting issues that urban planners and policy makers currently face. The analytical and policy tensions implied by this remark come to a head in current debates about the basic sources of creativity and competitiveness in contemporary cities. These debates figure prominently in several of the chapters that follow. To state the matter crudely, much of what is at issue here can be expressed in terms of two radically contrasting claims. On the one hand, some theorists contend that the enhanced creativity and competitiveness of cities derive above all from the in-migration of individuals with high levels of human capital, and that these individuals can be attracted to particular places by means of augmented investment in amenities. On the other hand, an opposing set of theorists ­contend that the foundations of urban dynamism reside primarily in the ­efficacy of the jobs system. Obviously, the policy implications of these two sets of claims are drastically different from one another, and a great deal is at hazard in any attempt to adjudicate between them. The authors of this book predominantly, and correctly in my opinion, come down in favor of the latter advocacy, but their arguments remain highly nuanced and open to the many complexities of urbanization today. In particular, they state repeatedly that there can be no boilerplate policy approaches to the development of creative knowledge regions, for each individual case is caught up in a mesh of idiosyncratic historical and geographical circumstances so that policies always need to be tailored to local conditions. They affirm this point, moreover, without falling into the not uncommon sophism of asserting that there can therefore be no sustainable theoretical understanding of cities as a whole.

In the emerging new world order, cities have become one of the essential pillars of all human activity. They represent major economic engines; they are the dominant foci of social life; they are, to an increasing degree, political actors on the world stage; and they form the principal staging posts of a ­globally interconnected system of competition, trade, and migration. The stakes are therefore extraordinarily high as we attempt to push forward our knowledge of cities and to sharpen our ability to cope with their developmental dynamics in the new capitalism that has been taking shape over the last couple of decades. Moreover, in today’s world, individual cities must increasingly take the ­initiative for dealing with their own prospects and predicaments, for ­higher-level governments are increasingly unwilling or unable to assume this responsibility themselves. Place-making and Policies for Competitive Cities offers critical insights into the many perplexing institutional and political tasks that cities must assume as they pursue the vital search for creativity and competitiveness in the context of ever-intensifying globalization.

Allen J. ScottDistinguished Research ProfessorDepartment of Geography and Department of Public PolicyUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Preface

Place-making and policies for competitive cities has been developed on the basis of a large-scale international comparative research programme, called ACRE1. This is the acronym for Accommodating Creative Knowledge. The subtitle of that programme – Competitiveness of European Metropolitan Regions within the Enlarged Union – shows our ambition to learn more about the urban conditions that are seen as essential to enhance the competitiveness of urban regional economies across Europe. Thirteen European metropolitan regions were involved.

The central research question of the project was this: What are the essential conditions and adequate policies for creating or stimulating ‘creative knowledge regions’? The analytical answers to the first part of the question (What are the essential conditions?) have been published in the earlier volume Making competitive cities (Musterd and Murie, 2010, Wiley-Blackwell). The second part of the question (What are adequate policies towards creative knowledge cities?) is systematically explored and elaborated upon in this volume Place-making and policies for competitive cities. While the contradictions between our early findings and existing theory already offered new insights that could potentially feed new practical ideas, in this volume the focus is entirely on policies, drawing on, among other things, a series of interviews with policy-makers. During the interviews, we confronted existing policies with innovative ideas derived from our own research findings. The title of this volume expresses that we do not advocate a standard best-practice policy approach, but a context-sensitive tailored approach instead.

Writing a book requires strong commitment by many, and it is clear that we owe a lot of thanks to a lot of people. In the first place, we would like to thank those who delivered the information to us, all the people we interviewed. Second, twelve enthusiastic teams of authors have delivered the substantial and often inspirational chapters found in this volume. All of them swiftly responded to our comments on earlier versions of manuscripts, and we would like to acknowledge their dedication and cooperation. Third, we would like to thank a couple of individuals whose help was invaluable: Olga Gritsai, who did not stop mobilising the teams of authors; Charlotte van Kemmeren, who was a great help in making the text technically readable; Christian Smid and Hans de Visser (UvA map makers), for smoothly producing the graphics; and Pieter Musterd, for shooting the wonderful cover photos.

However, our very special thanks go to Alan Murie, who – while ­enjoying a well-deserved retirement – continued to be our coach, and provided us with all sorts of advice on, among many other things, ­consistency, specific chapters and language. His cardinal support ­significantly helped us to realize this book.

Sako Musterd and Zoltán KovácsAmsterdam and BudapestOctober 2012

1 The programme was funded under priority 7 ‘Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-Based Society’ within the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission (contract 028270). Over a four-year period, various surveys were carried out and a large series of publications were written on analyses of and policies for urban economic ­development. Published results and more information about that research programme can be found on the ACRE website: http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/acre/.

Part I

Introduction

Birmingham     Photo by Montse Pareja Eastaway

Riga     Photo by Sako Musterd

1

Policies and Place-making for Competitive Cities

Sako Musterd1 and Zoltán Kovács2

1 Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands2 Institute of Geography, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

Policy progress

Over recent decades, a range of new policies for attracting economic ­activities to existing urban areas has been developed. New policies were not just required because of economic restructuring processes, which implied transformations from certain types of economic activity (such as manufacturing industry) to other types (such as producer and consumer services); new policies were also developed through new views on what drives urban economic development. With respect to the first mentioned process of economic restructuring, new activities were becoming more relevant while some of the existing activities lost position. This did not occur without consequences for urban regions. In some places the dynamics offered new opportunities, while simultaneously in other places a struggle against decline was predominant. The different development pathways of existing cities and urban regions seem to play a key role in the understanding of why some places succeed in adapting to the new structures and ­others do not. With respect to the second point, new views on what drives urban economies, we see a series of policies, each accentuating specific conditions for economic development. We artificially distinguish between these views, but in reality they are indeed overlapping, and remnants or bigger parts of one line of policy thinking coexist with others. We do not focus attention on why some undeveloped areas initiated action in the first place. Instead, we start with existing urban regions, with different histories and contextual and institutional characteristics, which, we believe, are crucial for the understanding of their current position and opportunities for renewing their economic structures.

If we are considering the past fifty years, initial policy aims were typically based on what is often called ‘classic location theory’. Authors such as Alonso, Weber, Christaller and Hotelling are frequently associated with this theory. Core concepts used by them are (relative) distance, transport costs and economies of scale. These are typically seen as essential conditions that firms have to take into account when trying to choose locations. The ­individual location decisions taken by firms would finally result in specific urban economic structures. The on-going focus on transport costs and ­distance implied the development of policies towards providing adequate technical infrastructures. Land for economic activity, roads, railroads, ­airports, telecommunication connections and other equipment to facilitate accessibility were central elements in the investments by local and national governments and – later – also by private firms. Increasingly, these were combined with policies aimed at enhancing the educational skills of the labour force, and in many contexts tax policies were also geared to the attraction of new economic activities. Theories that were built on ­agglomeration advantages and the site and situation characteristics of ­locations had taken centre stage.

To this very day, these ‘classic’ policies play a crucial role in most urban policies, but they were followed and overlapped by a strong and more explicit focus on creating and stimulating so-called economic clusters of activities. These clusters not only covered economic activities. Porter defines a ­cluster as: ‘a geographically proximate group of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities’ (Porter, 2000, p. 16). Economic complexes are regarded as the engines of the modern economy, and many governments decided to invest heavily in stimulating the formation of specific clusters of economic activity and saw that as their prime objective.

Cluster policies remain a prime focus of today’s policy-makers, but over the past one-and-a-half decades these policies were accompanied by a ‘new’ and much challenged focus: policies that are aimed at creating conditions for the attraction of the ‘creative class’, or ‘creative talent’ (Florida, 2005), therewith focusing on ‘softer’ conditions, such as urban amenities and a tolerant atmosphere. Analysing the role of creativity in economic ­development and urban and regional competitiveness, Florida came to the conclusion that ­talent, technology and tolerance (3Ts) are essential conditions. He argued that talent is the key source for economic development and in fact precedes such development. Therefore talent should be nurtured through the creation of an attractive creative milieu. So he reversed the conventional wisdom that used to argue that economic activity and production are essential ­conditions required to attract talent. Local politicians embarked on Florida’s – consumption-related – ideas in large numbers, instead of continuing their old focus, which was on attracting firms. This other ‘angle’ resulted in new beliefs and in new opportunities for a range of policy-makers and politicians to change their current policies and achieve economic success at a low cost. The ‘creative class’ became the new buzzword. That class would be attracted by cities with urban amenities and a tolerant climate, and if this could be combined with developments in technology (which creative talent would help to develop anyhow), the economic future could only be bright.

This, however, is not regarded to be the only reality. Policy strategies aimed at supporting economic development in this way have been fiercely criticised by a range of scholars and the volume of anti-theses is still ­growing. In the recent literature the creative class idea has generated most ­criticism. Peck (2005), as one of the first scholars who rigorously criticised the creative class ideas, argued that such literature is just preoccupied with an elite, ignoring other citizens and forming part of a neo-liberal agenda in which it is believed that the jobs at the top will generate trickle-down effects for those at the bottom. Scott (2006) responded as follows: ‘… again with ­apologies to Florida, creativity is not something that can be simply imported into the city on the backs of peripatetic computer hackers, skateboarders, gays, and assorted bohemians but must be organically developed through the complex interweaving of relations of production, work, and social life in specific urban contexts’ (p. 15). In addition, Storper and Scott (2009) challenged the ideas that amenities and tolerance would be the most relevant new drivers for urban economic development. In an article called ‘Rethinking human capital, creativity and urban growth’, they asked the question: ‘Do jobs ­follow people or do people follow jobs?’ Their answer to this question clearly supported the second option; they argued that ‘we need to take very seriously indeed the logic and dynamics of economic activity, and especially of locally agglomerated systems of production and work’ (p. 165). Others put themselves somewhere in the middle of the debate, such as Malecki (2004), who stated: ‘Urban and regional competitiveness is inherently multidimensional, including both traditional factors of production, infrastructure and location, as well as economic structure and more “ethereal” factors, such as quality of life and environmental urban amenities’ (p. 1108).

In a large-scale European research project we tried to widen the scope of this debate by testing similar questions while simultaneously taking other urban economic theories into account. That project was funded by the European Commission and called ACRE, which stands for Accommodating Creative Knowledge.1 The central research question that the project addressed was this: What are the conditions and adequate policies for ­creating or stimulating ‘creative knowledge regions’? We compared ­socio-economic developments, experiences of several categories of actors (managers, highly skilled employees and transnational migrants) and policy strategies in ­thirteen metropolitan regions across Europe to obtain more insight into the keys to successful long-term urban economic development. The metropolitan regions in the project were those of: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Birmingham, Budapest, Dublin, Helsinki, Leipzig, Milan, Munich, Poznan, Riga, Sofia and Toulouse. This includes cities and regions with different histories and roles – capital cities and second cities, cities with different economies and industrial, port-based histories, and cities with different cultural, political and welfare state traditions. It includes a much wider set of examples than usually informs the debates about creative and knowledge-intensive industry and economic development and competitiveness policies. The most important topics addressed focus on which metropolitan regions might develop as ‘creative knowledge regions’ and which regions might not; and why this is the case and, not least, what can policy do to influence this. Key findings of this project were that amenities, tolerance and diversity hardly played a role in the location-related considerations of the key actors addressed. Instead, employment opportunities (in the first place), personal trajectories and personal networks, and ‘classic’ conditions were of major importance. The results were published through a range of reports and ­journal articles, and a book was published with the title Making ­competitive cities (Musterd and Murie, 2010) that critically addressed the issues. That volume aims at understanding what the important conditions are for urban economic development in city-regions across Europe, but only limited attention was paid to the second main question of the ACRE project: What are adequate policies and strategies for creating or stimulating ‘creative knowledge regions’? After Making competitive cities was completed, ­further explicit policy analyses were carried out, based on additional analysis of policy documents, study of contexts and interviews with key stakeholders and policy-makers. The ­policy section of the project was directed specifically at gaining more ­knowledge about what types of policies and strategies could be applied to gain the best results – here to attract and retain new urban economic activity and (highly skilled) employees, migrants and managers in creative and knowledge-intensive industries. The findings, based on policy interviews and policy documents, were considered alongside the analytical findings from the first phases of the project and alongside current policies, and used to develop alternative policy views and ideas on policies for the development of creative industries and knowledge-intensive industries in urban regions across Europe. Reports have been produced for each city-region.2

Economic sectors

This volume aims to rigorously evaluate and test assumptions about urban and regional policies for specific economic sectors. This is about developing creative industries (such as arts, media, entertainment, creative business services, architects, publishers, designers) and knowledge-intensive industries (such as information and communication technology, research and development, finance, law) in metropolitan environments. We report ­findings from interviews and policy analysis carried out in the thirteen European cities and urban regions previously mentioned. We started with a selection of creative and knowledge-intensive industry sectors, following earlier work done by, among others, Pratt (1997) and Kloosterman (2004). For the creative industries, we focused on the most creative of creative industries, and within ­sectors, like advertising, this means the most creative parts of the sector and not standardised activities, such as the production of weekly broadsheets providing local advertisement and information. More specifically, based on analysis of contemporary statistics for each of the urban regions involved, three subsectors of creative industries were ­identified as currently most important. Two out of these three were then chosen for further research by all teams. These sectors were NACE (Nomenclature statistique des Activités économiques dans la Communauté Européenne) codes 72.2, 92.1 and 92.2:

creative parts of computer gaming, software development, electronic ­publishing; software consultancy and supply;

motion pictures and video activities; and

radio and TV activities.

A third important creative industries sector in the urban region was then chosen. This was advertising (NACE code 74.4), where it was among the most important sectors but another sector in other cities.

A similar research strategy was followed for the knowledge-intensive industries. Here all research teams focused on economic activities covered by NACE codes 65, 73, 74.1, and 80.3:

financial intermediation, except insurance and pension funding;

research and development;

law, accounting, book keeping, auditing, etc.; and

higher education.

The research carried out on these specific sectors also focused on firms of different sizes – small (one to five tenured staff) and larger (more than five tenured staff) firms – and in different locations – in the core of the metropolitan area and in the urban region beyond the core.

Questions and approaches

There is no single policy for a European creative knowledge city. The ­challenges are not the same in every city. Important differences in the ­economic and professional structure and functions, social composition, size, history and geographical location within Europe shape the current prospects and the challenges that different cities face. But although European cities are all very different, they are all affected by common trends and at least partly face similar challenges in the global marketplace for jobs, talent and investment. The question then is how European cities might best go about developing and implementing appropriate strategies and policies? What are the dimensions to take into account? To what extent are current and future policies informed by new or existing theoretical insights regarding how to create competitive creative knowledge cities? Are policy-makers sufficiently ‘place-sensitive’ and willing to develop tailored policies? What are the key theoretical assumptions policy-makers base their interventions on? What are their experiences?

These and related questions form the basis of this book. Answers to these questions are provided through cross-national, inter-city-region comparisons in each of the chapters. The on-going and alternative policies we ­present here are deliberately associated (by us) with three key concepts that have received insufficient attention in the past, but emerged strongly from our research: pathways, place and personal networks. These concepts are under-exposed in existing debate and we believe they deserve to be used to structure various policy approaches. This is why we have organised this volume around these concepts: first, by discussing policies that build upon or distance themselves from previous development pathways and that take specific established historical positions into account (Part II of this volume); second, by presenting policies that work with place-specific characteristics to generate distinctive comparative advantages for the attraction of new economic activity (Part III); and third, by stressing the importance for policy-­makers of addressing the frequently forgotten role of personal relations, ­networks and existing connections between key players and specific ­territories (Part IV). Paying specific attention to policies that take these dimensions into account should not be seen as presenting a series of fixed formulas for economic success. We are convinced, and show, that urban policies aimed at cities becoming or staying competitive need to be tailored policies: that is, they need to be context-sensitive policies based on ­knowledge about previous development paths acknowledging their own strengths and weaknesses, and based on knowledge about crucial personal connections; hence the title of this book is Place-making and Policies for Competitive Cities. Existing strengths or weaknesses may be present in the form of specific clusters and conditions of basic technical and organisational infrastructures. The specific time- and space-dependent characteristics ­associated with these contexts represent very good reasons to develop ­distinctive policies that fit that city or metropolitan region.

The approach chosen by the research teams involved the consideration of policies and strategies alongside the actual dynamics in the regions under consideration and the literature and current strategic policies and visions of local and regional governments (long-term strategies). Special concern was taken to position existing policies in their regional and political contexts, including how policies are influenced by European, national and regional policies. Strategic policies were discussed taking into account the ­instruments and mechanisms to achieve policy ends, including the following question: With what kind of human, financial and material resources will policy objectives be obtained? The researchers paid systematic ­attention to questions such as these: Are policies built on existing strengths or ­looking for new developments? Is there continuity or rupture? Is there consensus over policies or conflict? Which theoretical domain is stressed most (classic theory, cluster theory, soft conditions theory or network theory)? To what extent are policies embedded in broader urban development strategies and visions?

The effectiveness of policies is without any doubt related to the institutional structure and governance arrangements in each city. Therefore it is important to know the key governmental and non-governmental ­stakeholders that play a role in economic development in the local/­metropolitan/regional decision-making processes. In which strategies or policies are they involved? Do they form local–national growth coalitions or local ­government–business public–private growth coalitions? Is there a ­policy network?

Together, documents and interviews offer the basic material for carrying out the policy analyses. Policies and strategies, embedded in their own ­institutional structures and governance arrangements were identified and ­considered in conjunction with evidence about actual economic development. The findings are presented in this book and refer to the three key concepts we have identified: pathways, place and personal networks.

The structure of this volume is as follows. In Chapter 2 we introduce the prevailing policy approaches and confront them with first ideas about ­alternative tailored policies. In that chapter we also briefly introduce each of the chapters in the remainder of this volume. This chapter is followed by the three substantive Parts II–IV, each with a focus on one of the three key concepts. In each of these parts a short introductory chapter is followed by further chapters that set out various policy strategies related to the focus of each part. In Chapter 18, the final chapter of this volume, we synthesise the most important findings and elaborate on some of the lessons learned for policy and analysis.

References

Florida, R. (2005) The flight of the creative class. New York: Harper-Collins.

Kloosterman, R.C. (2004) Recent employment trends in the cultural industries in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht: a first exploration. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 95 (2): 243–252.

Malecki, E.J. (2004) Jockeying for position: what it means and why it matters to regional ­development policy when places compete. Regional Studies, 38 (9): 1101–1120.

Musterd, S. and Murie, A. (eds) (2010) Making competitive cities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Peck, J. (2005) Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4): 740–770.

Porter, M.E. (2000) Location, competition, and economic development: local clusters in a global economy. Economic Development Quarterly, 14 (1): 15–34.

Pratt, A.C. (1997) The cultural industries production system: a case study of employment change in Britain, 1984–91. Environment and Planning A, 29 (11), 1953–1974.

Scott, A.J. (2006) Creative cities: conceptual issues and policy questions. Journal of Urban Affairs, 28 (1): 1–18.

Storper, M. and Scott, A.J. (2009) Rethinking human capital, creativity and urban growth. Journal of Economic Geography, 9 (2): 147–167.

1http://acre.socsci.uva.nl/.

2 ACRE reports 10.1–10.13, available from the ACRE website http://acre.socsci.uva.nl/.

2

Prevailing Policies versus New Tailored Policies

Sako Musterd1 and Zoltán Kovács 2

1 Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands2 Institute of Geography, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

Introduction

Urban economic policy is perhaps one of the oldest fields of policy that transnational, national, regional and local governments and related institutions have been involved in. The attraction of new and the stimulation of existing economic activity to bring wealth to their citizens appears to be among the key tasks for leaders in the public sector. However, over recent decades, new pressure has been put on those who are held responsible for obtaining ‘good results’ for their own local or regional constituencies. This pressure relates to major economic restructuring processes, de-industrialisation in Europe and North America, industrialisation and explosive economic growth in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), increased interconnectedness, and very significant political transformations related to regime shifts in Europe and elsewhere. Growing interrelatedness, global flows and increased velocity of all sorts of interaction enforce rapid response to the changes that occur. This may explain why policy-makers, nowadays, seem to be acting more nervously and impatiently than they used to do. However, such behaviour is not without risk. The responses may be arrived at too quickly, hardly thought out and insufficiently based on solid ­knowledge of what is actually happening in the local urban economy. Frequently, there does not seem to be sufficient time to investigate properly what the best policy strategy for the local economy would be. In contrast, policy-makers tend to use, in the words of Graeme Evans (2009, p. 1006) ‘secondary “evidence” and rationales, in effect imported as a proxy for endogenous knowledge and resources’. He points to the weight given to ­specialist ­intermediaries, , think-tanks and policy conferences and symposia. These ‘instruments’ are popular with policy-makers since they are readily available and provide instant answers to urgent questions. The problem is that there is a tendency for policy-makers to gravitate to some of the most popular , who then set the tone for converging urban ­economic ­policies, while the value of the new policy direction is hardly or not at all supported by proper analysis of the characteristics and potentials of the local or regional economy under consideration. In some contexts, policy-makers – especially those who are heavily influenced by populist leaders and distrust (leftist) academic advice – even plead for fact-free policy-making.