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Innovation in the city and innovative cities

Jane Marceau
Innovation and Technology Policy Analyst and Visiting Professor, City Futures Research Centre, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW

Article Text

Cities matter. By 2006, more than half of the total OECD population lived in urban areas. Major cities in OECD countries generate almost one third of their nation's production while in some countries more than half national output is produced by one city and some Canadian cities generate half or more of their provinces' value added (OECD 2006: 13). Cities are a nation's innovation hubs, producing almost all patents and other measures of new products and processes in business.

Cities also matter increasingly because they are also hotspots of consumption and hence waste generation; already responsible for 75% of global energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, while cities in most rich developed countries are the motors of economic growth and the development and maintenance of the population's living standards, cities are also generators of major social problems, social inequalities and economic disadvantage.

Cities are complex entities and play multiple and complex economic and social roles. Governments are only now coming to grips with issues about how to best deal with the problems while also encouraging the generators of their wealth. Doing so makes enormous new demands on governance mechanisms and the skills of politicians and administrators as well as the imaginations and willingness of city populations to finance and accommodate change.
Over recent decades, as several papers in this volume make clear, economic literature on contemporary development has focused increasingly on innovation as the key to the long term competitiveness of modern western nations and drawn attention to the role of technological change as an endogenous factor in growth and the shift of techno-economic paradigm which causes nations and their component firms to move to new products, processes and organisational forms in all areas of production - resources, manufacturing and services. The emerging international economy among western countries has become known as the ‘knowledge economy', increasingly reliant on the generation and use of knowledge, formal and informal, as a major factor of production. Institutional and knowledge-generating arrangements brought together in national systems of innovation underpin this shift (see eg Edquist 1997), even though much of the shift to the new economy has been linked to shifts in international production systems, known collectively as globalisation.

Attention has been drawn to the bases of the innovation necessary for competitiveness. The outstanding factor is usually agreed to be knowledge. While all production has always involved often quite important inputs of knowledge, there now seems to be agreement that modern economic systems are based on formal knowledge to a much higher degree than older ones. This knowledge can be scientific or linked more closely to information about customer needs, overseas markets or new organisational possibilities, often themselves made possible by radical new technologies and their application as platforms for a wide variety of industrial and service sector uses. Both formal and informal knowledge are carried by people as they work and move around different spatial arenas. So knowledge, its generation and diffusion, visible as innovations, have come to the heart of policies for modern economic development.
Innovations are made by people operating in organisations and firms but it has become clear that much of the impetus for innovation comes from the socio-economic and technical systems in which any firm or organisation operates and innovates. These systems are composed of institutions, both in the sense of organisations and the regulatory ‘rules of the game', legal arrangements, especially for intellectual property and labour markets, education and training provision, financial and other support organisations and governance via formal governments and the more informal partnerships that provide input to the formal regulation and political systems. It is at the level of systems of innovation that national arrangements are the most evidently important. It is usually national governments that mandate financial and other regulation, organise education systems, make labour and intellectual property laws, provide welfare and other social inclusion or income redistribution policies, govern the tax system and make critical trade and other treaties that form a national system of innovation (NIS).

More recently, over perhaps the last decade and a half, observers have come to realise that nations may not always be the relevant territorial unit of analysis when examining the motors of economic growth. On the one hand, this view has resulted from the obvious international and globalising waves that have shifted the world's territorial production and consumption patterns and multiplied international connections, making transnational regions important in some areas. Innovation systems can be much larger than national systems and in some contexts it may make good sense to speak of an area with similar rules such as the EU or close trade links such as the Asia Pacific zone as a region. On the other hand, closer investigation has also shown the divergences within national boundaries as to how territorial units grow richer or poorer and more or less diverse.

It has thus become increasingly clear that sub-national levels of territorial unit are also important and have their own organisational and institutional arrangements. One level of these has been described collectively as ‘regional systems of innovation' (RIS) (see eg Cooke 2007 for a summary of recent theorising). The term ‘region' of course may cover areas hugely diverse in size, whether of territory and/or of population, and may even cross international borders as in several zones in Europe, such as Oresund which covers areas of both Denmark and Sweden. Regional systems seem often conceived of as smaller versions of national systems, subject on the one hand to national rules of the game but also with regional variations in terms of population, research and training systems or facilities, production structures and specialisations and such matters as income levels, which may determine consumption levels, and languages or cultural practices. Regions may also be conflated with Provinces or States in federal systems of government as these levels of government determine many of the specific rules and practices relating to innovation, such as education and research systems, transport and other access arrangements and financial or regulatory support for innovative activities. It is often these levels of government that have the closest interest in the mechanisms and location of specific kinds of economic activity.

In developed countries, however, regions are usually dominated by one or more major cities and it is cities that are the real heart of most regional innovation systems. Cities, moreover, it is increasingly clear, have their own, more local, systems of innovation, composed of the same elements as higher order systems but geographically much more concentrated even though they necessarily have many of their economic relationships (firms' clients and suppliers) with areas beyond the immediate city borders. Cities, especially large cities, are where it all happens in terms of economic development and innovation, knowledge generation and diffusion, the availability of skilled personnel, important transport nodes and the housing of both people and firms. It is where much local planning takes place, especially in terms of investment in new or replacement elements of the built environment, special incubator zones or science parks and many of the other supply-side elements that are generally agreed to be important to innovation by companies and public institutions. It is in cities that the firms who generate economic activity and the public authorities that organise governance are most likely to interact on a regular basis and where information related to all aspects of innovation more freely occurs. It is in cities that, for example, innovative partnerships between government, business and communities may be easiest to arrange since the organisations concerned are smaller than at national levels and in principle at least more permeable than higher levels of government, leading to faster problem-solving and greater room for policy experimentation.

Cities house innovative firms and innovative people. But not all cities are innovative power houses and not all are innovative in the same way or to a similar degree across national geographical areas. Some cities at some times are ‘in decline' while others are growing in both population and economic terms so fast that infrastructure provision and other innovation-related organisations and services may not be able to keep up. In between are cities where innovation is accepted as a desirable goal but where for various reasons it is not leading the city's development. In yet other cases, the public authority side of the city may be miles ahead of business development while in others innovation is pushed by companies powering ahead.
Cities also come in a vast range of sizes and compositions and are located in very different national and international contexts and circumstances. It is very often difficult to see the boundaries of a city since they have nothing that really resembles a frontier. Work on cities as local innovation systems has mostly focused on larger metropolitan areas which are often called city-regions as their economic footprint extends well beyond the main built up area. It seems most useful to define a city in policy terms at least as the area of the economic footprint. Thus, in Australia, Sydney, the country's largest city, is often referred to by policymakers as the Greater Sydney Region or the Sydney Basin and may be stretched as far as Newcastle to the north and Wollongong to the south if it is to match the functional economy.

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This special issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice (ISSN 1447-9338) is called Innovation in the City and Innovative Cities. To encourage its use by government and university policy makers, researchers and teachers, the publisher has made it available seperately as a book (ISBN 978-1-9211348-17-4) - contact info@e-contentmanagement.com.

The first section of the volume is devoted to papers that describe and analyse issues relating to what makes some cities grow and others stagnate or even decline and the reasons behind different patterns of development over time and space. These papers address major puzzles about the drivers of city development and the associated economic innovation and set the groundwork for discussing the potential roles that city managers and policymakers can play in encouraging ‘laggard' cities, regenerating older and less economically robust cities and maintaining and further supporting growing urban areas. Much of the discussion is about economic development as most observers of city dynamics have had an economic focus, much as national and sub-national policymakers everywhere have done. In Europe interest in cities and the innovation that takes place within them has been supported and sometimes led by European Union policymakers and leaders who deal directly with cities, firms and government organisations in Member countries.

Economic success has also brought new concerns about cities, most notably their environmental sustainability, since most ecological damage is caused by city populations, especially the wealthier ones. Dealing with these major issues brings new needs to the fore and demands both innovative social and governance partnerships and technological solutions, new ways of doing things, new transport solutions, new pricing mechanisms, new ways of raising and spending resources and potentially new governance structures for many cities. Technologies play an ambiguous role - some, such as cars, may be part of the problem but others can be part of the solution, providing that the human side of the equation is flexible and prepared to think and act in new ways. Social innovation is becoming increasingly important.

This volume mostly refers to cities in developed western countries, essentially because there are already so many issues that it seemed wise to limit description and discussion to countries that share many common elements in economy, society and government. The volume is designed to demonstrate to readers that there are many explanations of what makes a city work and grow or do less well and analysts take different slants as well as present some important examples of city innovations. The particular elements in the city or cities of interest to any given reader will always be slightly different but the intention is to provide policymakers with examples that work (or do not), to persuade analysts that each city needs to be treated in its own terms but that the many common elements should also be recognised as part of the equation and to provide tools and frameworks for their analysis and for further research in particular cases. It is intriguing that there is yet so little agreement on the reasons behind different city trajectories, whether successful or not, and the role that policy can play in change. Authors were asked to provide readers with real world examples. The examples selected are drawn mostly from much of Europe, the US, Canada and Australia but also Korea and China.

The next sections of this Introduction present an overview of the foci of the papers gathered in this volume. Each writer was asked to tie their argument as closely as possible to specific examples and to focus on particular issues. These have exemplified different frameworks and approaches as well as very differing emphases. Behind most of them, however, lies a view that Schumpeterian economic theories about technological development and especially the ‘creative destruction' resulting from the entrepreneurial use of new technical possibilities are the most valuable way into analysing and describing much of what happens in cities today. Taking this approach, different writers have emphasised different elements. Some have emphasised the role of the public sector, especially as it deals with the multiple problems and turbulence associated with what Johnson calls ‘urban order', while others look more at the entrepreneurship which is critical to city economic growth. Some examine innovation in cities from the supply side, of what cities and their public authorities offer and where competitiveness is often about attracting innovative firms and actors from other areas. Others focus on what cities do or can do to change growth trajectories by internal mechanisms.

The first section of the volume brings out the importance of city characteristics, notably size and diversity (David Wolfe in particular addresses this issue) since innovation comes from interactions between populations diverse both in people and firms and diversity suggest size. Diverse people bring a range of skills and diverse firms find new talent and bigger and differing markets. Johnson, for example, brings these issues out as part of his discussion of local city systems of innovation. Moreover, since it is clear that not all city growth is smooth the dynamics of innovation vary over time and space, Johnson points importantly to the role of maintaining what he calls ‘public order' in cities in response to the problems that cities create. The sheer number of people gathered in a relatively small space and their many needs create situations where governments need to act. By doing so, they create markets for new products and services - health and hygiene, law and order, transport, education and so on. Crises, Johnson says, also give cities a push to find innovative solutions and allow them to take risks unacceptable at other times. Other contributors take up the theme of crisis and risk when discussing why not all cities innovate and how cities can escape the path dependence which otherwise dominates their development trajectories as Simmie and Martin show in their contribution to section one. These characteristics are not simple, however, and a recent paper by Storper and Manville (2006) has pointed usefully to the need to specify much more clearly exactly what is meant by factors such as diversity and creativity and the need to study urban choices in more depth if policymakers are to make the right choices..

How these different aspects of city life work together and especially how policymakers can influence them is a common theme in the special issue. In the first section, Athey and his colleagues suggest that innovation is carried out by firms which in turn depend on different aspects of the operations of city life. Cities provide both the urbanisation economies in scale and scope and the underlying complementary assets that firms need for innovation. Cities seem to roughly divide between those in which local hubs are critical to innovative firms and those where companies depend more on local interactions and networks. City managers, Athey and colleagues suggest, need to recognise these differences in what their local industries need and invest in complementary assets accordingly. Implicit in this view is that policymakers must be able to analyse and make sophisticated judgements about the needs of the different business sectors in their jurisdictions. This ability is seldom encouraged by national level industry development strategies which in most OECD countries focus rather on general underpinning conditions except in the case of new science-based industries, especially biotechnology (Marceau & Wixted 2003).

The second section of the special issue discusses innovation in cities in the different realms of operation of major cities. Most cities, of course, link both innovations in city policies and investments and economic growth through entrepreneurship with innovations in organisational arrangements for administration and policy decisions as well as their implementation. In many cases, the one may not be possible without the other if the upward virtuous economic circle is to be enhanced and maintained. Cities are still experimenting and coming to grips with the manifold and urgent issues that face them, especially sustainability. Some of the issues are transport options, some proper pricing of infrastructure and services so that real costs become transparent, some concern lowering emissions and saving limited resources such as water and energy, some concern combating the social inequalities that have tended to accompany economic growth, some with regenerating old areas and inadequate housing. The particular configurations of common issues are innumerable. This means that every city has to learn major lessons itself and to do so must inevitably improve its information gathering and scanning systems and learn from the experiences of others. But it must do so in a sophisticated manner and not assume that what works in Stockholm or Amsterdam will work in Melbourne or Singapore, let alone in the huge cities of China or Korea.

There are, however, some lessons that can be learned from the experience of others. In this small volume it has not been possible to cover all aspects of what innovative cities must manage. We have picked some of the most important which show what cities can usefully do - or indeed not do. The first paper in this section, by van Winden, focuses on the immense challenges of governance of cities which are actively trying to maximise levels of innovation among local firms and industries but also innovate in housing and infrastructure development. Developed cities cannot let up - they have to keep up the momentum already achieved. The OECD in its 2006 overview of the dilemmas faced by major cities emphasised those relating to governance (by public and other sector players) and government. Van Winden here discusses the issues of how to relate the disparate agendas of national, regional (State or Province) and city governments to each other's needs and constraints as they struggle to link appropriately broad civil society goals and political platforms, such as social inclusion, with the need to invest in the engines of innovation and growth that underpin the prosperity of the nation and which mostly happen in cities.

The issues they must deal with cover not only how to develop priorities for activities close to market or community policies but also who has to deal with the less desirable consequences, the levels of government that should be responsible for the infrastructure that modern city competitiveness requires but which may be too costly for city residents to finance, and over when and how to develop the public- private partnerships that may be needed to resolve funding and regulation issues and ensure that the broad interests of the public are maintained. Governance issues include taxation and other mechanisms of urban finance but decisions about these cannot be fixed exclusively at one level of government. This issue is only indirectly addressed in this volume for reasons of space but American cities such as San Francisco offer interesting examples of different modes of urban finance packaging to address areas such as low and mixed income housing.

Coordination of policies is also of vital importance to innovation in the city and to innovative cities as they seek to address broader issues. The OECD overview in 2006 focused especially on issues of coordination and it is clear from contributions to this volume that packages of policies, not single focus interventions, are essential to successful urban growth and innovation. The complexity of cities and the crowded policy space in which all must operate make it almost impossible to address one issue at a time. Van Winden thus focuses on vertical, horizontal and sectoral planning coordination and the trade-offs that need to be made. Organising capability is essential. As Bradford (2005) has suggested, what is needed are place policies and as Cooke (2007: 133) has also emphasised, platforms of policies are essential to strengthening milieu and entrepreneurship structure, embedding and connectivity.

In the second section, one paper by a British-Australian collaboration (Couchman, McLoughlin & Charles) indicates how much attention is paid by policymakers to the creation of special ‘places' which are assumed to be the basis of economic development along trajectories quite different from their current ones. Using contrasting cities, Newcastle in the UK, an old mining city (‘old and cold' in Storper's phrase), and the Gold Coast in Australia, a new retirement and tourism area (‘sun and sprawl'), the authors show how different levels of government now provide, sometimes ill-assorted, incentives for place development. In Newcastle's case, the UK government decided on the need for a ‘science city' to regenerate the industrial base whereas in the case of the Gold Coast the assumption was that creating a new place would reduce the ‘retirement' image of the population and encourage science-based firms to locate there as part of the broader ‘Smart State' strategy of the Queensland government. This new Pacific Innovation Corridor in practice seems to have been largely a real estate, supply-side development. The local authority seems to have had neither the resources (six people in its development division) nor the understanding of industry development that could have encouraged it instead to focus on health or tourism, already either a local strength or market. In the Newcastle case, the science city is still underway and builds on the existing science and biotechnology cluster. The jury is still out on whether this kind of special provision can work in the longer term to foster city innovation.

Gert-Jan Hospers also picks up on the idea that ‘chance' is the most likely determinant of growth but he focuses on branding, on the creation of a realistic but inspiring image as a way to bring local players together in a joint innovation and development endeavour and to reshape expectations about the ‘place' concerned, to ‘give chance a helping hand'. He uses the examples of Austin (Texas), Manchester and Copenhagen to show how each developed a brand that both changed the external image of the city and city-region and provide an umbrella for international marketing of both place and products by local firms and organisations. The image of an innovative place is thus both a driver and a result of economic, social and cultural regeneration and innovation. The image, however, it is important to note, requires investment in the underpinning infrastructure - good housing and physical aspect, airports, internal connections and cultural facilities. Spin, however clever, is not enough.

Most analysts of competitive cities describe accessibility as critical to both economic development and innovation. Transport is therefore at the centre of much attention. In some cities new technology has been used as the basis for making transport innovations, notably the driverless metro trains that run in Paris, Copenhagen and elsewhere and short term rent and ride bicycle initiatives, such as Velib in Paris, soon to be joined by a similar experiment with cars, or the congestion charge in London. Giuliano Mingardo here takes up the issue of innovative solutions to transport and the associated sustainability issues facing cities. He discusses the need to find ways of decoupling economic growth and transport growth, to find ways of maintaining city accessibility but without the environmental damage caused. Road transport in particular is one of the demons city governments have to deal with as it causes congestion and air pollution with some of the most dangerous emissions that threaten sustainability. Rail and air travel demand huge investments in infrastructure and have their own problems. Mingardo focuses on London and Gothenburg to show how, once again, packages of policies are key - infrastructure and traffic management, not one or the other. He also points to the need for strong marketing of innovative solutions, a certain dose of coercion and a willingness to link transport change to personal issues such as health.

Creative people have been prominent in discussions about what makes cities innovative ever since the pioneering work of Florida (2000). Several cities now make the attraction of such people part of their innovation strategies on the assumption that their presence will stimulate local business and related innovation activities. In this volume, Nick Leon picks up on the issue in a discussion of how Barcelona is transforming an old industrial area into the buzzy 22@Barcelona, the city's flagship innovative city zone, a mix of work and live arrangements designed with attracting an international prestige population in mind. Leon points out that it is not enough simply to attract innovative professionals, their sheer presence will not do what is needed to stimulate local businesses to greater levels of innovation. Rather, ways have to be found to embed the newcomers in the local economic arena. Doing so requires local governance of a more sophisticated kind which can empathise with the needs of newcomers and link their personal and economic lives. The paper by Chen and Karwan on Shanghai shows that the need for this new social innovation is not restricted to Europe: the Chinese government, in inviting in multinational enterprises with their own innovation personnel, is rapidly finding that it has to come to grips with the fact that, while the economic growth engendered is truly spectacular, the people come with multiple needs which may require local social innovations in a away unforeseen by economic development planners.

The final section of the volume is devoted to quite other aspects of what makes an innovative city and especially how residents in such cities can participate much more broadly in the development planning and processes which will so intimately affect how they live, where they live, where and how they work and how they will get and their multiple live-work activities. We also know the need for educated personnel which all analysts mention. What is much more rarely mentioned, however, is how the personnel are to be educated and trained in the most effective and socially acceptable manner. Very little thought seems to be given to education in the recent literature on innovation, especially not to education at the secondary level or for the non-standard school students that are often associated with diverse city populations, except for vague recommendations that more ‘creativity' is needed.

In this volume, Florence McCarthy and Margaret Vickers address three issues which are centralto the development of future innovation personnel in a major city, Sydney. The first is the fact that present day students at secondary level are ‘digital natives' while their teachers are largely ‘digital immigrants'. This divide, say McCarthy and Vickers, means radical rethinking of teaching methods and they suggest the broad scale use of ‘service learning', which takes students out of their traditional classroom where they feel, in their own words, that they are ‘powering down', and presents them with real world challenges which make use of their skills and interest them more. While service learning in itself is not new and work has been done, especially in the US on non-classroom education for credit, over several decades (OECD 1983), it has recently been taken up by some innovative teacher-training courses for the mainstream. Service learning can be an important means of bringing digital natives along with the curriculum. At issue is the failure by most formal education systems to break down the walls of the school in recognition of the changing world outside the doors. The second issue is the failure of the school system in most countries to come to grips with the fact that most secondary students now work in the real world at the same time as they are in school. Schools are organised for full time educational, operating with hierarchical ‘old' industrial structures, when the economic world outside their walls has shifted, taking place in small organisations with flatter organisational structures, teamwork, sub-contracting and other arrangements. Since students are increasingly working as well as studying, even when at school, innovative educational arrangements need to be put in place to recognise the realities of part time schooling and to teach students their rights and obligations at work. Thirdly, the authors point out, cities are not all about relatively well off people; many citizens are poor, are migrants or refugees, and little effort is made to provide the sometimes radically different educational experience which would help them integrate and develop their own innovative potential.

The next two papers in the present volume focus on the use of ICT technologies to transform interactions between citizens and business, business and business and residents and governments in our cities. Many, perhaps the more radical innovations cities are now going to have to undertake, will only succeed if residents affected are on side. To get them on side policymakers need to listen to their viewpoints more quickly and easily and gain regular access to the enormous amounts of information held by citizens. Many new ICT technologies can help with this by enabling communication in quite radical new ways. One paper details a European experiment with the use of mobile phones for service delivery and communications between individuals and governments to improve participation by residents in the ordinary running of a city - concern with transport issues, for example, or other service monitoring. The ICING project discussed in the paper was an EU research project involving government to citizen interaction in cities in several countries. The second concerns similar developments in Korea. In that paper an international group of colleagues tell us that the Korean government is so keen on realising the potential of the new technologies, known there as U-infrastructure, that several cities are investing in creating a U-city with aspects concerning U-life, U-business and U-government.
These papers are just two examples from a bubbling innovation cauldron. Another is the Intelligent Cities project run by Steve Curwell at the University of Salford in the UK, which has built an e-City platform technology. The project has built a number of scenarios for use of the platform - the development of the cultural and environmental cities and others - and considers stakeholder and provider roles as well as the technology (Intelligent Cities Report; no date, probably 2007). To gauge how far such developments had progressed, in 206 the company Interlace-Invent published a survey of ‘mobile-ready' cities around Europe and covered a wide range of operating services - m-administration in Spain, the UK, Germany and Italy, m-entertainment in several countries, m-health in Italy, Spain, Greece and Denmark, m-learning in Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden as well as the very important m-logistics in the UK, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland, to give just some places and fields of m-experimentation (Interlace-Invent 2006). Since 2006 doubtless much more is happening.

All this experimentation that is taking place in city innovation and development has been described in this volume in relation principally to the aims and implementation of specific programs. Monitoring and learning across these experiments is also critical. As yet there seems to be little systematic cross-fertilisation between the innovating cities concerned as their projects mature and can be evaluated. Thinking that some of the methods used by Hamburg, Barcelona and Singapore, the three cities got together in early 2008 to compare notes and provide second opinions on the planning tasks at hand while also recognising their differences in structure, level of investments and governance. They decided to establish an Urban Innovation Observatory to record methods used and progress made in developing successful Third Generation Innovation Environments. The Observatory will become a critical resource of new ideas, urban innovation concepts and implementation strategies that can be directly linked to real time stakeholder interests. It will also be a place for thought-leaders from across the world to test and exchange ideas that could influence urban innovation environments and develop further their cross-border links to other hub cities engaged in global innovation circuits through companies, institutions and individuals (Jan Annerstedt, personal communication, September 2008).

The final paper in the volume, by a team from the City Futures Research Centre in Sydney, returns the reader to the basis of cities - their built fabric, the bricks and mortar or steel and concrete environments in which everybody spends their time and in which innovation takes place. The built environment (BE) is important day and night, for all city activities. It is also responsible for a very large percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, during building, during occupation and use, during renovation and removal. Since cities are by definition built environments, what happens in that environment is a central part of both innovation in the city and the good functioning of an innovative city. Yet it is an aspect of innovation in cities that is much neglected by innovation theorists, with some notable exceptions such as Gann and his colleagues at Imperial College, London, and such groups as the Cooperative Research Centre in Construction Innovation (Hampson, Manley and others) in Brisbane, Australia. Most research in the field (outside urban studies programs) focuses on building technologies, which are indeed important, but it is their use as city assets that is understudied and presents in many ways the greatest challenges. The technologies needed for sustainable building, for example, are largely already available but creating incentives for their use on a large scale are less well developed: Brandon, Heng and Shen (2005), for example, point out that some really powerful technologies for aspects of construction itself are now available but the tipping point for this ‘conservative industry' has not yet arrived (2005:286).

Innovative policies for the BE are now essential. The complexities of the BE make joined-up research and policy practice mandatory if innovation policies of any kind are to succeed. And cities of the future are mostly with us now - built to last several decades, they will not soon disappear from their present guise. Retrofitting the built environment is now key to successful innovation in many fields. Retrofitting by definition disturbs all aspects of citizens' lives and presents a critical challenge to city managers and policymakers.

This special edition of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice (volume 10/2-3, October - December 2008) aims to draw the attention of analysts, practitioners and policymakers, as well as businesses and communities, to the critical importance of what happens in cities to our common future. If ever there was an issue which is both urgent and complex and deserving of concerted attention by all major agents of change it is cities. In western countries over recent decades, cities have gone from being viewed as centres of problems to being seen as the motors of the good life everyone aspires to; cities have been both neglected and rediscovered as a focus of concern for reasons of national health and wellbeing. It is now time to show how innovative cities and innovation in cities, the fulcrum of modern dilemmas of sustainability, wealth creation and distribution, infrastructure investments, poverty and exclusion reduction, work as well as play, can be made to work effectively and sustainably for the good of all. Cities are where innovation happens; we now need to make sure we have innovative solutions to the hairy and complex problems facing us as well as the innovative momentum to keep economic growth and wealth creation going in the directions we collectively choose. New technologies will come to our aid; the challenge is the political and social will to use them and do so sensibly and speedily the community's capacity to be full partners in the difficult joint and innovative decisions that must be made.

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