Innovation and the City Innovative Cities
Special Issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice
Volume 10 Issue 2-3 December 2008
ii+182 pages ISBN 978-1-921348-17-4
Guest Editor:
Jane Marceau
University of New South Wales, Australia
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 nations' production while in some countries more than half national output is produced by one city.
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 hotspots of consumption and hence waste generation and 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, they are also generators of major social problems, social inequalities and economic disadvantage.
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, the 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.
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.
This special issue of IMPP (ISBN 978-1-921348-17-4) is called Innovation in the City and Innovative Cities. It analyses 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. It addresses 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.
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.
This special edition of the IMPP 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.
Related special issue from Rural Society
“Human Services and Rural Communities”
Editor:
Daniela Stehlik Alcoa Research Centre for Stronger Communities Curtin University, WA
Human Services and Rural Communities, a special issue of Rural Society, considers the paradigm shift that has occurred over the past decade in the way human services are delivered in rural communities, foc...Visit Website
Related special issue from Health Sociology Review
“Community, Family, Citizenship and the Health of LGBTIQ People”
Editors:
Jane Edwards University of South Australia
Damien W Riggs University of Adelaide, SA
Lesbians, gay men, and bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) individuals continue to experience exclusion from social institutions.
In the face of this, these groups of people conti...Visit Website
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