Archives
Innovation and the City – Innovative Cities
Deadline for Papers: Closed
Innovation and the City - Innovative Cities
Guest edited by Jane Marceau
Adjunct Professor, City Futures Research Centre
University of New South Wales in Sydney*
A special issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice - volume 10/3 December 2008
CALL FOR PAPERS
Innovation has become the catchcry of policymakers in most OECD countries as they seek to ensure continued prosperity in changed technological and competitive circumstances. Observers have discussed multiple aspects of innovation, including its stimulants, processes and systems. Others have focused on the geographical distribution of innovative firms, their relationships with universities and other public and private sector knowledge generation and diffusion organisations. Usually this work has focused on regions rather than cities and the characteristics of urban space as an innovation hub or laboratory.
The Special Edition will have two themes: Innovation in the City and Innovative Cities
1. Innovation and the City
It has long been said that cities are innovation nodes and that much change derives from the crowded life of metropolitan areas. Cities are complex entities and constitute a crowded policy field for those attempting to deal with problems or encourage change. Some research has included observations on the role of 'the city' in innovation and on the differences between cities which stimulate innovation and, as cities have returned to be a focus of public policies of many kinds aimed at economic growth, sustainability and social and cultural development, it is timely to revisit these observations. A comparative perspective, indicating the characteristics which create more innovative places, characteristics such as knowledge levels, size, governance mechanisms or economic base will be useful.
Widening the sphere of analysis, moving beyond the usual economic connotations of the word innovation to look at the innovation potentially and actually implemented in institutional arrangements, governance, education, the organisation of housing and transport and social and cultural services as well as the more mundane issues of garbage removal and the critical new emphasis on ecologically sustainable city activities wil be welcome.
2. Innovative Cities
Recently both city policymakers and observers have begun to focus on 'innovative cities' where, for example, governance mechanisms, population characteristics and policies make some cities innovative in many domains. Contributions looking at whole cities of this kind, or major sections of them, will be particularly welcome.
We are therefore seeking papers which centre either on specific 'city' issues and on whole cities or major sections of them.
We are seeking papers in the following fields:
- economic development and technological change
- transport and city logistics
- housing
- education delivery and focus
- sustainability, including the conservation of water and energy
- cultural and artistic development
- urban governance
- urban finance and management
We will be looking for new approaches based on real cities. It is hoped that authors will use the insights of different disciplines and discuss the issues broadly. Issues such as social equality and wellbeing could be part of the story and implementation part of the discussion but the focus is innovation. Case studies are welcome provided that they address general issues of the design and management of the city of the future and are cumulative in the information they can provide to policymakers and urban managers.
Deadlines
Abstracts of one page should be sent to Professor Jane Marceau, the editor of the special edition, at jmarceau@iinet.net.au by 17 May 2008.
Final papers will be due by mid-August for publication in late 2008.
*Professor Marceau is an Adjunct Professor with the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
eContent Home