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A previous paper on RIS3 assessed its potential to influence growth strategies and their delivery. It held that significant further investment work was needed in tools and techniques, data and intelligence, and innovation in leadership capacity and capabilities. It further asserted that such investment was needed to be part of a commitment to a long-run learning and evaluation process. This paper considers synergies and dissonances between these national approaches to development in England. In particular, it explores how far RIS represents a step change from previous approaches to innovation-led growth. Alternatively, is it more accurately an incremental facelift and rebranding of previous orthodoxies? Does it add value to or detract from national policy for England? What roles might the approach play in the so-called ‘devolution revolution’? Can the (small scale, ‘light touch’) Advisory Hub approach support and promote those roles? What, if anything, might the England experience have for other n...

The aim of this paper is to offer an empirically grounded conceptualization of the dialogical relationship between spatial planning and place branding in the context of regionalization. The analysis displays the discursive nature of such relationship by highlighting the intertwining of spatial planning with place branding as strategic actions devoted to, and included in, regional development processes. The analysis is based on two cases in Sweden. The first is linked to the emergence of the brand ‘Stockholm, the Capital of Scandinavia’, and the other is linked to the emergence of the brand ‘Swedish Lapland’. By combining data collected longitudinally, these cases represent two contrasting examples of dialogical relationships that materialize through two distinct yet somehow similar strategic processes of regionalization. Based on the two cases, the paper presents and discusses an empirically driven, albeit conceptual, model that highlights the dialogical relationship of regionalization as regional strategic policy and points out its spatial and political evolutionary features.

Literature on science and technology parks (STPs) lacks a systematic understanding of how regional contextual factors affect the performance of STPs. Most studies focus on park-internal factors and neglect the regional context and connections when evaluating STPs' performance. This paper provides new insight on the role of regional factors for STPs by combining and discussing existing studies on STP performance with literature on regional innovation systems. We conduct an exploratory, systematic literature review of 64 papers that refer to park-external factors in their studies of STP performance. We identify five regional factors (university and research institutes, industrial structure, institutional settings, financial support and urbanization) and assess how these factors have been shown to play a role for STP performance in previous studies. Based on this review, the paper develops a comprehensive framework of how regional contextual factors influence the performance of STPs, which can be used in designing and/or improving STP-performance while taking regional characteristics and needs into consideration. We believe a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of these regional connections can help improve designs of STPs, and thereby their performance.

This paper is focussed on the development of an exploratory integrated perspective to understand and measure Social Innovation Ecosystems through the notion of Social Innovation Regime. This concept builds upon the interrelation between socioeconomic contexts of SI (meso–macro levels) and intra/inter-organizational dynamics (micro level), where SIs are developing. That is to say, the ways in which the social economy and social organizations are connected to a broader SI Ecosystem where the socioeconomic contexts surrounding National Welfare Regime try to answer to the policy and market failures that have an impact on regional vulnerability rates. This article suggests the hypothesis that there is an interrelation between the strength of Welfare Regimes and Social Innovation Ecosystems, at a time where Social Policies and Welfare States all over the world are weakened or in crisis, opening the door to social innovation. This paper describes this connection through the notion of Social Innovation Regime, proposing an interesting exploratory framework to explore the socio-structural factors through which a country or region presents a set of vulnerabilities which can transform into unattended social problems. Finally, this analysis can contribute to the methodologies on SI measurement and impact by determining the regional vulnerability rate – social, economic, institutional, environmental – inside welfare regimes.

Trust is a key mechanism for explaining the ease and frequency of knowledge spillovers within regions. While the importance of trust is virtually uncontested, there have been few attempts to rigorously disentangle the way in which trust formation is related to space and proximity. The aim of this paper is to advance the understanding of trust formation in terms of its main antecedents within the context of regional studies. This is done by reviewing the rich literature on trust formation from psychology, sociology, and organization studies and connecting it conceptually to different types of proximity. In doing so, the paper maps out a number of avenues for future research on trust and geography.

Regional resilience has been criticized in the literature for being fuzzy. Based on that criticism one could expect it to suffer from conceptual stretching, that is that authors mean different things when they write about regional resilience. In this paper for the first time, a bibliometric analysis is presented to tackle the issue of fuzziness and stretching concerning regional resilience. With the help of that analysis, we identified three groups of research on regional resilience, urban ecology and policies (red), economic dynamics and regional evolutionary perspectives (green) and crisis management and engineering/modelling (blue). We also identified the key papers cited in these groups. In a second step, our qualitative analysis reveals that the divide between the red and green groups is not large and that the blue group is relatively isolated. Overall, the concept of regional resilience seems to be less stretched than we expected on the basis of the criticism expressed in the literature.

The paper aims to contribute to the debate of the economic transformation on cities discussing the case of Florence and its evolution from ‘art city’ to ‘creative fashion city’. According to the evolutionary vision of the path dependence model, the paper analyses the birth, development and establishment of the fashion industry within the city. This analysis seeks to understand if cultural and creative resources may contribute to the emergence of new trajectories or to the renewal – or decline – of existing ones. Results show that the existence of an endowment of cultural and creative assets and a base of knowledge and competences historically related to the artisanal tradition foster the creation of a fashion cluster. Despite the specificities of the case, the paper may give some insights of risks and opportunities related to rethinking the local economic transformation following a cultural-led and creativity-oriented approach.

Place marketers around the world are increasingly drawing on local food and regional specialties to emphasize the unique and authentic character of a given locality. This paper addresses how Danish rural tourism destinations exploit the discourses of the New Nordic Food movement as differentiator for rural areas with little or no culinary heritage. Taking a social constructionist perspective on the terroir concept, it identifies four distinct narrative strategies through which the taste of place is reinvented: accreditation, patrimonization, foraging and culinary inventions. Based on a discourse analysis of the tourism promotional material of two coastal destination in Denmark (The Wadden Sea Region and the island of Funen), it demonstrates how new touristic place identities are reconfigured along cosmopolitan food cultures. This paper conceptualizes place branding narratives that mobilize local food and contemporary gastronomic trends by revisiting the notion of terroir (taste of place) as a strategic marketing asset. In particular, it explores how rural tourism destinations with little or no gastronomic heritage exploit the discourses of NewNordic Food to create a distinct sense of place. An extensive review of the literature identifies two conservationist strategies by which terroir narratives are constructed (accreditation and patrimonialization), neither of which fully captures the particular rhetorical approaches shaping the Nordic terroir. Drawing on empirical illustrations from Danish rural destinations, the paper argues that terroir can be reproduced and invented through manipulative rhetorical approaches and identifies two novel, transformational strategies framing terroir narratives (exoticizing and enterprising). The paper contributes with a conceptual model conceived through a unique combination of place-specific(typicality) themes and market-specific ideologies, which has the explanatory power to distinguish Nordic terroir narratives from earlier articulations of taste of place.

The aim of this paper has been to address the apparent paradox that culture has been the high-profile victim of funding cuts in the period of austerity; at the same time, culture has prospered. Is culture then the ‘poster child for resilience’? The paper seeks to de-couple the notion from neo-liberalism and austerity. It counters with an argument that resilience as a concept is relational, it does not have a unitary meaning and its forms will change depending on context (that is, the cultural field and the field of governance). Hence, the strange survival of culture is explained not by austerity, but by the dynamism of the cultural field. However, this disjunction between governance and culture also carried a number of risks and problems.

Public houses, or “pubs”, have and always had an important role in the Irish culture, economy and society. Even more, pubs located in the Irish countryside represent vital networking places for local communities, and provide a significant contribution to local supply chains with their purchasing. Their decline in number, registered in recent decades, significantly affects local communities, determining the vanishing of many jobs and business opportunities in areas frequently characterized by small population catchments, infrastructural deficit and spatial remoteness. This paper explores the impact of pubs in creating economic development in rural areas of Ireland. The paper examines the current pattern of procurement and employment associated with pubs in the Irish countryside and its effects upon local supply chains. In addition, the paper investigates pubs' activities and publicans influence with regard to concepts such as entrepreneurial embeddedness and resilience. The authors present and discuss findings from an analysis conducted on a unique data set obtained with the use of a survey questionnaire, corroborated by information gathered from interviews with pub owners and managers. Results increase the level of knowledge about the formation of social networks and economic capital in rural Ireland, and provide valuable insights for practitioners and policy-makers about the role played by pubs within rural supply chains.

This paper presents a structural analysis of the governance arrangements established between Vienna and Bratislava close to the Austrian–Slovak border. We unravel the metropolitan governance relationships built in the context of territorial debordering and critically assess the policy relevance of cross-border cooperation (CBC). We particularly focus on cross-border economic positioning as a policy domain of strategic importance in a neoliberal era marked by urban and regional entrepreneurialism. In order not to embed the analysis in a predefined territorial configuration or geographic scale, this paper argues for an approach based on policy networks. The key point is that those private and public actors involved in building cross-border regions are developing a diffuse form of governance that relies on a set of flexible and tangled connections that do not necessarily conform to the territorial boundaries of the states concerned. Based on original fieldwork and data on the exchange of information ...

Throughout the last two decades, cultural quarters have been used by many local councils across the UK as attempts to redevelop and revitalize declining urban centres. Cities have spent millions of pounds developing cultural quarter policies, justified by the prevailing rhetoric of culture revitalizing the local economy and the creation of a “cultural milieu” that stimulates creative industry activity. However, in many cases in the UK, visitor numbers remain lower than expected, and in some cases, flagship projects have been sold off or closed down. High rents force out small and freelance creative industry actors, and (non-commercial) artistic interventions are strictly policed. Forming part of the wider debate on the political circumscription of the creativity paradigm, this paper argues that cultural quarters have been viewed within a predominately economistic, dichotomous and simplistic framework. This paper argues that there is a need for a more practiced-based, subjective account of cultural quarters that goes beyond such a traditional framework to include more deleterious practices such as community impoverishment, precariousness and short-termism.

The paper contributes to the on-going debate about the relative importance of economic and amenity-related location factors for attracting talent or members of the creative class. While Florida highlights the role of amenities, openness and tolerance, others instead emphasize the role of regional productions systems, local labour markets and externalities. The paper sheds light on this issue by analysing the changes in the spatial distribution of four groups of artists over time: visual artists, performing artists, musicians and writers. Little evidence is found for amenity-related factors influencing the growth rates of regional artist populations. Moreover, artists are shown to be a heterogeneous group inasmuch as the relative importance of regional factors significantly differs between artistic branches.

Drawing on the case of the Wageningse Eng in the Netherlands, this paper considers the role of “storytelling” within spatial planning practices. It moves away, though, from seeing it as merely a model of spatial planning, where “storytelling” is sometimes used to justify planners' ideals for the landscape, or a model for spatial planning, which pushes for a normative use of “storytelling” as a means of encapsulating local knowledge and the views of those who live in, and use, the landscape. Rather, the paper engages “storytelling” as a method for revealing how formal planning practices may be destabilized by more vernacular narratives seeking to subvert dominant discourses and processes. In doing so, it seeks to not only show the contested nature of participatory planning within the Netherlands, but also the ways in which narratives—as revealed via such a method—construct specific positionalities with real implications for notions of inclusivity within planning practices.

Proximity tourism planning is regarded as a significant challenge at the present time. This paper conceptualizes this type of tourism and justifies the need to approach it in post-coronavirus spatial planning scenarios, especially for addressing the peri-urban areas of medium and large cities, intermediate spaces of the contemporary urban model that have hardly been considered as tourism geographies. The conceptualization of proximity tourism and the justification of its current relevance are completed by a tourism planning proposal for the peri-urban territory of the city of Seville (Spain), which visualizes an implementation channel for the exposed theoretical reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Planning Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Citizen dialogues and other participatory practices are basically the norm in contemporary spatial planning. Nonetheless, what happens to citizen input after it has been collected – how it is handled and utilized by planners in the continuation of the planning process – has been described as a ‘black box’, where most stakeholders lack insight. The aim of this explorative study is to open this black box and examine how citizen input is handled by local planning professionals. This practice lacks a common language and form among the studied municipalities, but the analysis reveals that it takes the form of a ‘sorting process’ in which input is categorized, evaluated and structured in preparation for its integration into final plans. The paper outlines the basic logics and considerations that guide this sorting process, and distinguishes between two modes, which have been termed ‘inclusive’ and ‘selective’ sorting. These modes determine how input is categorized and assessed. The analysis indicates that multiple micro-decisions are made throughout the sorting process, and that these decisions influence the input that reaches formal decision-making bodies, and in what form. The results reveal the power exercised by municipal planning actors and how they affect the destiny of the received citizen input. Funding: Interreg

This paper analyses the gap between planning theory and planning practice in Swedish infrastructure planning. Planning theory was of limited relevance in order to understand the planning processes ...

Place branding refers to the creation of value in space by reinforcing and representing place assets in a cohesive manner, as a narrative image of the place itself. Such narratives of place are important in planning as well, when developing (strategic) spatial strategies. We argue that place branding and planning can be bridged, through cultural narratives built on local knowledge and the perceived meanings and images of place. However, there is a knowledge gap on how to build cultural narratives in multi-stakeholder processes. While participatory planning methods are increasingly applied, we argue for a greater role of art and arts-based methods. Accordingly, our key question is, how can arts-based methods support the creation of cultural narratives for place branding and planning? To address this question, we outline an approach based on the principles of Appreciative Inquiry. The approach is illustrated through a case study in Finland where we initiated a process of co-creation of place-based narratives. We analyse how the process was organized and facilitated, and what the challenges and lessons learnt were. The paper ends with a discussion, and draws conclusions on the relevance of arts-based methods for the wider debate on place branding and spatial planning.

This paper focuses on the social function of historical public space in Turkey that has been transformed with rise of modernism. Before that, it functioned as a suburban recreational area. The incr...

During the last five years, we can observe a soaring academic interest in the concept of smart specialization. A burgeoning literature emerged both conceptually and empirically. In this paper, we p...

This paper argues that it is important for urban scholars and practitioners to comparatively appraise the differential forms of local embeddedness of cultural quarters. Such appraisals can help to ...

This paper builds on the designation of cultural actors’ actions as a decisive factor in the emergence of urban patterns of art-driven social co-presences in Istanbul. It contributes to the creativ...

This paper addresses the study of inclusive growth from an urban perspective. It proposes to focus the relationship between urban economic growth and income distribution in cities in which manufact...

Since the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1997, the topic of how ‘star architecture’ plays a decisive role in urban regeneration has been discussed in academic debates as well as in the media. Efforts to emulate the so-called Bilbao effect followed internationally. However, not every city that commissions the design of a public cultural building to a star architect seeks to replicate that effect. This overarching narrative has nevertheless constituted a powerful background representation. This paper discusses the supposed replicability of the ‘effect’. The aim is to emphasize relational situatedness and plurality of roles of star architecture as a device of urban regeneration. The process of repositioning of a city does not necessarily follow the logic of international economic competition. When it comes to medium-sized cities, we observe that they aim at distinction within a specific field, in their nation-state, or try to reinvent their internal dynamics. This process can have expr...

The ‘life cycle’ approach has become popular in studies on industrial clusters. However, some concerns have been raised over the inherent determinism of this approach and its tendencies to focus exclusively on cluster internal dynamics while neglecting the role of external factors and socio-economic contingencies. This paper addresses these criticisms by investigating the long-term development of Castel Goffredo, a traditional textile cluster in Italy. In our analysis, we identify and characterize the main stages of the life cycle and its antecedents. We single out the main triggering factors behind each of these stages and show that a variety of factors, both external and internal to the cluster, contributed to its development. Our findings confirm that an ‘adaptive’ cycle approach, which focuses also on contingencies and external factors, appear to be appropriate for investigating the long-term evolution of clusters.

Professor Ho’s team has raised three questions about our paper entitled ‘On evolutionary economic geography: a literature review using bibliometric analysis’ published in European Panning Studies. ...

The aim of this paper is to bring new elements into the theoretical discussion so as to better understand the realities of borderlands. Our goal involves projecting a new conceptualization of the cross-border territory and cross-border reterritorialization by refining the analytical framework envisioned by the current literature on border studies. More specifically, we apply the so-called ‘territorialist approach’, an innovative and culturally oriented approach for territorial studies that is rooted in the Italian geographical school. Cross-border territories are conceived as complex territorial units, whereby geographical, socioeconomic and cultural patterns are affected and thus altered by the fixation of international boundaries and territorialization. Nevertheless, the persistence of local cross-border networks, both formal and informal, contributes to the maintenance of a shared local milieu. The European integration processes, especially in view of the European Territorial Cooperation progra...

Regions or regional development have not only gained importance in spatial planning, but also got fuzzy meanings. Originally regions refer to a specific geographical demarcated area, often with an inductive historic or cultural meaning. In the meantime, in our networked world, the concept also refers to transport regions based on models of daily urban systems, or functional regions based on distinctive urban or social functions. Within the post-industrial era, the concept also gained importance as economic regions. In this paper, we will explore how regional concepts emerge out of specific economic interest concerning technological innovation. We will focus on a cross-border municipal case, for example, the triangle Eindhoven–Leuven–Aachen. With the help of the assemblage and actor-network theory, we will show how the identity of regions is translated by evolving actor-networks, and how these actor-networks are influenced and adapted by those alternating regional identities themselves. From these ...

In this paper, we build on the results of previous research on how industrial districts (IDs) well-endowed with innovation capabilities fall into decline, and sometimes react against it. Major chal...

This paper provides a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of the Europeanization of spatial planning. While the supply of studies on the questions of how, where and when the E...

Cultural districts are becoming an important field of study to promote a growing number of initiatives for local development. Despite substantial research in this field, knowledge gaps remain, especially with regard to initiatives at supra-urban level. Many policy-makers, funding agencies, local administrators and managers still face important design issues. This paper contributes to the developing body of theory on cultural districts in two ways. Firstly, focusing on concepts from complexity theory, it expands the debate on the conception of cultural districts as complex adaptive systems. Secondly, it highlights the dysfunctional tensions that can arise from conflicting ways of conceiving organizations, organizing and designing among ‘promoters’ and designers. We have been involved for three years in a large project aimed at designing a wide supra-urban cultural district in Italy, financed by a major banking foundation. Adopting an organizational perspective and through participative action resea...

The importance of culture in defining new models of local development has been increasingly emphasized. However, less attention has been paid to the influence of local development models on local cultural policy. This article will focus on analysing two cities that have used culture as a central element in their economic and urban development. In both cases, they have followed different strategies but the two have finally finished generating two “white elephants”: the Universal Forum of Cultures in the case of Barcelona and the City of Arts and Sciences in the case of Valencia. From a comparison of the two cases, the paper analyses the causes of this urban phenomenon, which combines cultural legitimation, wasteful investments, financial and social unsustainability and, last but not least, corruption. These four characteristics of cultural white elephants express the depletion of a neoliberal city model based on real estate speculation and tourism, which de facto relegates culture – in spite of dis...

The paper suggests an explorative interpretative approach for conceptualizing regional change based on Foucault’s theory of genealogy. The theoretical outline is built on two key concepts of Foucau...

Recent discussions on state rescaling have pointed towards the need for a greater focus on how and why state activity may change over time in order to generate insights into the provenance, trajectories and outcomes of rescaling in different global regions and national state spaces. Consequently, this paper explores the dialectical and recursive relationship between the concepts of “statecraft” and “scalecraft” to explore the evolving sites, objects and mechanisms for urban planning within two key urban centres in different parts of the world—Birmingham, UK, and Brisbane, Australia. It is illustrated how a range of actors—from the national to the local level—have sought to craft and reshape the strategies and structures for urban planning according to different imperatives. In turn, the implications for a tighter specifying of the process of state rescaling are considered, as well as the subsequent nature of urban planning arrangements.

Planning culture has been frequently invoked in recent years to explain the differences in spatial planning across different countries. In discussing planning culture, most contributions emphasize the characteristics and particularities of spatial planning practice in particular contexts. This paper discusses the roles of culture and institutions in relation to the distinct urbanization patterns that have emerged in Flanders and the Netherlands. It concludes that it is not the differences between planning cultures (interpreted as the culture of planners, their ideals and practices and the features of the planning system) that provide the major explanation for different urbanization processes. It is rather the fit between the planning culture and the broader societal culture that seems to be an important explanation for how spatial development is managed.

The paper discusses key meta-theoretical presuppositions for urban planning to be possible and meaningful, pointing at critical realism as a fruitful philosophical position for research within urban planning and urban studies. For ontological reasons, critical realism considers that interdisciplinary integration is necessary to arrive at valid knowledge, whereas competing positions such as positivism and poststructuralism tend to neglect important parts of reality. Critical realism acknowledges the independent causal powers of both agents and structures and thus provides a suitable platform for investigating causal relationships between social conditions, spatial urban structures and the actions of agents (including those of planners). Moreover, a critical realist view on the possibilities of research-based predictions squares well with the qualitative impact assessments of alternative solutions and the modest, context-adapted estimates of magnitudes of effects typical within urban planning.

This special issue addresses the influences of planning cultures and histories on the evolution of planning systems and spatial development. As well as providing an international comparative perspective on these issues, the collection of articles also engages in a search for new conceptual frameworks and alternative points of view to better understand and explain these differences. The articles focus on three main aspects: the change in planning systems and its impact on spatial development patterns; the interrelationship between planning cultures and histories from a path-dependency perspective; and the variations in physical development patterns resulting from different planning cultures and histories. Papers from different parts of the European continent present evidence at different scales to illustrate these aspects. In all cases, the specific combinations of political, ideological, social, economic and technological factors are important in determining urban and regional planning trajectories as well as spatial development patterns.