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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...

This paper focuses on Brian McLoughlin's last published paper, in which he argued that narrowly focused planning education should be abandoned in favour of spatial political economy. The paper traces the origins and evolution of this position, and identifies the key factors which caused McLoughlin progressively to dismantle his earlier position on systems theory. However, it is suggested that whilst McLoughlin's prescription is helpful in developing the objectives and role of planning, there is also a need to extend his argument in order to ensure that planning is effective.

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.

This paper investigates the networking behaviour of biotechnology start-ups in peripheral locations. The aim is to understand whether the conditions found in this type of environment introduce some specificities in the networking process, namely in network building and early mobilization to access key resources. The paper compares biotechnology start-ups in Portugal and in Southern Italy, focusing on relationships with research organizations and on the relevance assumed by international connections, and investigating the role played by entrepreneurs' personal networks. The research identified some common features that diverge from the typical biotechnology start-up behaviour and can be regarded as firms' adaptive responses to the conditions faced. Notwithstanding the frequent presence of close connections with local research organizations-that often play functions that go much beyond that of a knowledge source-the local environment is a lesser determinant for a substantial proportion of firms than would be expected in start-ups. A distinctive feature of these firms is an extensive reliance on foreign sources, for different purposes and from the very early stages. Entrepreneurs' personal networks are found to be instrumental, both to identify and obtain knowledge in the vicinity and to support the establishment of more complex distant relationships info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The departure point for the paper is the need to scrutinize previously unconsidered dimensions which are fundamental to understanding the dynamics of the planning enforcement system. Drawing upon emerging themes in regulation theory the paper fuses these with knowledge constructs. The rationale is that the regulatory regimes must be informed by knowledge imparted from a range of sources and the resultant quality of decision making in pursuit of remedies is inextricably linked to the robustness of the evidence base collated. The theoretical analysis, coupled with radical legislative changes, provides a lens for an empirical investigation which scrutinizes tactics, strategies, operational mechanisms, attitudinal dimensions and ethics with a view to identifying the key factors impacting upon enforcement efficacy. Prizes and pitfalls are identified in the course of the analysis and evaluation, with evidence-based remedies suggested where appropriate. The paper concludes by reflecting on the importance...

This paper assesses the relevance of the knowledge base conceptualization and the relationship between the symbolic knowledge base and the spatiality of knowledge flow in the context of the animation industry in Ireland. The paper draws on findings from a study of four innovation case studies. In broad terms, the findings provide further support for the applicability of the knowledge base approach and the association of the animation industry with the symbolic knowledge base. However, in relation to the spatiality of knowledge flows, the findings contradict the theoretically deduced postulations. Nearly all of the knowledge sources are located overseas. In addition, the study finds little support for the role of local buzz in knowledge flow. The local animation community “buzzes globally” at international events.

The creation of a second Musee du Louvre in Lens, a declining manufacturing city, clearly refers to the prototypical case of the Guggenheim Bilbao. However, this paper shows that the motivation and origin of the Louvre-Lens museum are very different, since it was decided by the central state and primarily funded by the regional authorities with a shared belief in the necessity of bringing art to the working class in a city lacking cultural facilities. This shortcoming made the project highly risky, and its successful implementation can only be explained from a theoretical perspective by various kinds of regional embeddedness. Finally, regarding the impact, even though this project was not directly inspired by the example of Guggenheim Bilbao, a positive effect is hoped for, and the paper aims to assess the possibility of producing the Bilbao effect.

The paper aims to contribute to the debate on urban renewal, departing from the so-called Bilbao effect. Focusing on the resurgence of a societal function of cultural heritage, we discuss the idea of the museum as a societal engine through a case study. Although the literature has been mainly dedicated to assessing the economic impact of large art museums in former industrial regions, the paper focuses on a small scientific museum, the Museum of Natural History in Florence, and on its strategy of social enhancement through the organization of small- and medium-sized cultural events in the historical city centre. Through the application of social network analysis to 17 temporary exhibitions between 2000 and 2012 and the analysis of 790 events divided into three macro-areas (relations with territory, educational networks and scientific networks), the role played by the museum, the density and variety of events will be investigated. The resulting picture is that of a proactive museum located at the c...

This paper aims to show the levels of local and regional embeddedness of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (GMB) as well as its effects on the position of Bilbao within global networks. Although it is often said that the GMB as an international art franchise did not fit well with the local traditions, values and culture of Bilbao and the Basque Country, this paper attempts to show that the GMB is quite embedded into the local and regional context of institutions, private agents and policies. This effect increases with the growing recognition of the potential effects of the GMB on the creative and service industry in the Bilbao region. On the other hand, there is also an increasing tendency for Bilbao and the GMB to be included in global networks, as can be demonstrated by the branding effect of the GMB on the attraction of tourists or the increasing importance of the term “Bilbao” in semantic networks. The authors conclude with some recommendations on strengthening both the regional embeddedness and th...

The concept of legacy has emerged in the twenty-first century as a dominant narrative within mega-event projects. Accordingly, event hosts now engage in detailed legacy planning. This often means creating new agencies and new plans; something that has important implications for wider urban governance and planning. This paper focuses on initiatives attached to the 2012 Olympic Games in London. One of the main aims of staging the Games was regenerating East London; and the pre-event planning (2000–2012) associated with this legacy promise is the focus here. Using evidence collected from primary and secondary research, the paper records how the governance and planning arrangements evolved over 2000–2012. These were designed to achieve regeneration effects at different scales; in the Olympic Park, the fringes of the Park and in the wider sub-region. The paper acknowledges the pioneering work undertaken in London, but also identifies the key issues, challenges and dilemmas involved. The paper concludes that Olympic regeneration planning has rescaled regeneration governance in London, privileging city-wide and national stakeholders. It also suggests that, rather than a process driven by corporate interests and public–private partnerships, London 2012 regeneration planning is best understood as government intervention that de-risked East London for private-sector investors.

In Dutch planning, there has always been an important role for spatial concepts. Their role has arguably changed with the recent decentralization of planning to the regional and local level. At the national level, guiding concepts of a more procedural nature have replaced the more substantive and place-based spatial concepts, leaving more room for regional and local interpretation. At the regional and local level, spatial concepts are still in use, but this seems to be in a more communicative, negotiating and developing role than before. In this paper, we analyse how place concepts are used to exercise power, mobilize recourses and frame meaning over the use of the peri-urban areas, in the changing Dutch planning context. This paper focuses on two competing place concepts for overlapping green urban fringe areas in The Hague Region, which have been promoted by different actor constellations and which represent different visions about the meaning of these peri-urban areas. The case study allows conclusions about the changing role of spatial concepts in Dutch spatial planning. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The creative industries have been identified as a key sector for the UK's economic recovery. Despite the intense focus, however, the working practices of their labour force remain largely enigmatic to public policy. Particularly, freelancers, who make up a large proportion of labour within the creative industries, remain largely under-researched. This paper seeks to highlight the importance of freelancers to the creative industries through a case study of London's creative economy. Moreover, by discussing the prevalence of project-based work, this research shows there is a high propensity for firms to regularly engage with freelancers on a project basis—but it is the freelancers who often conduct the more creative aspects of the work. The paper concludes by suggesting that freelancers are a crucial component of the creative industries and should be included in future political decision-making.

This paper argues that the role of key individuals in the governance of urban regeneration is often overlooked in empirical studies and theorizations, despite it often being an important causal factor in urban change. The paper provides a “starter” conceptualization of this phenomenon through combining Weber's [(1947) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization—Translated by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers)] conceptualizations of authority and Kim, Dansereau and Kim's [(2002) Extending the concept of charismatic leadership: An illustration using Bass’ (1990) categories, in: B. J. Avolio & F. J. Yammarino (Eds) Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead, Vol. 2, pp. 143–172 (Amsterdam: JAI-Elsevier Science)] typologies of leadership. Detailed research into the economic regeneration of Liverpool, UK, between 1978 and 2008 is drawn upon and a series of key individuals highlighted which played important roles in governance and policy outcomes. It is...

Recent, dramatic spatial development trends have contributed to the consolidation of a unique territorial governance landscape in the Baltic States. The paper examines the transformation of this evolving institutional landscape for planning practice and knowledge, which has been marked by the disintegration of Soviet institutions and networks, the transition to a market-based economy and the process of accession to the EU. It explores the evolution of territorial knowledge channels in the Baltic States, and the extent and nature of the engagement of actors' communities with the main knowledge arenas and resources of European spatial planning (ESP). The paper concludes that recent shifts in the evolution of these channels suggest the engagement of ESP has concentrated among epistemic communities at State and trans-national levels of territorial governance. The limited policy coordination across a broader spectrum of diverse actors is compounded by institutionally weak and fragmented professional co...

Many international differences can be experienced in shopping spaces on both sides of a national border. Other languages, unfamiliar goods and unknown spatial codes are only a few of the physical-functional and socio-cultural differences that could cause exciting and stimulating situations but could also be perceived as problematic and deterring. This paper analyses perceptions, motivations and practices of cross-border (non-)shoppers and provides insights into ways in which people from cross-border regions deal with differences and the extent to which they interact across borders. The aim is to both theoretically and empirically substantiate the dynamic concept of (un)familiarity by scrutinizing the impact of “push”, “pull”, “keep” and “repel” factors on shopping (im)mobility in the Dutch-German Rhine-Waal Euroregion. These factors are seen as rooted in dynamic processes of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing differences between places on both sides of the border. In so doing, attention is paid to changing shopping practices and motivations and influencing changing perceptions of international differences. As such, the paper also discusses “familiarization processes” in crossborder regions. The concluding section provides critical reflections on the current European policy approach towards cross-border regional development. In fact, the paper ends with a plea for more instead of less borders, as borders are markers of international differences which could promote cross-border mobility.

The concept of territorial knowledge dynamics (TKDs) has been introduced as an update to existing territorial innovation models (TIMs), questioning the focus of TIMs on technological innovation, as well as the traditional distinction between production and consumption. This paper considers whether the TKD concept can “make a difference” compared to traditional TIMs, in general, and, in particular, in relation to public policy played out at the regional level. This paper identifies three elements highlighted in the TKD concept, which have been introduced as additions to the literature on TIMs. These involve the necessity of acquiring a combination of different types of knowledge in innovation processes, establishing external relations and taking into consideration the complexity of producer and consumer relations. This paper analyses the role which has been assigned to the administrative region within the framework of three selected TIMs, the regional innovation system, clusters and the learning region, an...

After many decades of inner-city decline and massive suburbanization during the post-socialist transition of the 1990s, in eastern Germany there has been recently evolving a new, specific phenomenon: the simultaneousness of shrinkage, fading suburbanization and rising reurbanization. In this paper, the focus is on processes of reurbanization. Starting from a critical debate of conceptual approaches, the paper aims to scrutinize whether reurbanization can serve as an appropriate explanatory framework for the currently changing patterns of spatial development in eastern Germany. Reurbanization is applied to both processes on the urban macro-scale and the meso-scale of inner-city districts. By using regional, local and small-scale data from municipal statistics and questionnaire surveys, reurbanization processes will be analysed mainly for the city of Leipzig. In our paper, we argue that there is evidence for reurbanization in the sense of the model by van den Berg et al. (1982) mainly for some bigger cities...

Territoriality is mostly discussed as the political competence to exert control on a certain space, in particular with regard to the nation state. Globalization and European Integration have initiated some debate on this understanding, but cross-cross-border cooperation has rarely been linked to this debate. In these areas enormous political changes have been seen during the recent years. Still, the territorial dimension cannot be addressed, as territoriality as known from nation states is challenging politics. However, the territorial implications are manifold and are increasing throughout Europe. Against this backdrop is conceptual reflection. This paper starts with a brief overview of discussions and the empirical implementation of the territoriality debate. Based on this, the paper attempts to catch up with the political changes – the reflection of cross-border territorialities in a two-fold way. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this field. First, we propose a methodological approach to s...

In the context of current interest in “low-carbon” interventions and “energy transitions”, this paper provides a comparative perspective across three European cities (Barcelona, London and Paris) on the role of photovoltaics (PV) technology in wider transformative processes affecting crucial sites in which the “sustainability” of the built environment is being contested: the powering, planning and construction of cities. For conceptualizing far-reaching urban infrastructural change processes, the combined innovation frameworks of “strategic niche management” (SNM) and the “multi-level perspective” (MLP) on “systems in transition” offer valuable contributions. However, some implicit assumptions of these innovation frameworks make them not unproblematic when applied to the urban. This paper proposes a way of operationalizing the SNM/MLP for urban transition studies, by drawing on contributions from actor-network theory (ANT) and ANT-inspired scholarship. From this conceptual engagement, a refined understand...

This paper explores the relationship between active citizenship at a local level and the workings of local government, focusing on urban planning processes in the Greater Dublin Area, Ireland. The paper argues that to fully understand the role of community actors within urban planning, there is a need to look beyond the institutions of planning and formal avenues of decision-making to examine the overlapping, disorganized and informal practices that are increasingly mobilized to influence planning outcomes. We argue that a key motivation for community action within our case study areas relates to the perceived failure in traditional representative democracy in managing rapid urban growth and addressing quality of life concerns of local residents. Rather than collaborate with the state in organized planning arenas, community actors play a key role in informal politics both outside and against the state, leading to tensions between state efforts to promote active citizenship and the resultant community action.

This new global financial crisis has required us to recognize how closely and deeply different regions and countries around the world are connected and how they interact with each other. In this interconnected context, planning theory and experiences also become fluid rather than being confined within certain boundaries. This paper explores the links between Chinese planning and European (or "Western"-oriented) spatial planning by critically analysing the development of Chinese planning. In China, modern European planning theories have been under discussion and partly in practice for years. Indeed, they have been playing an important role over the past 30 years in, for example, urban growth management, land-use regulation and environmental protection, and also in helping achieve sustainable development. However, the evolution of Chinese planning, now in a highly dynamic phase, has distinguished itself from that of European planning by adopting a highly rational, coordinated and top-down approach. This paper argues that there are several reasons for this. However, beyond this mere observation, there are a wide range of possibilities to be considered and reflected on with respect to these two different trajectories of planning development, which could enhance planning theory and practice. In other words, there are lessons to be learnt in comparing contemporary Chinese and European planning.

Planning in England1 represents an important arena for the development and contestation of environmental discourses. Over the last century the changing assumptions about human-nature relationship have led to numerous meanings of “the environment” in planning. These have in turn influenced the choices made between: preserving, enhancing, protecting, compromising, trading, exploiting or guarding against, the environment. While recognizing the nuances of the environmental discourses, this paper identifies eight distinct meanings of the environment in contemporary plans including the environment: as local amenity, as heritage landscape, as nature reserve, as storehouse of resources, as tradable commodity, as problem, as sustainability and as risk. The latter has emerged as a result of growing climate change awareness. The paper argues that, while the emphasis on climate change mitigation has reinforced some aspects of the sustainability discourse, the adaptation agenda has introduced a new meaning of the envi...

In a world in growing turbulence, complexity and uncertainty, where crisis is becoming the norm rather than the exception, resilience is increasingly seen as a critical feature that reflects the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize without collapsing. Resilient systems are more adaptable to change, are more able to learn and are less vulnerable to disturbance and external shocks (e.g. natural phenomena, economic crises or political shifts). The resilience theories are re-emerging as a field of research and practice with application to socio-ecological systems, fostering new insights in the discussions about sustainable development. The main purpose of this paper is to explore resilience as a concept and as a framework for promoting more sustainable trajectories, highlighting its potentialities and advantages for policy and planning processes. SPARK, or the strategic planning approach for resilience keeping is introduced in the paper as a new sustainability framework, following key und...

In this paper, it is claimed that the dynamics that enabled the emergence of city regions as new places of globalization brought about significant changes and restructuring in these areas in the early years of neo-liberal policies. Subsequently, from the 1990s onwards a new neo-liberalist agenda, in reply to the problems of the early period of globalization, defined new relations and new dynamics for city regions. The aim of this paper, with the help of earlier Istanbul case studies, is to discuss the changes taking place in city regions, including the outcomes of the neo-liberal policies induced by the competitiveness of the 1980s, especially those related to the distribution of welfare and social cohesion, which forced the nation state to reconfigure its neo-liberal project.

This paper suggests the need for a more penetrating research agenda around the theme of leadership for progressive urban and regional change. While a much improved understanding of the leadership contribution is emerging in the urban and regional studies context, no strong organizing discourse has yet surfaced in the debate around the leadership of cities and regions that might serve as a guide to the development of a more critical research and leadership development agenda going forward. This paper seeks to contribute to debate around theory and practice by exploring the idea that it is knowledge “writ large”—how it is created, developed, combined and deployed—that lies at the heart of a progressive transformation of cities and regions. And that consequently, we need to think of how leadership works in, for and through these settings alongside a broader understanding of the dynamics of knowledge. The paper draws on recent research and policy literature to present an argument for a re-framed leadership pr...

The impact of what has been broadly labelled the knowledge economy has been such that, even in the absence of precise measurement, it is the undoubted dynamo of today's global market and an essential part of any global city. The socio-economic importance of knowledge production in a knowledge economy is clear, and it is an emerging social phenomenon and research agenda in geographical studies. Knowledge production, and where, how and by whom it is produced, is an urban phenomenon that is poorly understood in an era of strong urbanization. This paper focuses on knowledge community precincts as the catalytic magnet infrastructures impacting on knowledge production in cities. The paper discusses the increasing importance of knowledge-based urban development (KBUD) within the paradigm of the knowledge economy and the role of knowledge community precincts as instruments to seed the foundation of knowledge production in cities. This paper explores the KBUD, and particularly knowledge community precinct developm...

Transition from a centralized to a market economy yielded different responses from the former Eastern Bloc countries with economic performance directly affecting spatial composition of the cities. Post-socialist urban transformations across Central and Eastern Europe exhibit main, common features but always preserve singularities, characteristic of individual states. This paper, by using comparative methods and urban planning analyses, emphasizes differences in the degree of change for inner city areas under same transition conditions. Drawing on empirical evidence from Tirana, the paper stresses the fact that besides the obvious general change in the communism-inherited urban fabric, the degree of this change is predicated on the area's centrality and its pre-transitional urban pattern. It is pointed out that this spatial change follows a mutually interactive, parallel path with the socio-economic composition of the city. The peculiarity of Tirana stands in the fact that post-socialist socio-spatial tran...

The present paper investigates the role of urban networks in interaction and integration of cities by means of the “sister city” movement. The paper addresses the relationships of “Eurocities” with their “sister cities” to highlight the main factors behind the successful relationships. The data and information used for evaluation are based on the extensive survey questionnaires filled out by relevant departments or experts of municipalities in Eurocities. A logistic regression method is deployed to identify the most important factors in the success of sister city relationships. The results of our study show that the existence of any former relation with the sister cities affects the success of the relationship positively. This former relation makes it easier to have a future relation with an economic partnership while shortening the process and accelerating the economic partnership. The results also show that two factors, viz. similarities in urban problems and contributions of Eurocities to their sister ...

The impact of universities on the economic wellbeing and innovative potential of regions has been the object of intense scholarly and policy interest in the last years. Despite this interest, a clear picture is missing in relation to the roles universities are seen to play, the benefits of university activities and the mechanisms through which they occur. This paper proposes a review and a critique of current views on the role of universities and their associated policy implications. To achieve this, the paper identifies five “models” for universities as they are reflected in the literature, each advocating different set of roles of universities, different spatial aspects of interactions, as well as different mechanisms for university engagement. National and regional innovation and research policies tend to explicitly or implicitly reflect one or a combination of several of these models, giving rise to potential contradictions or conflicts of policy rationales and objectives.

While it is quite common in studies of diversity to focus on its negative aspects, this paper specifically aims to emphasize the contribution of immigrants to the urban economic performance. By exploring different kinds of social integration, this paper discusses how immigrant groups can be important agents of urban economic growth and competitiveness by liberating creative forces and enhancing the competitiveness. Immigrant entrepreneurship is defined as the most important means of social inclusion and sustained economic performance in two different cities, with different features yet hosting considerable number of immigrants with diverse characteristics, namely Antwerp (Belgium) and Izmir (Turkey). The findings of our two case studies reveal that different kinds of diversity play an important role in urban economic performance. Immigrants contribute to the growth of different forms of production and services, not only because of their talents and skills, but also because of their social connections. Social capital enables immigrants to survive in a recipient country, and integrate into an economy as active agents. They can fill the gaps in an economy as entrepreneurs or the skilled labour, which are the most important assets for the cities aiming sustained economic growth in volatile economic conditions.

Arguments about the need to improve “skills for sustainable communities” have emerged recently in the context of debates around spatial and territorial polices for the EU. This debate has been driven by the UK government as part of its contribution to framing debates around what should follow on from the European Spatial Development Perspective. A programme to shape spatial policy discourse around a skills agenda within EU policy circles was mounted, with considerable UK government support, and this paper explores the success of this attempt, using concepts familiar within environmental policy discourse analysis. We suggest that the attempt met with some success, but achieved a lower level of policy influence than was hoped for, and the paper goes on to examine the reasons for this.

Contemporary cities have witnessed the emergence of new real-estate products in which gated communities and closed condominiums (CCs) can be included. The proliferation of these urban products is worldwide, with similar patterns that are analysed in this paper according to five perspectives of analysis: physical, economic, social, political and cultural. These perspectives cross-cut some of the main issues of discussion of the contemporary urban debate associated with private residential developments. These developments seem to appeal to an increasing number of social groups and have been able to adapt to different planning systems. With a smaller scale, these developments emerged in Portugal in the form of CCs, and are analysed in a case study in Greater Oporto. The purpose of this paper is to present the Portuguese singularities of this phenomenon in comparison with the worldwide dimension. In our case study we find some important particularities strongly associated with the Portuguese planning system. ...

Inherent in transnational planning are obstacles which cause spatial planners to venture into unknown territory. The scale, the issues and the institutional context are significantly different from planning at the national level or below. What does this mean for the role of spatial plan-making, which is the cornerstone of the planning profession? This paper focuses on the role of plans as part of building transnational governance capacity. It does so on the basis of an in-depth case study of the preparation of the Second Benelux Structural Outline (1994-2000). The research material consists of a series of interviews with directly involved planners and administrators, primary sources such as internal reports of the Benelux Economic Union and direct observations by the researcher who attended several meetings of the planning committee. The paper starts with a short discussion of contemporary planning theory through which the formulation of the plan is analysed. Planning as a communicative process and planning as a programming process are central concepts in this analytical framework. The paper proceeds with an analysis of the making of the Second Benelux Structural Outline. A conclusion is that the plan as a communicative tool was not sufficiently developed during the planning process, in spite of the desirability of such a feature in this stage of building transnational governance capacity. The concluding remarks will focus on the ways in which the communicative dimension of future transnational plans can be improved.

Recent work in regional development has stressed the role of key economic actors in less favoured regions, particularly in high-technology sectors, in making those regions more attractive to outside investors. Of course, in less favoured regions (LFRs), there are rarely strong high-technology sectors able to reconfigure their local environment and provide the necessary local “buzz” to attract the attention of outside investors. In this paper, this issue is addressed by looking at how universities can play this role and have a broader systemic effect on the regional economic environment, by plugging gaps in the local regional innovation system. In this paper, a case study from Newcastle in the north-east of England is taken to consider recent developments which have begun to rebuild the regional innovation system. Focusing on the commercialization community around the university, it is looked at how this community of geographically proximate but initially organizationally and cognately remote acto...