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Household size decline accounts for a substantial portion of population loss in shrinking cities, yet little research has focused on it. Much of the literature presents a simple growth/decline binary that is largely determined via population figures. In this paper, we highlight the importance and assess the impact of household size changes on population decline, and determine what types of household size declines are more acute in shrinking cities than other locales. We find that elderly households and households with school‐aged children are under‐represented in shrinking cities, while households with pre‐school‐aged children are over‐represented. More tellingly, we find the biggest source of household‐related loss in shrinking cities to be the growth of single‐person households now living in houses that were once home to entire families. These findings puncture the binary on which much of the shrinking cities discourse is based. The population dynamics of most cities are subtler than either practitioners or critical scholars assert. We argue that plans and development strategies for shrinking cities should reflect a range of demographic changes, including outmigration and internal household restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that innovation is a key to both national and local economic growth. It examines the significance of military research and development (R&D) in the context of innovation-driven economic growth and also the prospects for such growth with accelerating cuts in expenditure on military R&D. It discusses the potential significance of cuts in military R&D for the main European countries in general. It then goes on to examine the changes taking place in Great Britain in Particular. This analysis leads to the conclusion that cuts are likely to affect those industrial sectors and places which have been most dependent on defense contracts primarily concerned with aerospace and electronics. The paper then examines case studies of aerospace, electronics, the Bristol Region in England and the Thames Valley in Great Britain. These are the industries and areas most likely to experience the effects of the peace dividend on R&D in Great Britain. The paper evaluates the local economic implications of cuts in defense R&D. It is argued that although R&D employment is only a small proportion of total employment, it has significant multiplier effects. Cuts will therefore have short-term effects in linked industries and long-term effects on local skill bases.

In the paper, industrial relations are considered in a much wider sense than is usual among industrial relations scholars. Formal collective bargaining is just one aspect of the complex relationships among social actors which take place at national, regional and local levels. These include, among other things, the sharing of normal and practices regarding human resources training and management, labor market and economic development policies. These relationships often involve state agencies, public sector officers and various interorganizational networks which give different contexts and meanings to industrial relations. The hypothesis is that the regional dimension is particularly appropriate to observe how these relationships are currently evolving into different contexts. The region as a unit of analysis has recently been relaunched, after a long historical prevalence of the national level. As neo-industrial systems tend to decentralize and territorially agglomerate their structure, the main competitive advantages are likely to be found at the regional level. However, the new regional dimension is the result of economic reorganizational processes and institutional frameworks which are largely shaped by national habits and constraints. This is why apparently rather similar regional dynamics currently defined as network organizations remain different with respect to institutional and in the wider sense to industrial relations contexts.

The paper seeks to directly assess the relationship between immigration and the transformation of the urban service economy through a case study of immigrants in the hotel industry in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This comparative study of the hotel industry provides a particular good test case for both the restructuring and the replacement labor perspectives. Hotels in major U.S. cities have witnessed a major burst of capital investment in recent years. The industry's growth has been linked to the new sources of urban agglomeration and the pattern of growth has followed the trajectory of market segmentation predicted by the restructuring hypothesis. As hotels have also been a traditional employer of African-Americans focusing on this industry highlights the processes by which jobs are allocated to immigrants or native blacks. By comparing New York, still the quintessential immigrant city, with Philadelphia, a city with few immigrants, the paper assess whether the service sector/immigration interactions are indeed as important as the restructuring hypothesis asserts.

By critically reviewing different strands of literature on institutional change and development, this essay argues that, in order to fully understand subnational economic development, we need to move away from 'good governance' explanations in which geography‐specific analyses of power structures and elite interests are largely absent. Using findings for Colombia and insights from economic geography and heterodox political economy theories, this essay gives theoretical and conceptual guidelines and approximations for future studies on regional economic development. The contribution provides a place‐based discussion of how the historically evolved distribution of power balances, context‐specific elite interests, and the interaction between place‐bound actors and place‐less dynamics affect subnational institutional arrangements shaping policies and development outcomes. The conclusions drawn are not limited to Colombia and will prove beneficial to researchers studying regional economic development in subnational contexts elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a debate on "An institutionalist perspective on regional economic development." Until recently, regional policy has been firm-centered, standardized, incentive-based and state-driven. This is certainly true in the case of the Keynesian legacy that dominated regional policy in the majority of advanced economies after the 1960's. It relied on income redistribution and welfare policies to stimulate demand in the less favored regions (LFRs) and the offer of state incentives to individual firms to locate in such regions. The article seeks to develop the institutionalist perspective by bringing together strands of policy action scattered across the literature, as well as suggesting new strands. The first section of the paper summarizes the axioms of economic action and governance which emerge from a theorization of the economy rooted in institutional economics and socio-economics. The second section discusses applications of institutionalist thought within regional development studies that seek to explain the importance of territorial proximity for economic competitiveness. Part of the purpose of these two sections is to demonstrate that the new policy orientations, outlined in the third section, are not just ex- post generalizations based on the experience of a small number of regions, but also ex-ante suggestions based on a particular conceptualization/abstraction of the economy and its territoriality.

Scholars and policymakers interested in the growth and prosperity of regions have long recognized that talent and knowledge are fundamental. Yet the question is what types of talent are needed in a growing twenty-first-century economy: human capital, creativity and innovation, or entrepreneurship? The latter we define broadly to include any type of risk taking, and not only radical innovation. The literature does not clearly point to one factor as being the most essential. This study assesses this question separately for rural and urban United States (US) counties. We find that human capital--measured by educational attainment--is considerably more conducive to employment growth than the share of creative occupations. Likewise, the share of small and medium businesses is also very conducive to local growth, although this does not apply to the self-employment share. Rural and urban areas experience similar patterns, although the magnitude thereof tends to be larger for urban counties, whereas high-technology employment share has had a positive effect in rural areas. Policy conclusions suggest that enhancing small business development and increasing educational attainment are the two strategies that are most likely to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends in social outcomes of economic restructuring have been translated to different degrees into the framework of Australia's regional system, although the processes are only partially understood. In the broadest sense, the balance of competitive advantages and disadvantages each region has for retaining and gaining economic growth will determine the average nature of social outcomes. It is the intra!metropolitan variations in outcomes which is the specific interest of this paper and the subject of research by the present authors which is currently under way. As is common elsewhere, important welfare indicators available nationally are not to be had for subnational areas. A less satisfactory set of measures, usually derived from official census data, has to be used instead. Australian cities have received much attention from the cartographers of socio-spatial structure Not surprisingly, mapping confirms that there is spatial variation in key interrelated welfare indicators such as incomes, unemployment and education levels. Within cities this variation has been traditionally explained by spatial sorting in residential property markets combined with life-cycle stages and a degree of cultural clustering. In addition, whilst public housing is relatively insignificant in Australia it tends to be concentrated in certain locations, and thus influences their welfare profiles.

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

The article comments on the formation of development capital in Brazil. In Brazil since the postwar era the state has been the driving force behind the extraordinary process that led to the modern housing industry. There is no doubt that economic forces can provide explanations for the limited and unstable character of housing construction. Nevertheless, it is necessary to examine this movement from a long-range historical perspective. While keeping in mind its specificities, housing production should be understood as an expression of the contradictions arising from the development of capitalist social relations. Only in this way people can analyze the specificity of the housing sector, without turning the construction movement into an epiphenomenon of the global economy. The effects of the economic situation on real estate are mediated by the contradictions that continually mark the productive structure of housing. This paper discusses the results of using this approach to analyze the historical process of the formation of development capital in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The article focuses on observations about the future of the postindustrial economy and its major victims. When in 1962 sociologist Gunnar Myrdal took an old-fashioned Swedish word for lower class to describe a new American underclass, little did he know what immense effects his brief, new conceptualization would have on America's view and treatment of the poor. This paper is devoted to some observations about that insight 30 years after the publication of his new concept, and about two other topics: variations in how the victims of the post-industrial economy are chosen in different countries, and cross-national variations in the definitions and uses of the term `underclass'. Several researcher stress the importance. of looking at the victims of the postindustrial economy in countries which vary economically, politically and socially. One analysis must examine who is chosen for victimization, how and why and by whom, dealing also with the diverse ways in which people are victimized. Given the centrality of the behavioral definition of 'underclass' in American life, a parallel cross-national study must look at which economic victims are stigmatized with this label, and by whom, and which economic victims escape the stigma and the punishments that accompany it.

The concept of the informal sector first introduced in the early 1970s in studies of Africa, has recently gained currency as a tool for understanding the changes under way in the advanced industrial societies. Originally, the concept was used to describe the variety of third world business enterprises characterized by their small scale, ease of entry, labor intensiveness and the evasion of government regulation. The first waves of studies identified the informal sector as a leftover from precapitalist modes of production, subsequent work portrayed the informal sector as an increasingly integral aspect of industrializing third world economies. But the most recent evidence suggests that the informal sector is a first world phenomenon as well. Increasingly, social scientists draw attention to the growing proportion of persons working on their own account, the shift toward smaller firm size, the expanding scope of economic activities whose existence is concealed from the state, the revival of homework and the burgeoning of sweatshops. They conclude from this disparate set of phenomena that the informal sector is alive, well and growing in the postindustrial West. The paper takes a skeptical look at this new version of the informal sector idea by examining a case that is critical for the informal sector claims, the sweatshop phenomenon in New York's garment industry.

For most of the 1980s the New York City economy surged, carrying its expensive municipal government along with it. the fiscal crisis of the middle 1970s had become a nearly forgotten product of fiscal mismanagement and the death throes of the industrial economy. The city framed its budget according to accepted accounting principles and with its newly achieved satisfactory bond rating, it could once again market its general obligation bonds. New York's restructured economy, based in finance and advanced services, reaffirmed its enhanced status as global city. Then, just as rapidly as the boom began, it ended. The 1987 stock market crash constituted the first harbinger of decline, nevertheless New York's economy continued to grow for the next two years, albeit at a slower pace. By the end of 1989, however, almost all indicators had turned down and for the years 1990 and 19991 New York City showed declines in employment, a virtually total real-estate slump and a drastic shortfall in tax revenues as compared to anticipated receipts. The paper examines the causes and outcomes of the two post-1970 fiscal crises to indicate the links between New York's economic base, the financial condition of its government, its politics and the way in which these factors intertwine.

This paper explores social and spatial dimensions in the world car industry with a view to better understanding the variations in the ways transnational production systems are organized by companies in various industries in various parts of the world. Japanese corporations have forged the world's most competitive auto production system. The challenge from Japan has forced enterprises and governments in the developed capitalist societies to confront anew how they organize their own production systems and how it is that production systems become the mainsprings for economic development and change. Japanese companies will serve as the major, United States companies the minor, reference points in the comparison of transnational production systems in the world car industry. The Japanese automobile industry experienced massive growth after World War II. Toyota and Nissan went from insignificant companies in the 1940s to the world's, second and third largest car makers by the early 1980s. A key to the competitive international success of Japanese companies is the way they organize and tightly control their many layered production systems.

The article presents the author's comments on the paper titled "The Dialectics of Reason," by John Friedmann. The paper is a useful reminder of contemporary processes like the halt in economic growth and modernization, as the years of relatively rapid growth for underdeveloped countries are followed by those of stagnation and recession. There is the serious possibility that rapid growth will not return again, and will not provide a market alleviation of poverty through the trickling-down effect. Internal resources, as presently organized, are inadequate to sustain economic growth, while the industrialized countries and their capital, increasingly preoccupied with managing growth within and between their trading blocs, appear to be abandoning the underdeveloped world to its fate. Moreover, the author doubts the barrio economy itself. Friedmann tells that it does not include the small-scale workshop or the putting out process, anything that ties local people to the wider market economy. Essentially it is the economy of exchange and self-help in which people substitute their own labour and that of their neighbours for the market. But it is unlikely that such an economy will flourish in the face of recession.

The aim of this paper is to show that the "Massachusetts miracle" is based on services sector job growth rather than on the manufacturing-based industrial policy to which it is usually attributed and to argue that in the new situation of very low levels of unemployment the priority is for an employment policy directed at the needs of low-paid service sector workers rather than further job creation. Authors start by providing a selective overview of Massachusetts industrial policy during politician Michael Dukakis' administrations. They then evaluate the Massachusetts miracle and attempt to delineate the contradictions between employment policy and industrial policy that are emerging in the full employment state. After considering at some length the political and ideological grounds for the manufacturing focus of state economic policy and the obstacles to services-based policy, they turn to the needs of the new workforce and a series of proposals that are currently. transforming the labor movement and policy agenda in Massachusetts.

The article presents information on a seminar on high technology and the labor market held in New Delhi, India. This seminar was organized by the International Institute for Labour Studies and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. It brought together an informal network of academics, policy-makers and trade unionists concerned with the relationship between high-technology industrialization, labour markets and general issues of economic and social development. Much of the debate was dominated by discussion of the Indian experience, although China also was represented by a strong contingent. Three main issues discussed were the role and likely impact of high-tech industrialization for India and China, autarkic versus more open paths to development, and the significance of state policy. Whether high-tech should or could play a major role in a country's development was a major concern of the Indian participants. However Chinese participants were more convinced about the positive aspects of both high-tech and world economy connections.

Around the world, public-private partnerships have become increasingly popular to deliver large-scale transportation infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, railways, subways, seaports and airports. The aim of this article is to provide a framework to understand the global geography of projects built through this market-driven procurement model, which have been predominantly concentrated in a small number of developed countries and emerging markets. As is shown, within many countries, a governance and regulatory environment has been established that supports public-private partnerships over other alternative procurement approaches. Nevertheless, the production of public-private partnerships worldwide has been dominated by a relatively small number of highly globalized construction contractors, engineering firms, financiers, accountancies and consultants from developed countries, who have focused their activities in a narrow set of regions. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the high level of industry concentration, and emerging trends showing greater involvement from firms from developing countries. Resumé À travers le monde, les partenariats public-privé sont de plus en plus utilisés pour les projets d'infrastructure de transports de grande envergure, tels que routes, ponts, voies ferrées, métros, ports et aéroports. Cet article définit un cadre permettant de comprendre la géographie planétaire des projets bâtis selon ce modèle orienté par le marché, projets concentrés dans un petit nombre de pays développés et émergents. Les régimes de gouvernance et la réglementation mis en place dans de nombreux pays favorisent les partenariats public-privé au détriment d'autres approches de réalisation de projets. Néanmoins, la production de ces partenariats dans le monde a été dominée par un nombre relativement réduit d'entreprises de bâtiment et d'ingénierie, de bailleurs de fonds, de cabinets de comptabilité et de conseils, acteurs installés dans des pays développés et dont les activités internationalisées s'exercent sur un ensemble restreint de régions. La conclusion aborde les conséquences d'une forte concentration industrielle et l'apparition d'une implication croissante des entreprises des pays en développement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

China's rapid economic growth and urbanization poses great challenges to urban transportation planners. Although most municipal governments have, since the mid-1980s, substantially increased their spending on urban transportation, the resulting infrastructure and service expansions have generally been outpaced by an explosive increase in travel demand. The problem is further complicated by the Chinese government's recent decision to adopt the automobile industry as a driving force for national economic development. This important new policy will dramatically increase the level of motorization and the demand for transportation facilities in China, especially in the urban areas of the coastal region. Unless appropriate policy actions are taken, the gap between supply arid demand in urban transportation will grow and eventually become a major obstacle to economic growth and improvement of quality of life. This paper discusses urban transportation problems and their planning implications in the case of Shanghai, China' s largest metropolis. As part of its national economic development strategy, the Chinese government is determined to develop Shanghai into a leading international center of finance and trade.

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

The article comments on economic growth strategy and urbanization policies in China. Urbanization in the early stage of industrialization is, in essence, the spatial manifestation of the economic structural transformation, characterized by a massive shift of labor and other inputs away from agricultural to non-agricultural activities in the production structure. China's rapid industrial growth has not been accompanied by comparable levels of urbanization, which remains low even by third world standards. The article outlines the major principles governing urbanization in the early stages of socialist industrialization and demonstrates that China has been consistent in attempting to maximize industrial growth while minimizing urbanization, through measures such as control of urban-rural population and labor mobility, fuller use of urban workers, the suppression of services and personal consumption, and the promotion of rural industrialization. The heavy emphasis on rapid industrial output expansion inevitably generates high growth of industrial employment, especially during the early years of extensive growth. This creates a strong tendency to agglomeration and urbanization. At the same time, under the SGS, the wide gaps in wages, consumption or economic opportunity between the industrial and agricultural sectors are maintained. There are immense incentives for peasants to out-migrate from rural areas because state policies towards agriculture, including the collectivization and compulsory delivery of agricultural goods, are mostly unfavorable to the farm sector and therefore create a strong push for migration.

The article discusses the changing face of the electronics industry in Malaysia. The growth of the semiconductor industry in Malaysia is the most spectacular event in the country's industrialization. This article examines empirically the growth of the semiconductor industry in Penang within the context of this transition in the new international division of labour. In theoretical terms it focuses on the exchange-productionist debate on the role of transnational capital in third world industrialization. More specifically, it adopts the more rigorous internationalization of capital thesis as the appropriate framework for understanding the impact of transnational and local factors, including the role of the state, on local industrialization. The prime concern is to offer a description of changes in the patterns of growth and stagnation of the local semiconductor industry in terms of cycles and rhythms in the industrialization of capital and the competition amongst capitals in peripheral industrialization. Transnational capital is a force for the transformation of work and development during the transition in peripheral capitalist formations.

The article focuses on Buffalo in New York City as a typical example of many other declining industrial centres. Although still a major manufacturing centre in New York Buffalo has suffered a sustained decline in industrial employment over the last decade. The article suggests that for Buffalo this process of decline has led to a fairly entrenched relationship between economic growth and social distribution namely that most kinds of economic growth lead to a worsening of distribution. This relationship is rather stable to other ongoing changes in the economy such as the long run trend from manufacturing to service activities. It also does not appear to be affected greatly by economic policies as diverse as the promotion of new economic activity versus support for older sectors. The first section of the article highlights the key income flows in the Buffalo economy followed by general discussion of the internal structure of the economy that shows the relationship between growth and social distribution.

The article discusses the historical patterns of reaction to urbanism in Great Britain. The article is based on two assumptions. The first is that modern industrialism, as an economic and technological system based on inanimate sources of energy has, or had, an inherent spatial logic, and this logic is expressed in the existence of the industrial city and large-scale urbanization. Second, whilst modern industrialism, as an economic and technological system, results in similar and comparable urban forms, the extent to which the social, physical or spatial forms of such cities differ results from two variables--culture and power. The first part of this article deals with the historical patterns of reaction to urbanism in Britain at the height of the urbanization process in Europe. In the second part, the phenomenon of "temporary escape" from the city and its expression in the institution of the "vacation home," "residence secondaire," "wochenend haus" or "country cottage", a research topic previously monopolized by geographers and conceptualized by one of them as "seasonal suburbanization" is being highlighted.

Welfare‐state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative cities and culture‐led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite‐centric economic development agendas tend to trump 'civic creativity' ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture‐led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus on decorative projects as part of urban upgrading, which are often associated with ensuing gentrification and displacement of the urban poor. In contrast to focusing on these kinds of regeneration strategies, this article investigates Dlala Indima, a hip‐hop‐led graffiti project in a rural township in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This article situates graffiti as a critical social and spatial practice to argue that this case challenges normative cultural planning paradigms. Dlala Indima's work is an alternative approach to cultural development by and for young people who are usually marginalized by the mainstream practice of culture‐led economic development. The project challenges dominant creative cities and culture‐led development discourses in three ways: first, it challenges the normative processes of regeneration; secondly, it grounds participatory practice; and finally, it shifts participation from 'tyranny to transformation' through the ubuntu of hip‐hop, the notion of ubuntu being based on the communitarian notion of 'ubuntu, ngubuntu ngabantu'—'I am because you are'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City regions are significant sites of economic development, policymaking, and everyday living. Yet in many countries they are weakly institutionalized and therefore lack established democratic practices. This article is based on a study exploring citizen participation in city‐regional planning in Finland, where traditional participatory means have largely failed to invite and involve citizens. The analysis approaches city regions relationally, as evolving processes with a changing spatial shape and scope. Through the notion of lived citizenship, including the dimensions of status, practices and acts, the article reveals how the dominant ideas of citizenship in city‐regional planning hide from view elements that are significant for citizen participation. Whereas people's rights to participation can largely be fulfilled on a territorial basis in municipalities and states through legal membership in political communities, in the context of weakly institutionalized city‐regional planning such status‐based forms of participation are typically not available. This vagueness has created an image of a missing city‐regional citizenry, which the article sets out to challenge and rework through the notion of issue‐based participation as lived citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the 'rules of the game'. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of 'play' and 'games' to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a 'regeneration game'—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BRICS countries in general, and China and India in particular, are now widely regarded as the areas of the world likely to challenge the economic leadership of the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). A large part of this challenge will come from rapid technological catch-up by China and India. Yet, despite a recent rise in interest, there is limited knowledge about how and where innovation takes place in these two leading emerging countries and to what extent the Chinese and Indian territorial systems of innovation differ from those in the EU or the US. In this article we explore the geography of innovation in China and India, concentrating on understanding key territorial-level innovation trends by country, region and technology field, using the US and the EU as benchmarks. We find significant contrasts between the geography of innovation in China and India and that of the US and the EU. First, the degree of concentration of innovative activities in both countries is extremely high. Levels of agglomeration of innovation in the coastal provinces of China, as well as in Delhi and the South of India, significantly exceed the levels of agglomeration found in the USA and the EU. Secondly, China has witnessed a more rapid increase in the degree of concentration of innovation than India. We posit that the differences in the geography of innovation between, on the one hand, China and India and, on the other hand, between these countries and the developed world are rooted in different institutional settings, different systems of innovation and different national innovation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by plans for aspirational infrastructure serving elites. What is rather more peculiar, however, is the way in which the promotion of some fiscal policy reforms can also inadvertently support land commodification and the uneven development it (re)produces. This article describes how efforts to host both democratic fiscal reforms (via localized exercises like participatory budgeting) and to tap into international capital circuits to stir economic development (via aspirational infrastructure and urban redevelopment plans) can produce a Sisyphean dilemma. While gains in ordinary infrastructure investments (e.g. wells, water pumps) were achieved democratically in Maputo's KaTembe district with the participatory budget, these material (and political) improvements have been rendered irrelevant by better funded aspirational infrastructure projects for KaTembe (e.g. bridges, high-rise residential buildings, tourist facilities) supported by more opaque decisions made by the national government without residential input. Given the wide embrace of participatory budgeting in contexts of weak democracy across SSA cities and elsewhere, Maputo's experience serves as a timely alert of the risks run when this popular exercise is prematurely promoted, especially when wider-scaled property tax reforms could better redress uneven and undemocratic urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of 'trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industrial to a post-industrial city, where, during the last two decades, we have found three concurrent components: the ideology of trickle down; several urban policy programs and governmental policies to 'make' money and resources trickle down; as well as increased economic polarization and segregation. A liberal critique of trickle down would argue that market mechanisms cannot by themselves solve distribution, and that government policies therefore are needed. We argue for the need to go beyond a liberal critique of trickle down and stress how unequal distribution is built into the unequal production of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities need law to thrive, but it is not clear how abstract texts become tangible policy outcomes. Existing research on the role of law in urban affairs conceives law as either an algorithm that shapes urban life or a reflection of political disputes. The former assumes that the meaning of law is obvious; the latter claims it is irrelevant. In contrast to these views, I argue that laws are multipurpose instruments that acquire a specific function when enforced by those government agents who operate at the frontlines of public service. To understand what these agents do and why, I conducted a qualitative study of the Ministério Público and the Defensoria Pública in São Paulo, Brazil. Through this process, I found that these government agencies are not cohesive bureaucracies but heterarchies composed of distinct internal factions with different evaluative principles. Moreover, officials within them are not isolated from other entities in society but tightly entangled with them, and these connections influence what these officials do. Finally, enforcement agents are not always resigned to solving conflicts as they arise. Rather, they strive to find acceptable solutions in the interstices of existing conditions or even change the circumstances that created the conflict in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship suggests that local transformation in reform-era China has been a process of decentralization of state power driving extractive local governments to pursue economic growth through rapacious land appropriation and producing many miserable landless villagers. This study puts forward an alternative perspective by arguing that local governance reforms in China to advance urban development should also be interpreted as a process of state building, whereby local government reshaped its governance strategy so as to mitigate potential social unrest and strengthen its political legitimacy in governing rapidly urbanizing areas. Based on intensive fieldwork in a periurban district in southern China, this research examines how the local state has heightened its control over urbanizing villages through its day-to-day governance practices and the pursuit of a complex policy agenda comprising social welfare provision, shareholding reforms and intervention in grassroots politics. The findings of this study shed new light on understanding local state transformation in periurban China and on explaining why the country still maintains tremendous urban growth despite incessant land disputes and numerous social tensions at different localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clusters are important drivers of regional economic growth. Although their benefits are well recognized, research into their evolution is still ongoing. Most real-world clusters seem to have emerged spontaneously without deliberate policy interventions, each cluster having its own evolutionary path. Since there is a significant gap in our understanding of the forces driving their evolution, this study uses a quantitative approach to investigate the role of inventor collaboration networks in it. Inventor collaboration networks for 30 top-performing American metropolitan clusters were constructed on the basis of patent co-authorship data. The selected clusters operate in hi-tech fields: information technology, communications equipment and the biopharmaceutical industry. Starting from a widely accepted hypothesis that the 'small-world' structure is an optimal one for knowledge spillovers and promotes innovation effectively, the authors statistically tested the impact of 'small-world' network properties on cluster innovation performance proxied by patent output. The results suggest that the effect of the small-world structure is not as significant as theorists hypothesized, not all clusters benefit from the presence of inventor collaboration networks, and cluster performance can be affected by policy interventions. Our analyses also suggest that cluster typology moderates the impact of inventor network properties on cluster innovation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European spatial governance is becoming an intriguing mix of ideas from the economic, political and cultural spheres. This article asserts that, in the EU's spatial planning, the cluster is increasingly part of a hybrid spatial politics, here named the 'cluster gaze', based on the interplay of innovation-oriented political rationality and spatial governance. To study this process, the article provides an empirical investigation into selected EU documentation. The investigation is based on two perspectives. First, the cluster is analysed as a mediating instrument to stimulate and rescale transnational market developments in the EU. Second, the cluster is studied as an instrument of spatial management - one that builds on a business managerial ethos and endorses a specific hierarchical spatial imaginary and a cluster evidence base to assess the productivity and efficiency of European clusters. Both of these perspectives pave the way for a European 'politics of cluster excellence' that is about the constant sharpening of cluster practices, continuous evaluation and ranking, and the enhancement of cluster performance to rise from the ' European league' towards the 'world class'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The apparent success of state-managed market economies has challenged the conventional wisdom that liberal democracy is the norm around which all capitalist countries tend to converge. If the link between democracy and development is more tenuous than we often think, the authoritarian variety of capitalism is not without its own problems, especially with respect to political legitimacy, innovation and regional development. This article explores these issues through the prism of 'authoritarian modernization' in Russia. We argue that this strategy is unlikely to succeed, even in its own terms, because (1) the political system fails to create favourable institutional conditions for modernization; (2) the economic system is beset by deeply embedded structural problems; and (3) the regional policy apparatus is torn between the goals of spatial equalization and spatial agglomeration. The article focuses on the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, the main symbol of Russian modernization, to demonstrate the territorial repertoire of the mega-project, a state-sponsored development strategy to create innovation clusters from above because they cannot emerge from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 2000s, Dubai seemed the apotheosis of the global city model. Lauded as an embodiment of globalist ideals, or harshly criticized as a representation of the dangers of contemporary urbanism, it was clearly under the spotlight. Then, like the concept of the 'global city' itself, it disappeared from the headlines, to be subject only to sporadic and cynical attention. Today some are heralding a 'return' of Dubai from the anonymity of the middle ground of global city hierarchies and rankings. What is often forgotten, however, is that urbanism in Dubai did not stop. On the contrary, Dubai's continuous 'worlding' offers a productive opportunity for the encounter of 'global' and 'ordinary' modes of urban analysis. By unpacking the construction of a global Dubai, this article advocates greater sensitivity to the multiscalar politics that shape its continuity. Stepping beyond rumours of crisis and decline, it aims to connect the global fortunes and everyday processes that jointly characterize the development of global cities. 'Global' and 'ordinary' urbanism, it argues, are but two registers of how we could, in Warren Magnusson's words, 'see like a city'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global events such as London's 2012 Olympic Games raise questions about the ways in which embedded political arrangements take their shape from relationships that stretch across and beyond urban boundaries. In this article, the urban politics that we wish to capture is not one that is merely located in the city, but rather one that has to constantly take into account the mediated demands folded (as it were) into the urban arena. In the first part of the article, the corporate politics of an Olympic-related urban regeneration are outlined and then considered, first as a staged setting for interaction, a kind of placeless political engagement, and then as a more embedded spatial politics that takes into account the leverage of networked groups acting within and beyond the city. Following that, we explore the politics of regeneration when campaign groups and alternative coalitions of interest raise their own political demands by drawing on references outside of their immediate urban area and attempt to steer political dialogue in ways that extend the reach of urban politics. The urban politics at stake in this context, we argue, appears to work more through topology than a series of mapped connections; through actors registering their presence in ways that often dissolve the tension between inside and outside rather than define it in terms of separate political spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with recent debates which assert that community participation and empowerment are place-contingent. The particular nature of localities has regularly been taken to account for success or failure in processes of participation and regeneration. In contrast, this article exposes the failings based in the nature of the process of regeneration in the complex intersection of national agendas of community participation, regional objectives of economic growth and local aspirations of social cohesion and improved amenities. These agendas meet in the seemingly mutual pursuit of the 'active community'. They become manifest in the micro-politics of negotiating and enacting different constructions of community by the different actors 'empowered' in the regeneration process: regional development agencies, local government and local civil society. The article is based on ethnographic research in the Kent coalfield. The coalfields as distinct places have commanded a lasting place in the academic and policy literature: romanticized as the epitome of 'communityness' but demonized as the site of problem groups. This otherness has outlasted the industry the communities were built on. The analysis here shows that the social organization of regeneration in an arguably 'different' place is less driven by local specificities than by a failure to make visible conflicting constructions of community; therefore both the pathologizing of disadvantaged social groups and calls for more 'community' in policy delivery rather than policy reform are called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the dynamic relationship between economic development and the identification of ethnic minorities and argues that identification of China's ethnic minorities manifests itself at various levels. At the national level, the introduction of market mechanisms and economic growth initiatives have been concentrated predominantly in the coastal areas and metropolises, and are thus increasingly distant from ethnic minorities, a disproportionate majority of which reside in the western parts of the country. This growing regional disparity has placed ethnic regions and populations in a distinctly unfavourable position in terms of economic engagement and development. Regional development in the ethnic-minority homelands has been characterized by the representation and reinvention of ethnic cultural traditions and the production of cultural economies. Unequal economic growth has resulted in a massive migration of ethnic minorities to the cities. Simultaneously, urban development has reinforced ethnic identity, particularly through urban labour-market development. Urban and regional development has, in turn, led to the production, activation and magnification of ethnic identity at individual and group levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studies to analyse the notion of urban laboratories as they relate to experimental governance, the carbonization agenda and the transition to low-carbon economies. We present a case study of the Oxford Road corridor in Manchester in the UK that is emerging as a low-carbon urban laboratory, with important policy implications for the city's future. The corridor is a bounded space where a public-private partnership comprised of the City Council, two universities and other large property owners is redeveloping the physical infrastructure and installing monitoring equipment to create a recursive feedback loop intended to facilitate adaptive learning. This low-carbon urban laboratory represents a classic sustainable development formula for coupling environmental protection with economic growth, using innovation and partnership as principal drivers. However, it also has significant implications in reworking the interplay of knowledge production and local governance, while reinforcing spatial differentiation and uneven participation in urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization-era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal 'slum' as the self-evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, 'world-class' city. The story of Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary - and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization-era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes - dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a growing body of research analyses the functional mechanisms of the cultural or creative economy, there has been little attention devoted to understanding how local governments translate this work into policy. Moreover, research in this vein focuses predominately on Richard Florida's creative class thesis rather than considering the wider body of work that may influence policy. This article seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how municipalities conceptualize and plan for the cultural economy through the lens of two cities held up as model 'creative cities' - Austin, Texas and Toronto, Ontario. The work pays particular attention to how the cities adopt and adapt leading theories, strategies and discourses of the cultural economy. While policy documents indicate that the cities embrace the creative city model, in practice agencies tend to adapt conventional economic development strategies for cultural economy activity and appropriate the language of the creative city for multiple purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mainstream media, policy circles and academic scholarship, economic discourses have highlighted the importance of knowledge, creativity and innovation for generating economic growth. This has been translated into an urban planning and policy agenda which favours the establishment of research parks, innovation clusters, and especially universities along with amenities to attract creative-class workers. In much of this literature universities are invested with an almost magical power to spur economic growth, and the benign language of 'transition' is used suggesting a rather seamless progression from one urban economic engine to another. Through analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews related to the establishment of a new university in Oshawa, Ontario, this case study seeks to challenge the straightforward relationship that is assumed to exist between universities and local economic development. Like other lagging regions across the OECD attempting to repair their economies through creative and knowledge urbanism, Oshawa's recent achievements are tempered by growing concerns about poverty, homelessness and inequality. Planners and policymakers that mistake the complexities of economic restructuring for a smooth 'urban transition' put their cities and citizens at risk of creating new problems out of efforts to improve local conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While earlier research has shown that regional restructuring after reunification has led to broad de-industrialization processes in eastern Germany's chemical industry, this article focuses on how re-bundling processes at the corporate level have stimulated adjustments to the changing economic and political environment leading to a renewed regional development trajectory. The analysis is based on a conceptualization that assesses diachronic processes of rupture and re-bundling by applying a bottom-up perspective of how corporate adjustments and restructuring processes generate re-bundling types that manifest themselves in broader regional re-bundling scenarios. The empirical analysis focuses on a qualitative case study of Bitterfeld- Wolfen, the eastern region with the largest chemical industry. The research provides evidence that, although new firm formation has remained weak and acquisitions of chemical multinationals have generated structures only tenuously embedded in the regional economy, modernization and re-bundling process have contributed to a renewed, smaller yet stable, regional chemical industry. The analysis further shows that the associated processes depended on the roles of individual industrial leaders in the region, who acted as network builders, mobilized joint action and stimulated the development of a collective regional spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the changing trends in regional economic development policy delivery in multilevel governance systems. Although the imperatives of coordination of public policy interventions across multiple levels has generally been recognized, not enough attention has been given to how different political systems actually adapt their institutional and policy designs to effectively operate in the emergent complexity of multilevel governance systems. The article focuses on regional economic development policy governance in the province of Ontario, Canada over the past three decades, drawing insights from new regionalism, organization theory and governance literature to examine the prospects and challenges of policy delivery in politically complex multilevel systems. The case study illustrates how regional economic development policy is increasingly dictated by complex environmental and institutional forces of multilevel governance that are shaped by the particular character of a political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]