Place-making and Policies for Competitive Cities (PDF)

Urban policy makers are increasingly striving to strengthen the
economic competitiveness of their cities. Currently, they do that
mainly in the field of the creative knowledge economy - arts,
media, entertainment, creative business services, architecture,
publishing, design; and ICT, R&D, finance, and law. This book
is about the policies that help to realise such objectives:
policies driven by classic location theory, cluster policies,
'creative class' policies aimed at attracting talent,
as well as policies that connect to pathways, place and personal
networks.

The experiences and policy strategies of 13 city-regions across
Europe have been investigated: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Birmingham,
Budapest, Dublin, Helsinki, Leipzig, Milan, Munich, Poznan, Riga,
Sofia and Toulouse. All have different histories and roles: capital
cities and secondary cities; cities with different economies and
industries; port-based cities and land-locked cities. And all 13
have different cultural, political and welfare state traditions.
Through this wide set of contexts, Place-making and Policies for
Competitive Citiescontributes to the debate about the
development of creative knowledge cities, their economic growth and
competitiveness and advocates the development of context-sensitive
tailored approaches. Chapter authors from the 13 European cities
rigorously evaluate, reformulate and test assumptions behind old
and new policies.

This solidly-grounded and policy-focused study on the urban
policy of place-making highlights practices for different contexts
in managing knowledge-intensive cities and, by drawing on the
varied experiences from across Europe, it establishes the
state-of-the-art for both academic and policy debates in a
fast-moving field.