International Symposium "Coping with City Shrinkage and Demographic Change - Lessons from around the Globe"
30.-31.03.2006 Dresden, Germany
Cristina Martinez-Fernandez / Chung-Tong Wu, University of Western Sydney (Australia)
Cristina Martinez-Fernandez
Abstract
Tackling Urban Decline through Innovation Activities
Innovation might have a major role to play in the transformation processes of shrinking cities. An important strand of economic-development work, which grew in importance over the 1980s and especially over the 1990s, focused on the importance to economic growth of innovation and more recently of well functioning systems of innovation. International research has shown that some countries and regions have higher levels of innovation than do others and that these levels are not random. They are higher when all aspects of knowledge generation, transmission and transfer, the regulatory framework and other public policies affecting the operation of businesses, notably taxation, and the availability of venture capital work smoothly together. This characteristic of innovation has led observers to speak of ‘systems of innovation’. These systems function at national level, even in a globalizing world but also at local and regional levels. There has thus been increasing interest in how systems of innovation might work at the level of the city and the metropolitan region and hence how local governments can best direct the resources available for local economic development of their cities and regions. The search is now on for the best ways of quantifying and measuring the effectiveness of innovation systems at all levels as the basis for further policy development. Localized learning has been shown to be especially important.
However the application of the innovation literature to the analysis of new planning paradigms has not attracted much attention of the academic community that has focused much more on the economic growth of cities. Some analysts argue that innovation holds the key to economic growth; others focus on innovative regional clusters as an engine of economic growth and so on. What is missing here is a more detailed analysis of communities in transformation through cycles of shrinkage and growth and the role that innovation -or the lack of it- plays in the decline.
The presentation will discus preliminary analysis of the role of knowledge and innovation activities of communities in transformation in Australia and some of the strategies put in place by city stakeholders.
