Innovation districts are emerging as place-based, knowledge-based urban development strategies in diverse cities around the world. They have, however, been criticized for being non-participative top-down initiatives that encourage gentrification and income, social, and racial polarization. In 2015, Mayor Berke launched Chattanooga's Innovation District in the city's downtown to accelerate the transformation of Chattanooga into a knowledge city. This paper investigates the programs that are being implemented in order to mitigate the negative externalities that such a strategy can generate. Using Chattanooga as an exploratory case, the authors argue that gentrification in innovation districts can increase knowledge spillovers.
This paper investigates how public sector institutions change their form and approach to achieve a socially innovative urban governance. The “Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics” (MONUM) in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) proves a representative case of innovation in the public sector. As a new type of government agency, it is essentially an open innovation lab dedicated to innovative evidence-based policymaking. Following a new dynamic organizational pattern in urban governance, MONUM is conducive to project-oriented social innovation practices and horizontal multi-sectoral collaboration among the three societal sectors: public, private, and civil. Its results suggest that first, the peculiarity of MONUM lies in its hybrid and boundary-blurring nature. Second, new institutional forms that experiment with urban governance can rely on multi-sectoral collaboration. Third, MONUM has experimented with a systemic approach to social innovation following the “design thinking theory.” The MONUM case can contribute to the current debate in Europe on the need to harmonize EU policies for an effective social inclusion by promoting the application of the place-sensitive approach.
Community-based urban development is an inclusive approach for local service provision and management centered on the proactive partnerships between urban communities and local governments. Rooted in the deinstitutionalization of public services, the European Union and national policy effort is pushing towards the organization of community-based alternatives in response to the evolving needs of local communities. As the pandemic has shown, service accessibility has proven to be a key concern element that needs to be addressed to increase communities’ and cities’ resilience. In this direction, the paper aims to propose data-driven alternative approaches to assess urban systems’ accessibility and connectivity as an element of leveraging the resilience-oriented planning process and facilitating community-based development. The methodological approach focuses on the case of the Calabria region, where community-based alternatives for the provision of public services found difficulties to be operationalized through an integrated planning approach. The case study is explored by experimenting on the spatial connections of two purposefully selected clusters to assess the accessibility and connectivity of urban systems within the region through network analysis visualization tools: health and social-related services and transportation and logistics. The analytical approach outlines the accessibility level of urban systems in the region examined, proving its relevance in detecting social, economic, and environmental dynamics. This approach shows how using non-traditional data-driven perspectives can detect development dynamics—which affect local community’s needs—and their limitations in the organization of community-based development alternatives.
The paper aimed at exploring the role of local industrial clusters as a part of an important evidence-based pathway for operationalizing smart specialization policy. Hitherto, the scientific debate has been largely focused on the relationship of clusters with the local business environment to boost competitiveness and has mostly searched for the operationalization of smart specialization policy in economically successful regions. However, the understanding of the role of local clusters (LCs), in terms of cluster industries that serve local businesses and residents, as potential “building-blocks” of Smart Specialization Strategies (S3) still lacks interpretive studies. We proposed a conceptual framework to unveil those factors of LCs that may be enhanced in the S3 policy design, around the concepts of adaptiveness and responsiveness to structural and influencing features of a local economic system. The distinction between Local and Traded clusters, applied in the US context, allows the identification of Local Cluster performance because of the availability of a robust data set. Accordingly, a tool is proposed to investigate those factors that are likely empowering smart specialization strategies: The dynamic SWOT analysis on the case of San Diego provides interesting insights toward building this conceptual framework. The findings may help explain how to relate LCs with smart specialization as building-blocks, based on potential risks and opportunities associated with the local economic system.
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