Reinventing Strategic Planning in Post-socialist Cities: Experiences from Sofia

Recent planning experiences in post-socialist cities indicate a growing interest in strategic spatial planning. In their search for new planning paradigms, municipalities in transition countries have embraced strategic planning as a way to involve the business community and the broader constituency in defining a vision for the future of cities. More importantly, this more proactive approach has created an opportunity for mobilization of funds and political support for urban development thus bridging the resource gap under a regime of fiscal austerity. Drawing on the recent experience of Sofia with strategic spatial planning, the paper outlines the essential characteristics of the process (plan-making) and the product (strategic plan). The research establishes clear links between the process of strategy development, its institutional framework and the hierarchical structure of goals, objectives and actions. It is argued that strategic spatial planning is an efficient tool to manage post-socialist cities.     

Success Conditions for Urban Networks: Eurocities and Sister Cities

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 cities stimulate the willingness of Eurocities to improve the relationship. The contributions as well as economic benefits provided from the sister city relationship and new business and investment opportunities have emerged as the most important factors in sister city relationship.     

Cities,Clusters and Creative Industries: The Case of Film and Television in Scotland

Interest in the creative industries has burgeoned in recent years. They convey many positive images for the development of cities and regions in an increasingly market-driven, globalized economy. The cluster concept has had an important influence on thinking and policy towards the creative industries. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which these ideas help to explain a particular situation. It analyses the various forces affecting the performance of the film and television industries in Scotland. It concludes that these sectors have a more modest economic impact than commonly assumed and that national and transnational organizations and government regulation are more important than localized networks in influencing their scale and durability.     

Learning to Innovate: Building Regional Technology Development Learning Networks in Midsized Cities

There has been increased attention to the importance of knowledge in economic success. The ability of a region to develop learning capabilities has been linked to knowledge-based success. However, conflicting perspectives exist about whether and how it is possible for policies and institutions in a lagging location to foster a learning region. This article examines this debate in the context of an effort to develop a second region of innovation (outside of Atlanta) in the US state of Georgia through a learning network called the Midsize Cities Technology Development Initiative. This initiative partnered four midsized cities in Georgia with four European midsized cities to stimulate benchmarking and learning. While traditional perspectives on economic development persist, some learning and reorientation of strategy was evident in the participating US cities. In stimulating these changes, significant roles were played by outsiders in brokering interaction and imparting fresh ideas, in strengthening ties to research and innovation capabilities in the core Atlanta metropolis, and in building new local institutions. A major new state-sponsored programme (the Centers of Innovation) with local presence in each of the four cities resulted from the effort. Still, it remains to be seen how learning will continue and whether a fully fledged second region of innovation will emerge in Georgia.     

Collaboration for Local Economic Development: Business Networks,Politics and Universities in Two Swedish Cities

In this article we want to show how conceptions about collaboration for local eocnomic development in Sweden are constructed on national and local levels. We also show how these conceptions have been realized in two different company networks; in the city of Östersund (“Odenskog företagsstaden”) and in the city of Karlskrona (“Telecom City”). In politics and research, local collaboration or cluster formation are viewed as important tools and levers for local economic development. However, we argue that the local labour markets and unemployment rates in our case studies do not differ significantly, despite very different strategies for collaboration. Therefore, we suspect that the political focus on collaboration is a way of legitimizing the change in regional policy rather than a delegation of real power to the local level. If this continues, we fear that the current regional policy is reduced to a discourse of popular concepts rather than a real instrument for local economic development.     

The Experiences of a Polish Family from the Eastern Borderlands (1914–1921): The Protassewiczes of Borki

ABSTRACT

This article examines how two generations of a large Polish landed family from the Grodno governorate in the Russian Empire were affected by the political and social upheavals brought about by World War One, the Russian Revolution, the threat of Bolshevism, and the rebirth of a Polish state. The Protassewiczes, like other landed noble families in the region, despite their Polish- Lithuanian identity, enjoyed a privileged social status in tsarist Russia. Marriage and work took many of the family’s members to Wilno (Vilnius) and Siberia, while a younger member studied in Austrian Galicia where he joined Pi?sudski’s organisation. The article describes the evacuation to Taganrog in 1915 of the senior Protassewicz and his subsequent return to Borki in 1918 to face the ensuing Polish-Soviet War. Two members of the family who were engaged in railway building in Siberia met a tragic end. The younger generation participated in Polish military efforts in the east in 1919–21 and adapted successfully to life in restored Poland. Attention is paid to issues of national identity raised by rival Polish and Lithuanian claims to Wilno in the context of the fall of empires and the emergence of new national states.     

The Specialized Cities of the Gulf Cooperation Council: A Case Study of a Distinct Type of Policy Innovation and Diffusion

This article examines a new phenomenon in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) referred to as specialized cities (SC). These cities, in addition to being new towns, implement innovations in selected policy areas. This article goes beyond describing the spread of SC to answering a broader question: what motivates a GCC country to adopt such policy innovation? After a quantitative overview of the phenomenon, three cases have been selected to cover three main policy areas: energy, health care, and education, in Abu Dhabi Masdar City, Dubai Healthcare City, and Qatar Education City. A preliminary analysis of each of the cases is followed by a comparative approach that aims at discovering similarities and differences, as well as developing the basis for a preliminary analytical model that explains the driving factors behind these innovations. The country adoption of a policy innovation and its diffusion are mainly the results of geographical proximity and similarity, as these proximate countries tend to have similar economic aspects and common social problems that lead to similar policy action effects. Regional competition and positive reputational mechanisms are also particularly strong determinants for diffusion. The findings suggest that in the GCC region a diffusion of the phenomena is occurring, rather than that of a specific type of SC.     

Creative Thinking and Emotion in Human Social Life: The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms

Abstract

There is debate whether The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play. However, in this debate there has been insufficient attention paid to Shylock's relationship with Tubal. In his criticisms of Shylock, Tubal represents the larger Jewish community. This criticism shows that, in Shakespeare's view, Jewish self-understanding of what it means to be a good Jew is incompatible with the character of Shylock.     

Global Metropolitan-Regional Scale in Evolution: Metropolitan Intermediary Cities and Metropolitan Cities

The case of Madrid is used as empirical focus to propose a new classification of the metropolitan region urban medium-sized or secondary city system. Based on a methodology that integrates the morphological (size, location and socioeconomic history) and the functional dimensions (centrality index, advanced producer services (APS) concentration and commuting), the article compares new employment centres—cities with metropolitan origin—and historical cities—previously free standing cities, progressively integrated in metropolitan processes. The results show a distinction between (1) metropolitan cities, with a traditional intermediation role, and (2) metropolitan intermediary cities, that include an additional quality to their traditional intermediation role, that of concentrating APS. The article confirms that some medium-sized cities—metropolitan intermediary cities—linked to different origins and up to 100?km away from the metropolis are more visible in the global scene and are establishing an emerging global multicore-network at a metropolitan-regional scale.     

China's Cities: Tradition and change

Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds. The Chinese City Between Two Worlds. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974. xiii + 458 pp. Tables, maps, notes, character list, and index. $18.75.     

Global Production Networks and Global Innovation Networks: Stability Versus Growth

This paper works with global production network (GPN) as compared to global innovation network (GIN) theory and focuses on the global information and communication technologies (ICT), specifically the hard disk drive (HDD) aspects of that system. In this respect it has a double distinction to examine: it concerns complex socio-economic and political governance processes focused upon innovation, argued by many to be the guiding principle of the construction of economic advantage in the contemporary era and it utilizes theory to capture important contrasts in the condition of key and changing building blocks in the global ICT industry. Methodologically, it is qualitative and necessarily so, based in this instance on much secondary information interpretation and some interviews. The larger project of which these findings are a small part had a balance of the two methods of inquiry. Empirically, the paper finds that GPN set-ups are not particularly innovation-inducing, tend to stabilizing over the long term and firm growth is largely by acquisition. The contemporary global ICT system is, by contrast, endogenously innovative, far from stable and has greater developmental potential because of its key GIN characteristic, which is its capacity for novelty.     

Civilization and Barbarism: When Barbarism Builds Cities

Around the mid-nineteenth century, D. F. Sarmiento introduced in Argentine literature the duality of “civilization and barbarism,” assuming that it was, at that time, an inescapable model in the analysis of society. Early in the 1880s, when the “conquest of the desert” came to an end and conflicts between city inhabitants and their urbanistic and “civilizing” urban plannings, vis-à-vis the rural populations that assumedly resisted change, worsened, the model acquired a new meaning. Taking one particular case of analysis, the foundation of the city of La Plata in lands owned by the Estancia Iraola, this paper uses archaeology to explore the limitations and falsehoods of such duality, jointly with the assumption of a simplistic relation of determinism between an environment and a particular human group.