Metropolis on the margins: talent attraction and retention to the St. John's city‐region

The objective of this research is to examine the factors that influence the attraction and retention of creative and highly educated workers in a small‐sized Canadian city. The study examines two hypotheses: that the social dynamics of city‐regions constitute the foundations of economic success in the global economy; and, that talented, highly educated individuals will be attracted to those city‐regions that offer a richness of employment opportunity, a high quality of life, a critical mass of cultural activity and social diversity. The hypotheses are explored through in‐depth interviews with creative and highly educated workers, employers and intermediary organizations. The evidence from the interviews suggests mixed support for the hypotheses. In view of these findings, we contend that the specificities of place must be more carefully theorized in the creative class literature and be more carefully considered by policy‐makers designing policies directed towards attracting and retaining talented and highly educated workers.     

Talent,technology and tolerance in Canadian regional development

This article examines the factors that shape economic development in Canadian regions. It employs path analysis and structural equation models to isolate the effects of technology, human capital and/or the creative class, universities, the diversity of service industries and openness to immigrants, minorities and gay and lesbian populations on regional income. It also examines the effects of several broad occupations groups—business and finance, management, science, arts and culture, education and health care—on regional income. The findings indicate that both human capital and the creative class have a direct effect on regional income. Openness and tolerance also have a significant effect on regional development in Canada. Openness towards the gay and lesbian population has a direct effect on both human capital and the creative class, while tolerance towards immigrants and visible minorities is directly associated with higher regional incomes. The university has a relatively weak effect on regional incomes and on technology as well. Management, business and finance and science occupations have a sizeable effect on regional income; arts and culture occupations have a significant effect on technology; health and education occupations have no effect on regional income.     

Exploring creative class mobility: Hong Kong creative workers in Shanghai and Beijing

In 2008 a controversial essay was published in Hong Kong drawing attention to the increasing number of local creative workers who have allegedly responded to the limitations the city had to wrestle with and the opportunities brought forward by the “Rise of China” – they moved northwards. Taking cues from the mainland China–Hong Kong dynamics, this inquiry zooms in on 12 Hong Kong creative workers who have relocated to Shanghai and Beijing during the last 20 years. It supplements existing scholarship on creative class mobility, which is largely configured by concerns with work situations and place attractiveness and is situated in cities in Europe, the United States, and Australia. It does so in two ways. On the one hand, the empirical evidence delivered by this inquiry aligns with studies pointing to the limitation of Florida’s creative class thesis and wonders if “cool places” are indeed attracting talents. On the other hand, it is inadequate to posit that creative workers move only because of place or only because of work. It builds on the complexities of their subjective accounts to propose to include four dimensions – the geopolitical, the intersectional, the contingent, and the circuitous – to future explorations on creative class mobility.     

Where does all the talent flow? Migration of young graduates and nongraduates,Canada 1996–2001

It has recently been suggested that cities and regions should focus upon attracting talented individuals as a means to develop. Such a suggestion implies two things: first that it is possible to meaningfully alter migration flows by way of local policy, and second that these flows have an effect on local growth (and not the reverse as has generally been admitted). In this paper, we begin to investigate the empirical foundations of such assertions by examining some structural determinants of graduate migration flows by comparing them, in a gravity model context, to flows of nongraduates. Our contention is that, if migration flows are structured by such factors, then policies aimed at modifying flows—and any research purporting to give such policy advice—must first take them into account. We show that migration flows are strongly dependent on basic gravity variables such as size and distance, but that these and other variables (such as income differences, presence of graduates and border effects) do not affect all flows equally. Furthermore, we show that certain factors that are assumed to be local (such as wage levels) in fact only operate at a provincial level. Thus policies implemented locally may have little or no effect if they are manipulating factors that operate at a different scale.     

The Creative Industries,Creative Occupations and Innovation in London

London is a global hub of the creative industries. These industries are seen as both innovative in themselves and an input in innovation processes in other sectors. Yet few studies have tested these relationships. This article investigates these issues using large-scale survey data for London. Using four measures of product and process innovation, we find no evidence that London's creative industries are more innovative than other sectors. Yet, individuals doing creative occupations in other sectors are a robust driver of product innovation in London's firms. The results suggest that occupations performed in London may be an important driver of product innovation in the city, and firms in other sectors may use creative occupations to develop new products in the capital. This finding is supportive of policies attempting to stimulate the creative industries by integrating creative occupations into firms across the whole economy.     

Indigenous health organizations,Indigenous community resurgence,and the reclamation of place in urban areas

Research around the world has been nearly unanimous about the positive impacts of Indigenous‐led health organizations on Indigenous peoples' qualitative experiences in health care, in the face of often negative experiences in non‐Indigenous‐led health care settings. Urban environments, including health care environments, are areas of increasing attention with regard to Indigenous peoples' health in Canada. In this study, which took place in the northern city of Prince George, British Columbia, 65 Indigenous community members and health services workers participated in interviews and focus groups, describing their experiences with urban Indigenous‐led health organizations—defined in this study as non‐governmental organizations that prioritize the values and practices of local Indigenous communities. Employing perspectives on place and relationships drawn from Indigenous critical theory and Indigenous community resurgence to analyze the findings of this qualitative study leads to a focus on how relationships impact and can even constitute places, enabling new understandings of the roles of Indigenous‐led health organizations in urban Indigenous community resurgence.     

Does time heal all wounds? Restoring place attachment in Halifax's Point Pleasant Park after Hurricane Juan

On September 29, 2003, Hurricane Juan profoundly altered Halifax's Point Pleasant Park, resulting in feelings of solastalgia (the distress caused by perceived negative changes to a beloved place) as park users mourned the loss of a place that held great significance for the city. Starting in 2008, over 100,000 trees have been planted in order to restore the original Acadian mixed forest to this landscape. Drawing on scholarly literature focused on place attachment and disaster recovery, this paper utilizes interviews (n = 11) and online surveys (n = 79) to determine whether long‐term park users have re‐established positive place attachments in conjunction with the park's restoration. Our results indicate that participants have largely overcome their solastalgic outlook and restored meaningful place attachments to the park. Unexpectedly, our results also suggest that long‐term participants have current place attachments that appear stronger than the place attachments expressed by participating short‐term users, who never experienced the traumatic impact of Hurricane Juan on Point Pleasant Park.     

Québec et la géographie sociale en questions

Questioning Québec through social geography In the early 1960s, two revolutions were underway: the quiet revolution in Québec and the quantitative revolution in geography. Apparently unrelated, these episodes of change probably shared common underlying values associated with modernity. Since then, the transformations experienced in Québec have been interpreted in a multitude of ways, including geographical considerations. Research careers, mine included, have been shaped by this undertaking. All along, I have found that social geography, with the capacity it has to reinvent itself, has helped making sense of this turbulent environment. In the 1970s, exploring the structural dynamics of Canada's social space helped in figuring out the place occupied by Québec in this ensemble. Then, analyzing the historical relationships between cosmopolitan Montréal and provincial Québec City suggested that the oxymoron ‘quiet revolution’ stood for a central process in the cultural dynamics of Québec's social space, where new ideas arriving through Montréal are sifted and institutionalized by the state in Québec City. Nevertheless, Québec City is also capable of initiating progressive urban movements, as illustrated by the odyssey of the Rassemblement populaire de Québec, documented through participant observation. Such urban movements may affect the urban fabric but, as intense and creative social networks, they may affect even more their interacting members, as it seems to have been the case with regard to rapidly evolving gender relations during the last decades. All in all, after more than four decades, I keep the conviction that a practice of social geography that is open to various theories and methods is capable of producing liberating knowledge.     

Networks and place in Montreal's independent music industry

The significance of networks for independent music producers has been well established in the urban‐economic geography literature and the literature centred on cultural industries. In this article, we seek to build on this literature by considering how place‐based attributes mediate network development; that is to say, how the unique characteristics of place (such as historical and cultural attributes) determine networking outcomes among spatially proximate actors. Specifically, we consider the importance of place through an examination of Montreal's independent music industry. Drawing on 46 semi‐structured interviews with key actors in the industry, we illustrate how Montreal's bilingual identity contributes to network dynamics within the industry.     

创造阶层与城市可持续发展

随着知识经济的发展和经济全球化,人才资源(人力资本)成为第一资源,以人为本,重视人力资本特别是创造型人才并发挥其创新作用,是城市可持续发展及竞争力的根源和保证。创造阶层理论为城市可持续发展发现了新道路。创造阶层的兴起将深刻地影响城市的可持续发展,中国城市应当采取措施兴起创造阶层。城市可以通过规划建设提高人居环境质量、增加城市便利性,通过制度创新扩展人的自由、提供创新的制度环境,而积累人力资本特别是兴起创造阶层,从根本上增强城市可持续发展能力。     

CULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE CREATIVE FIELD OF THE CITY

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra‐urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path‐dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global.     

Time,Waste, and the City: The Rise of the Environmental Industry

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service‐based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial past, cleaning up the waste left over from long‐departed manufacturing sectors. Returning to David Harvey's earlier work on the urban process, this paper develops a theory of waste switching that situates EGS within a larger renegotiation of space and time across city landscapes. This theory is fleshed out in case studies of the EGS industry in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, where new cycles of accumulation have been built on refuse, toxins, and dead labour. These “toxi‐cities” and their cleanup challenge traditional conceptions of urbanisation as spatially—but also temporally—bounded.     

流动人口居留稳定性的群体分异与空间格局

利用2015年全国1%人口抽样调查数据,本文分析了流动人口居留稳定性的总体特征、群体分异和空间差异性,并对流动人口居留稳定性的影响因素进行了探讨。结果表明：①我国跨市流动人口在当前城市的平均居住时间约为5年,新生代流动人口的居留稳定性与老一代并没有显著差异,从事工业行业的流动人口居留稳定性明显低于各类服务业从业者;②省内流动人口的居留稳定性低于省际流动人口,且有更大的可能离开当前城市,转向省际流动;③城市流动人口的规模和居留稳定性在空间格局和影响因素方面均存在明显差异,虽然收入水平和就业机会依然是吸引流动人口的主要因素,但公共服务、住房市场和环境等城市宜居性因素对提高流动人口的居留稳定性更为重要。     

Independent creative subcultures and why they matter

Independent creative subcultures, in their various hybrids of music, theatre, art, and new and old media, are the primordial soup of cultural evolution. They have the capacity for a highly definitive influence on their participants – catalysing the transition from consumer to producer for instance – often conferring much broader cultural and social benefit. Creative subcultures make continuing, well-documented, contributions to established city cultures for relatively low outlay. Indie creative activities in particular do not make much money and they do not cost much to set-up. They tend to cluster in areas characterised by low rents and non-residential uses such as retail and industrial areas, but as third wave gentrification reaches into the dark pockets of many cities, cheap rental properties are becoming scarce. This article uses time-series maps of inner Melbourne to show a pattern of tighter and tighter clustering of indie cultural activities as alternative spaces disappear. It looks at where they are going and why, considers the implications of this pattern for the ‘creative city’, and suggests some policy initiatives to help maintain and nurture independent creative scenes. As Melbourne’s live music scene is particularly vulnerable to displacement from increasingly dense and contested inner-urban space, the article focuses on interventions relating to music venues.     

Emerging challenges of an urban creative economy: reflections on the governance of creative clusters in Taipei City

ABSTRACT

Retaining the global mobile creative class has been considered a crucial strategy for driving creative economic development in inner cities. However, implementing the global creative city strategy overemphasizes the significance of amenity-based creative economic landscapes over institutional collaborations in contributing to the situated governance dynamics of creative clusters. Drawing on insights from an evolutionary perspective, this paper scrutinizes the extent to which creative city strategies foster the situated development of creative clusters based on a case study of Taipei. The paper argues that developing the urban creative economy requires a context-specific understanding of the urbanization process, and should involve an institutional collaboration to articulate the socio-spatial co-evolution between the diversified dynamics of creative clusters and urban form. This paper advocates reflexive thinking on neoliberal city strategies to develop a conjunctive, diverse and substantial creative policy to support alternative paths of creative city development.     

Essai de typologie des centres de santé et de services sociaux au Québec

Given the importance of contextual factors—physical, social and institutional environments—for understanding health landscapes, this article examines the situation in the province of Québec and suggests a spatial typology at the scale of the health and social services centres (CSSS). These CSSS provide services for 95 areas which are the finest territorial delineation in terms of health policies since a reform instituted in 2003. While delivery of primary health and social services is defined at this local scale, overall health policy is decided at the provincial scale. The challenge for stakeholders is to supplement their local knowledge with that of the broader context. In this article, we use principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis to identify eight profiles of CSSS. The final results of the cluster analysis demonstrate that two‐thirds of the health and social services centres correspond with two marginally differentiated profiles and the remaining third shows specificities that are highly spatially anchored.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Are new patterns of low‐income distribution emerging in Canadian metropolitan areas?

Recent studies on urban poverty in Canadian cities suggest a growing spatial concentration of poor populations within metropolitan regions. This article assesses trends in the intra‐urban distribution of the poor population from 1986 to 2006 in eight of Canada's largest cities. We consider five well‐known dimensions of segregation, as identified by Massey and Denton (1988) , in order to examine changes in the spatial distribution of poor populations within metropolitan areas: evenness, exposure, concentration, clustering, and centralization. These indices were calculated for low‐income populations at the census tract level using data from five Canadian censuses. Although each metropolitan area has distinctive characteristics, we were able to identify some general trends. The results suggest that, in 2006 compared to 1986, low‐income populations lived in more spatially concentrated areas, which were, at the same time, socioeconomically more homogeneous and more dispersed throughout the metropolitan area. In addition, we observed that over the last twenty years areas of poverty have been located, for the most part, in neighbourhoods adjacent to downtown cores. Nevertheless, we found that poverty has mostly increased in suburban areas located outside inner‐city neighbourhoods. Growing socioeconomic homogeneity and dispersion of low income areas in metropolitan areas reveal new spatial patterns of urban poverty distribution. These findings should be cause for concern as social isolation in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods could affect the life chances and opportunities for the residents of those areas.     

Historical limits: narrowing possibilities in ‘Ontario's most historic town’

Place branding in heritage tourism development is presented as a strategy that opens up new possibilities for attracting investors and visitors by distilling, capturing and shaping what is distinctive about a place. This representational fix is an efficient marketing device in the sense that it represents places through widely intelligible symbols. Branding is also a limiting activity that locks places in time and class relations. While place branding has always had this dual effect, we argue that it has particularly insidious and limiting consequences for local development under current conditions of roll‐out neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, several prominent residents and outsiders initiated efforts to transform the Town of Cobalt, Ontario, into a mining heritage tourism destination. In 2001, the town entered and won a contest to be named Ontario's Most Historic Town. The following year it persuaded Parks Canada to designate it as a national historic site. These two events provided renewed external validation for the efforts to brand Cobalt as a heritage site and began a new cycle of mining heritage tourism development. However, instead of breaking the dependency relationships that characterize resource regions, the current round of place branding has acted to circumscribe the range of possible economic development options.     

Ghosts,Memory, and the Right to the Divided City: Resisting Amnesia in Beirut City Centre

Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right‐to‐the‐city to non‐sectarian social movements’ struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements’ activities is to reprogramme memory—cosmopolitan and inclusivist—into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding.