The social dynamics of attracting talent in Halifax

The paper reports a case study of factors attracting and retaining talented and creative workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia. All categories of workers interviewed mentioned quality of place and amenities in discussing their location preferences, but that could not fully explain their choices. For some occupations (like health research), talented people followed jobs; in other sectors (like music), talented workers migrated to a sympathetic locale with the right conditions for creative engagement; creative workers in some occupations (like those in architectural, engineering or planning consulting) were more rooted in place. The social dynamics—that is, positive and collaborative social networks within key sectors and a wider community perceived as welcoming and interesting—make this mid‐sized city attractive to talented workers. Local universities and a vibrant music scene generate a mutually reinforcing context that attracted mobile talented and creative workers to the city. Respondents noted Halifax's limited cultural diversity but did not report a perceived lack of tolerance as affecting their choices. In smaller cities, the social dynamics of place and workplace and the quality of life available may play more significant roles than tolerance in attracting and retaining talented workers, challenging a basic assumption of creative cities discourse.     

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.     

‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

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.     

Political pragmatism and the creative economy: Singapore as a City for the Arts

Can the arts and culture prosper under a less than democratic political regime? This paper looks at the soft authoritarian Singaporean government and the making of Singapore into a ‘City for the Arts’. Many scholars advocate that a culturally vibrant and creative city must also celebrate diversity, tolerance and experimentation. This implies that a democratic space is needed for creative energies to flow. Singapore is not known for its democracy. But Singapore has become relatively successful in being the cultural hub in the region. A more liberal approach to diversity and criticism of the authorities can now be observed but there are still many strong‐handed social and political controls in the city‐state. This paper tries to answer these two questions: has Singapore become democratic because the authorities want the arts and culture to flourish? Is democracy necessary for the creation of a lively cultural city?     

IS SOCIAL CAPITAL USEFUL FOR EXPLAINING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN POLISH REGIONS?

The concept of social capital is widely perceived as a promising tool for explaining differences in economic development between countries and regions. According to this theory, weak links (bridging social capital) and social trust in an area favour its better access to other forms of capital, that is, economic and human capital. However, strong links (bonding social capital) may stifle creativity and entrepreneurship. Since the vast majority of research on the impact of social capital on economic development focuses on highly developed Western European countries, it seems particularly interesting to evaluate the usefulness of this approach when applied to post‐communist countries with their different experiences. The objective of this article is to identify the spatial variation of different forms of social capital in regions of Poland and then to test a hypothesis on the impact of this capital on regional economic development. The results demonstrate that despite the existing differences between regions there are no significant relationships between levels of social capital and economic development. This may be explained either by low social capital levels or by the overall degree of Polish economic development.     

Culturally clustered or in the cloud? How amenities drive firm location decision in Berlin

Creative firms are neither capital‐ nor land‐intensive in production. They predominantly rely on creative and specialized labor and, assuming a strong competition for workers, are therefore increasingly dependent on the location of their (potential) employees. If these creative and highly qualified employees are attracted by consumption amenities such as bars, clubs, and restaurants, then it follows that these same amenities may determine the location of creative service firms. I investigate this hypothesis by examining whether Berlin Internet start‐up firms locate in urban amenity‐rich places. Identification builds on the fall of the Berlin Wall. A 1 percent increase in amenity density raises the probability of a start‐up location by almost 2 percent. A comparison with other service industries suggests that amenities are significant to the location choice of creative sectors, whereas no effect can be observed for nonreative firms.     

Locating creative city policy in East Asia: neoliberalism,developmental state and assemblage of East Asian cities

This paper attempts to map how creative city policy emerged as a new form of urban politics in East Asia. It locates the emergence of creative city policy within the East Asian context, where the current political economic movement of neoliberalism intersects with the developmental state’s historical legacy. By investigating institutional and economic practices and consequences of creative city policy in Seoul and Yokohama, this study focuses on how the urban place become carefully rearranged settings through certain procedural, institutional, and technical mechanisms implemented by various discursive and material practices of policy actors. Through this analysis, this research critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy driven-development and considers the social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within the new creative city policy discourse.     

Hospitality workers and the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent interest among labor geographers for workers’ ability to strategize around their mobility, and tourism researchers’ longstanding examination of mobile tourism workers, this paper explores the mobility agency of differently positioned hospitality workers. The findings suggest that workers are not always ‘strategic’ in relation to labor mobility, and that labor mobility and career paths must be recognized as fragmented, happenstance and erratic. Furthermore, this article argues for an approach to the study of mobile tourism workers that takes the relational as well as temporal aspects into account. This endeavor is in particular guided by the notion of stories-so-far and the understanding of people as both being and becoming. The empirical basis of this paper consists of 22 interviews with hospitality workers in four hotel workplaces in Sweden; the luxury city hotel, the suburban chain hotel, the city chain hotel and the seasonal hotel. Ultimately, I suggest that the multifaceted complex of considerations which workers negotiate, could be conceptualized as the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility.     

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF FIRMS AND SKILLED LABOR*

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between firm location and skilled‐labor location. While existing new economic geography (NEG) models could not explicitly analyze the relationship due to their assumptions, I construct a new NEG‐type model allowing for different location dynamics of firms and skilled labor for this objective. The main results are as follows. First, a relatively large pool of skilled labor attracts firms when trade costs are small, while it might repel firms when trade costs are sufficiently large. Second, assuming that skilled workers are mobile between regions, the model shows that skilled workers agglomerate faster than firms with decreasing trade costs. Third, the model supports the hypothesis that firms follow skilled labor rather than the reverse. These results are consistent to Indian and Chinese experiences, and some “creative‐class” or “skilled‐city” stories.     

Linking Gentrification and Labour Market Precarity in the Contemporary City: A Framework for Analysis

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call “weak” and “strong” links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of “gentrification‐supporting” and “gentrification‐fostered” labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.     

‘Innovation is a dirty word’: contesting innovation in the creative industries

Innovation is a term that is used and defined in many different ways. This holds for innovation in general, but particularly for innovation in the creative industries. In cultural policy and in academic literature, the creative industries are often addressed in the relation to their innovative capacities, yet a shared conceptualisation of innovation in this sector is lacking. This paper seeks to develop a conceptualisation of innovation in the creative industries based on 43 interviews with creative workers about their views and practices. Results indicate that creative workers articulate numerous views on innovation, with three main approaches: innovation as something completely new, innovation as a contribution to society and innovation as a continuous recombination of new and existing elements, with the latter being most prevalent in the creative industries and considered a central (by-product of the) process of creative production that is highly contextual to specific localities and fields.     

Supporting ‘Film Cultural Peripheries’? The dilemmas of regional film policy in Norway

Public funding is crucial for the small Norwegian film industry. Based on an analysis of policy documents and interviews with regional film workers, this article discusses the implementation of regional film policy in Norway, and the tensions it has caused between center and periphery with respect to the allocation of funding. The creative industries discourse and the cluster concept are important for understanding this implementation; despite the new regional film policies the capital Oslo remains the undisputed hub of film production, and low production volume is still a challenge for the regions. Size, the article explains, is not only central when discussing Oslo as compared to the regions, but has also become a contentious issue within the regions. A key concern for the government, the article suggests, is how to create strong film milieus all over the country, which may entail the risk of spreading funding too thinly across the regions, resulting in a fragmented industry.     

A Socio‐Geographic Perspective on Human Activities in Social Media

Location‐based social media make it possible to understand social and geographic aspects of human activities. However, previous studies have mostly examined these two aspects separately without looking at how they are linked. The study aims to connect two aspects by investigating whether there is any correlation between social connections and users' check‐in locations from a socio‐geographic perspective. We constructed three types of networks: a people–people network, a location–location network, and a city–city network from former location‐based social media Brightkite and Gowalla in the U.S., based on users' check‐in locations and their friendships. We adopted some complexity science methods such as power‐law detection and head/tail breaks classification method for analysis and visualization. Head/tail breaks recursively partitions data into a few large things in the head and many small things in the tail. By analyzing check‐in locations, we found that users' check‐in patterns are heterogeneous at both the individual and collective levels. We also discovered that users' first or most frequent check‐in locations can be the representatives of users' spatial information. The constructed networks based on these locations are very heterogeneous, as indicated by the high ht‐index. Most importantly, the node degree of the networks correlates highly with the population at locations (mostly with R² being 0.7) or cities (above 0.9). This correlation indicates that the geographic distributions of the social media users relate highly to their online social connections.     

Alone or together in the neighbourhood? School choice and families’ access to local social networks

This study explores how the everyday geographies of city life and families’ access to social networks in the neighbourhood influence families’ school choices. The data consist of thematic interviews with parents of 8–14-year-old children (n?=?170) in three urban areas located in the cities of Paris (France), Milan (Italy) and Espoo (Finland) and are analysed via qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that the families’ access to local social networks influences the reasoning behind school choice to the local school. The children’s relationships with other children and adults in the neighbourhood are considered important, but additionally, the parents’ networks with other parents in the area, mediated by the school, play their role. School choices as practices should therefore be analysed not merely as choices of an institution, as they comprise various aspects concerning the surrounding neighbourhood as a physical and social space.     

Supporting food security for Indigenous families through the restoration of Indigenous foodways

Indigenous families are overrepresented among those within Canada who experience food insecurity. Studies have largely focused on northern populations, with less attention paid to southern and urban communities, including the social, cultural, and geographic processes that challenge food security. In this study, we present findings from a decade‐long community‐based study with the Southwest Ontario Aboriginal Health Access Centre (London, Ontario) to examine family perspectives related to the social determinants of food security. These topics were explored through qualitative interviews (n = 25) and focus groups (n = 2) with First Nation mothers with young children from the city of London, and a nearby reserve community. Interviewees from both geographies identified a number of socio‐economic challenges including household income and transportation. However, some interviewees also shed light on barriers to healthy eating unique to these Indigenous contexts including access issues such as a lack of grocery stores on‐reserve; loss of knowledge related to the utilization of traditional foods; and the erosion of community, familial, and social supports. Resolving these unique determinants of food security for urban and reserve‐based First Nation families will require a range of economic and culturally specific interventions, particularly those that support development and uptake of Indigenous foodways.     

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.     

WILL ATTRACTING THE “CREATIVE CLASS” BOOST ECONOMIC GROWTH IN OLD INDUSTRIAL REGIONS? A CASE STUDY OF SCOTLAND

Attracting in-migration of the creative class has been argued by Florida (2002) to be a route to higher economic growth in the era of the knowledge economy. This paper critically evaluates this proposition in relation to old industrial regions using the example of Scotland. The paper presents an assessment of, in the first instance, to what extent there is a shortage of skilled, talented and entrepreneurial individuals and, in the second instance, whether a talent attraction strategy alone can hope to attract such people to Scotland. It is proposed that for most migrants the availability of appropriate economic opportunities is a prerequisite for mobility. However, despite uncertain evidence that place attractiveness is a catalyst to mobility among the so-called creative class, this is not a reason for dismissing talent attraction programmes. Instead it is argued that talent attraction programmes have the potential to contribute to old industrial economies, but their success will be greatest when talent attraction is carefully targeted and based on economic realities rather than the marketing of ethereal conceptions of place attractiveness.