Creating Critical Mass of Research Excellence in the Region: The Case of Scottish Research Pooling Initiatives

This article examines the recent development of, and policy rationale for “research pooling” initiatives in Scotland. Research pooling initiatives have been started with financial support from the Scottish Funding Council in order to form inter-organizational “international critical mass” of research excellence at universities at the regional level. This article examines the development of university cooperations at the regional level as vehicles for obtaining “strategic resources”. Then the “multi-level governance” structure of research pooling is explored in light of the future development of a Scottish regional innovation system (RIS). Particular attention is drawn to challenges concerning knowledge transfer, which is critical in integrating research pooling initiatives in the development of RIS in Scotland.     

丝绸之路沿线城镇空间分布特征研究

丝绸之路是一条连接欧亚大陆的著名古代陆上商贸通道,沿线分布有众多的城镇。通过实地调研和文献分析,结合立地条件对丝绸之路沿线城镇空间分布的地域特征进行了系统分析,依据城镇发展阶段的不同,提出了散点型、串珠型和网络型三种基本的空间分布形态,在分析研究政治、经济、环境、文化等要素的时空组合基础上,提出了城镇空间演变的三个基本特征,即空间发展的差异性,中心城镇的游移性和城址变迁的宜居性,这对于指导丝绸之路沿线城镇化发展和新农村建设具有十分重要的意义。     

The Role of Universities in Regional Development: Conceptual Models and Policy Institutions in the UK,Sweden and Austria

The literature on universities’ contributions to regional development is broad and diverse. A precise understanding of how regions may draw advantages from various university activities and the role of public policy institutions in promoting such activities is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for analysing universities’ contributions to regional economic and societal development in differing national contexts and the policy institutions that underpin them. To do this, we review four conceptual models: the entrepreneurial university model, the regional innovation system (RIS) model, the mode 2 university model and the engaged university model. The paper demonstrates that these four models emphasize very different activities and outputs by which universities are seen to benefit regional economy and society. It is also shown that these models differ markedly with respect to the policy implications and practice. Analysing some of the public policy imperatives and incentives in the UK, Austria and Sweden, the paper highlights that in the UK, policies encourage all four university models. In contrast, in Sweden and Austria, policy institutions tend to privilege the RIS university model, whilst at the same time, there is some evidence for increasing support of the entrepreneurial university model.     

Performance evaluation to support European regional development – A university–industry perspective

Regional-level innovation policies and development activities, which are not only technology oriented but that also address intellectual issues, knowledge and absorptive capacity enhancement as sources of innovation and economic growth, are posing challenges regarding their management. One of the main challenges that arises with these new types of regional-level development activities relates to their evaluation because insufficient attention is paid to the design and building of the current evaluation frameworks suggested for the context of regional development. This study presents a framework to design and build a performance evaluation system to support the performance measurement of regional development activities. Utilizing operational-level development activities as an empirical example, this study aims to improve the understanding of performance evaluation in university–industry collaborations in the context of regional development. The presented framework highlights the role of evaluation as part of the learning process in regional development activities between universities and industrial and public-sector organizations. The results of the study show that it is also possible to use the evaluation system to increase understanding of the interplay between operational level development activities and regional development programmes.     

县域城镇化发展水平评价与对策

县级区域是我国最为基本的行政地域单元,是农村劳动力得以转移的主要载体。文章以统筹城乡发展的要求为指导,以江苏省沭阳县为典型案例,通过构建融人口、经济、社会文化、基础设施于一体的县域城镇化发展水平综合评价指标体系,采用熵值法和SPSS统计分析技术,从时空尺度视角对沭阳县城镇化发展水平进行了综合评估,并从加强中心镇建设、发展工业、人口控制、政策调整等方面提出了加快县域城镇化发展的对策。     

REGIONALIZING “MODE 2”? THE ADOPTION OF CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE IN SWEDISH RESEARCH POLICY

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the role of university research for innovation and economic growth, a debate highly influenced by concepts such as Mode 2 and regional innovation systems and clusters. A prominent trend in many EU and OECD countries is to direct research funding towards so‐called Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in order to stimulate the industrial output of scientific research. The implementation of the CoE approach is viewed as an attempt to bridge research and innovation policy. By using Sweden as an example and providing an overview and critical discussion concerning Swedish research policy during the period 2001 to 2007 we show that the rhetoric within research policy has changed and become increasingly intertwined with innovation policy. In practice, however, this is not as evident. The study draws on (a) an analysis of policy literature pointing out regulatory and organizational changes concerning the increasing emphasis on linking research to competitive industrial milieus, and (b) a comprehensive database including 110 CoEs, presenting a detailed picture of university‐industry collaboration, cross‐disciplinarity, and prioritized sectors. We fiind that the CoEs account for a relatively small share of government funding, but may however have a strengthening impact on particular research milieus and industries, especially in the life sciences. Additionally, although contemporary policy rhetoric appears to highlight steering funding to geographically‐concentrated milieus, thereby linking leading university research to regional industrial clusters, this has only been manifested in a few cases – notably in the Vinnväxt programme run by Vinnova, the national agency promoting innovation systems.     

甘肃城镇体系地域空间结构研究

在分析甘肃城镇体系地域空间结构现状的基础上,运用分形理论和方法对甘肃城镇体系地域空间结构的聚集维数、网格维数和关联维数进行了测算和分析,表明甘肃城镇体系的空间分布是分形的,以14个主要城市为研究对象,甘肃省城市体系在空间分布上比较集中;以甘肃省内75个城镇为研究对象,城镇分布的总体均衡性适中;以中部城镇密集地区为研究对象,城镇体系在空间上分布比较均匀。并据此提出了甘肃城镇体系地域空间结构合理化的建议。     

宁波市域城镇体系中重点镇发展的若干问题研究

宁波地处长江三角洲南翼,是长江三角洲城市带的重要组成部分,目前已形成了以宁波中心城市为核心,包括副中心城市、重点镇和一般镇的市域四级城镇体系。但该城镇体系存在空间分布不均,功能分化不明显,规模结构不合理等问题,制约城市化的进一步发展。文章从研究宁波市域城镇体系中重点镇发展的区域背景着手,分析了重点镇发展的动力因素和制约条件,在此基础上探讨了重点镇发展在宁波市域城市化进程中的作用与发展目标。最后,文章探讨了如何建立有利于重点镇发展的集聚动力和约束机制问题。     

Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec

As stress on water resources increases from growing human demands and a changing climate, recognition of the need to develop effective strategies for water governance is expanding. Consequently, it is timely to consider the legacy of effective instances of water policy innovation that have been highly influential in water resource management in Canada. We present two historical examples of policy transfer – that is, when policy employed in one jurisdiction is adapted for use in another. The first is the late nineteenth-century adoption of water allocation law in the North-West Territories that was a noteworthy departure from how water had been allocated in eastern Canada. The second is the twentieth-century introduction of conservation authorities in Ontario as regional watershed-based management entities. These examples illustrate how, in an era of expert-driven natural resources management, notions of governance were adapted from Australia and the United States. They also reveal how the biophysically-based policy context of water influences which policy transfer mechanisms are appropriate for lesson-learning. We conclude that the potential for policy transfer and lesson-learning to shorten the policy innovation timeline must be viewed as a critical response to urgent and evolving demands on water.     

Regional development in a resource production system: long distance commuting,population growth,and wealth redistribution in the Western Australia Goldfields

Resource towns often exist on a knife‐edge, largely depending upon global demand for their resource/s and, at the same time, playing a critical role in the development of a nation. The transition from single resource towns to diversified economies has been modelled on several occasions, but their application to other resource locales is difficult given the unique interplay of geographic, political, social, and economic factors. Nonetheless, Innis' Canadian staples theory may explain the political motivations of resource extraction and exportation, not least in relation to the Western Australia Goldfields. This paper seeks to explore the theory's potential in this context by examining the implications of high labour mobility. It employs a two‐step process using, first, a social network analysis to map the entire Australian labour commuting network and, second, a regression analysis of commuting, regional wealth, and population size against population change. While the Goldfields historically grew in line with processes described by Innis' theory, contemporary high labour mobility has created a variegated landscape of different development dynamics and trajectories. This finding carries implications for network patterns of residence and work. Labour acts to extend the distribution of wealth by sending incomes to the metropolitan core and to amenity‐rich regional towns across the State and nation. In such light, regional development scholars must view the resource town in its broader urban system of distinct but interlocked, and sometimes overlapping, activity nodes.     

Teaching Australian foreign policy: vocational training or critical thinking?

ABSTRACT

In the current higher education context there are strong incentives for the development of work-ready skills for graduates. In this article, I reflect on the challenges of mediating between developing vocational skills and emphasising the immediate practical and policy relevance of coursework on one hand, and the development of critical thinking and research skills on the other, in the context of teaching Australian Foreign Policy.     

郊区新城发展与大城市空间结构调整:松江案例

目前,我国正处在城市化快速推进阶段,为突破既有城市结构对城市发展的束缚,缓解中心城区的人口、就业、交通、环境等压力,优化城市经济结构,许多城市正在积极拓展新的发展空间,大城市地区的新城建设更是如火如荼。上海自早期的卫星城建设开始,到近期的"一城九镇",再到最近的"1966"城镇体系规划建设框架,一直试图通过郊区城镇的建设和发展来疏解中心城区的巨大压力。特别是最近10年,松江作为上海大都市郊区重要城镇的规划建设,对突破上海中心城区"一核独强"的空间结构所产生的影响在新城建设中颇具典型的意义。本文试图通过松江新城"次核"发育、松江新城的城市功能演化、松江新城人居环境建设三个方面的剖析,探讨新城建设与城市空间结构演化的互动关系,以在宏观上更好地认识和把握新城对城市发展的影响,以期对上海或国内其他大都市区郊区其他新城的建设和多中心城市空间格局的形成有所裨益。     

Tracing British cultural policy domains: contexts,collaborations and constituencies

This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britain's local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britain's domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.     

Eye to eye with the innovation paradox: why smart specialization is no simple solution to policy design

This paper revisits common, yet often untested assumptions on factors hampering the implementation – or even clear articulation – of regional innovation strategies. Based on a dedicated framework drawing on political science literature, it reflects on whether there are merit and promise in future higher-level attempts to promote a more strategic take on regional innovation policy. It investigates which relevant factors in local politics, policy and administrative facilitate or prevent the definition of clear priorities for action. Drawing on a Europe wide survey of stakeholders managing strategic processes, it finds that while a number of obstacles need to be overcome, these are regionally specific rather than attributable to restrictive national cultures. Furthermore, it demonstrates how stakeholder involvement bears different challenges at different levels.     

An Entrepreneurial University Strategy for Renewing a Declining Industrial City: The Norrköping Way

Norrköping, a small urban area formerly dependent upon old labour-intensive industries, has developed a knowledge-based renewal strategy inspired by ideas emanating from its superseded local economy. Using a longitudinal case study, this paper explicates the dynamics of change among a triple helix of university, industry and government actors that involved building consensus within the city and with its neighbouring city of Linköping. The keys to success have been cross-institutional entrepreneurship, aggregating regional and national resources to realize a unique, locally generated strategy rather than adopting the usual list of hot high-tech topics such as information technology, biotechnology or alternative energy, and striking a balance between intra-regional competition and collaboration in order to achieve common objectives and avoid any stasis arising from hyper-competitiveness. This paper utilizes a triple-helix “spaces” framework and makes comparisons with other relevant cases to develop a theoretical model of regional renewal through the hybridization of old and new industrial and knowledge elements.     

县城在乡村城市化中的优势分析

依据县城在我国乡村城市化过程中快速发展的现实,分析了县城在乡村城市化过程中拥有的而一般小城镇所不具备的非经济方面的优势条件。这些优势条件主要体现在社会文化、地域条件、区域与设施条件等方面。最后提出在乡村城市化的过程中要重点建设县城,并配合各项改革,进行制度创新,因势利导,充分发挥县城优势等各项对策建议。     

Miami's Little Havana: Yard Shrines,Cult Religion and Landscape

The urban square has been a distinguishing characteristic of European cities for millennia. However, in the context of small towns, where the square is often the sole identifier of their physical urbanity, its role differs from that of large towns. This fact is substantial within national administrative systems that endorse desirable urban status to rural settlements endowed with urban morphology. It is also important in times of extensive EU-subsidized actions aimed at improving the quality of public space in small underresourced towns. However, many projects fail to draw from and respond to the specifics of the local context, and, by focusing on the details and disregarding the basics, they may defeat their purpose. Departing from extensive field observations in Poland, this paper puts theoretical framework and current trends in urban design into relation to various elements of a square's spatial configuration in order to arrive at degrees of their urban significance. By interpreting the fundamental values embedded in the morphology of market squares, this paper attempts to isolate the cultural archetypes that shape our perception of such places as urban. The proposed analysis could be used to meet the main goal of market square revitalization, namely to visually articulate urbanity.     

河南省城镇发展演化的时空格局研究

利用2004年河南省997个城镇数据及夏代以来的城镇演化空间数据,对河南省城镇发展进行了时空梳理,河南省城镇数量的变化可以划分为5个阶段,呈现出较强的波动性,其原因主要有:全国经济重心南移、政治重心北上、政府行政干预等。河南省城镇分布的最初格局受当时人们取水方式等技术条件的限制呈现沿水系分布的空间格局,铁路的兴建使河南省城镇布局的限制条件得到改善,公路建设使城镇布局更加趋于合理、均衡。但不同区域经济的增长使城镇分布又相对集中,20世纪90年代以来,全省城镇分布向均衡化方向发展,同时在局部地域又有较为集中的块区。河南省城镇的空间格局基本符合中心地理论,但各地域的主导因素有一定差异。     

Youthful Creativity in Regional Australia: Panacea for Unemployment and Out‐Migration?

This paper addresses the theme of youth out‐migration from rural Australia, in the context of recent policy discussions about creativity and its role in regional development. Ethnographic fieldwork in one rural location – the New South Wales Far North Coast – is drawn upon to highlight how creative industries are being cast as a potential way of promoting cultural activities and jobs for young people, and in turn, how they might be imagined as a means to mitigate youth out‐migration. Yet, creative industries have contradictory employment and social outcomes. Creative industries are likely to generate higher rates of youth participation in economic activities than public data reveal. However, strategies for future job growth should also consider the limitations and instabilities of creative industry employment. Second, and more broadly, the paper discusses those socio‐cultural dimensions of nascent creative industries that may have a more substantial impact when conceived as part of strategies to stem youth exodus from rural areas. Creative activities may contribute to rural development in indirect ways, especially if linked to policy goals of increased tolerance of youth activities, better provision of cultural services, and improved well‐being for young people. While formal job‐creation may be limited, creative industries could mitigate some of the impacts of youth migration to cities by enriching regional social life and mediating perceptions of the advantages and drawbacks of rural versus urban life. This kind of policy imagination requires a shift in attitudes towards young people and a more genuine commitment to encourage young people to feel that they belong in non‐metropolitan areas.