Cologne—a creative city

The paper addresses the problem which conditions account for the creativity of a city. Network analysis is used as an approach to study the major institutions and individuals that contributed to the success of Cologne becoming a German arts centre. The impact of this network on the city's eeconomy and functional specialization is analyzed for the period 1960-1995. To this end, the demographic and economic changes of the city are described comparing Cologne to four other major German cities. Furthermore, the impact of policy and administration creativity is examined. The major finding is that it is less the creative structure that accounts for the success, but rather indiviuals in different institutions that played a major role in shaping both the institution's policies and contributing to the city's economic growth.     

The Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC): A Private Initiative for Industrial Development

The private sector can create unique institutions that help to achieve industrial and economic goals. To demonstrate this growth model, the Houston Advanced Research Centre (HARC) was created as a private non-profit organization, part of a new town development north of Houston, Texas. Over its 17-year history, HARC has successfully linked university, industry and governmental research in this framework. During this time, four strategies have been tested: large or sensitive R&D projects, strong links with member universities, efforts to bring technology to the marketplace, and policy analysis and advice. Of these, the latter three are today's successes as HARC has become a more responsive, service-oriented organization. Also, sustainable development has emerged as a unifying theme, reflecting part of the organization's initial legacy from its founder, George P. Mitchell. The Woodlands has grown around HARC as a place to live for over 50,000 people, a growing job base, and realization of the initial "research forest" concept with more than 100 firms and 4,500 employees.     

Exploring evolutionary economic geographies

Evolutionary approaches in economics have gathered increasingsupport over the last 25 years. Despite an impressive body ofliterature, economists are still far from formulating a coherentresearch paradigm. The multitude of approaches in evolutionaryeconomics poses problems for the development of an evolutionaryeconomic geography. For the most part, evolutionary economicgeography imports selective concepts from evolutionary biologyand economics and applies those concepts to specific problemswithin economic geography. We discuss a number of problems withthis approach and suggest that a more powerful and appealingalternative requires the development of theoretically consistentmodels of evolutionary processes. This article outlines thecontours of an evolutionary model of economic dynamics whereeconomic agents are located in different geographical spaces.We seek to show how competition between those agents, basedon the core evolutionary principles of variety, selection andretention, may produce distinct economic regions sharing propertiesthat differentiate them from competitors elsewhere. These argumentsare extended to illustrate how the emergent properties of economicagents and places co-evolve and lead to different trajectoriesof economic development over space.     

Agglomeration economies and productivity differences in US cities

Plant-level data from the Longitudinal Research Database ofthe US Bureau of the Census are employed to estimate the impactof agglomeration economies on industry productivity across USmetropolitan areas. This analysis seeks to remedy three shortcomingsof previous empirical studies of agglomeration economies: relianceon aggregate spatial or sectoral data; lack of attention tospatial dependence in data; and representation of agglomerationeconomies with vague proxies such as city-size. We show howa number of establishment-, industry-, and city-specific factorsinfluence labor productivity across US cities, and we pay particularattention to separating the influence of different kinds ofagglomeration economies on firm efficiency. Here we follow Marshall'sPrinciples of Economics in examining the spatial concentrationof input–output linkages, the character of local laborpools and embodied technological spillovers.