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Character is Key to an Economically Vibrant City
Around the world, cities are seeking the recipe for economic success in a rapidly changing global marketplace. Indispensable assets in a post–industrial economy include well-educated people, the ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into commercial realities, connectivity to global markets, and multi-modal transportation infrastructure.
Another critical but often neglected asset is community distinctiveness. Read more here.
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Creating the creatives
Thank you Paul for drawing this piece to our attention. There seems to be a lot of writing from the likes of Richard Florida and Edward Glaeser that suggest that to be prosperous, all cities need to do is 'chase the creatives' - create conditions which attract sparky, innovative entrepreneural people who will then build a diverse, probably high tech, market economy, bringing prosperity to the city with it.
Whilst that may be so, it seems to beg the question of how we 'create the creatives' in the first place. There are other writers seriously questionning whether our education systems are presently capable of providing sufficient people with the skill sets required to act in this way. It might be a better approach to re-focus education on entrepreneurial, commercial, operational, technological and creative thinking to enable cities to 'grow their own' creatives, improving the local economy and life-chances of existing city populations. The role of education and learning within regeneration programmes is crucial, but often missing, it seems to me, from policy prescriptions for the future of place.
By the way, there is often more on this theme in articles in OBSERVATIONS from PASCAL.
More comment please.