Suchergebnisse

The competitive advantage of cities in the developed world is increasingly thought to lie in their superior access to the knowledge-base. The generation of new knowledge through investment in research and development leads to new products, services and processes which form the basis of the new economy. Attempts to correlate knowledge creation with economic growth have therefore tended to use R&D measures such as the numbers of research establishments in a rather narrow sense. This paper develops a much wider measure of the knowledge-base comprising tacit knowledge, codified knowledge and knowledge infrastructure for 19 European cities. With the exception of the two world cities, London and Paris, which significantly underperform, there is a broad relationship between the quality of the knowledge-base and economic change as measured by the competitive shift-share residual.

The diminishing importance of national frontiers in western Europe has intensified competition between cities for mobile investment, for the location of public institutions and for hallmark events. This has led to the creation of league tables of cities in which rankings are determined by single or multiple variables. Analyses of changes in rankings focus on whether there has been divergence or convergence amongst European cities. This paper uses data on 117 cities to suggest that there was convergence in 1981-84, followed by divergence in 1984-87. The paper goes on to test three hypotheses which relate urban economic growth to size or capital status, to location within the core or periphery, and location within northern or southern Europe. Overall it finds that capital cities grow more quickly, in economic terms; that the urban south is catching up with the urban north; and that, whilst the cities of the core did best before 1985, there is some evidence that 'crowding out' has relatively helped the cities of the periphery since 1985.

The paper examines the phenomenon of counter-urbanisation in western Europe and argues that by the late 1980s there was evidence of reurbanisation in some cities. Changes in public finance, in housing preferences and in employment location were leading to a redensification of cities which is likely to continue through the 1990s. The paper uses detailed data from Glasgow and the west central Scotland conurbation, first to indicate how the massive outward movement of residential population to the suburbs and beyond had slowed to the extent that the distribution of residential population between core city, suburban ring and exurbs was almost unchanged in 1981-88, and secondly to show how the inner city's share of the conurbation's employment actually rose after 1984.

The processes of deindustrialisation and disurbanisation, and the emergence of the postindustrial society or city, have been debated within a number of disciplines since 1960. However, much of the debate has been conducted at the general or aggregate level. At the level of the individual city the situation is often considerably more complex and the positive and negative attributes are less easy to compare. In this article we use the example of Glasgow and the surrounding conurbation to characterise the major elements in the processes and as a test bed for current urban policy.

Considerable interest has been shown in recent years in the calculation of regional income and/or employment multipliers. Their role in the formulation and evaluation of regional policy has been stressed by Wilson (1968) and some writers have been prepared to suggest that high levels of leakage and consequent low multipliers are causes of economic decline or slow growth in the peripheral regions just as much as are economic structure or locational disadvantages (Thirlwell, 1972). The early approaches to the calculation of income or employment multipliers generally used aggregate data on employment, where data on output were not available, national input—output tables to identify input mixes and generalised economic base concepts to distinguish local and nonlocal purchases and sales (Archibald, 1967; Brown et al, 1967; Steele, 1969). More recent work, however, had identified another approach, forsaking the use of aggregated national data sets and employing intensive survey methods of individual industrial plants, such as Greig's study of the pulp and paper mills at Fort William (1971), of educational establishments such as universities (Brownrigg, 1973; Lewes and Kirkness, 1973) or of service sectors such as tourism (Blake and MacDowell, 1967). More recently Lever (1974a) has introduced a more rigorous comparative method into the study of individual manufacturing establishments.