Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Educational services, etc. Clearly, Boston has initiated a remarkable economic
renaissance, introducing technical innovations and new activities employing a
high proportion of knowledge workers. But Boston also displays a 'broader'
social creativity—a more social, cumulative, and collaborative account of crea-
tivity (as contrasted with the common focus in the literature on the individual
spark or on the private sector changes). This collaborative creativity reflects its
history, political governance traditions, and the vibrancy of its civil society
institutions. Boston achieved this remarkable reinvention by building on its
vast stocks and variety of knowledge assets, networking opportunities, rivalry
and trust-promoting contexts, and its history of institutional innovations and
social cooperation
(Lakshmanan and Chatterjee
2006
)
.
One must realize that a viable regeneration strategy pursued in an urban
region in the Megalopolis is a very complex public good, resisting simple
characterizations. However, the common focus in the larger literature on crea-
tive cities and urban evolution is on the processes underlying the generation of
new knowledge and its incorporation in new goods and services, but that is only
part of the story. This paper has argued that a viable urban regeneration strategy
must include additionally the capacity to generate flexibility, tolerance, social
capital and new governance models, which are necessary for the effective
functioning and collaboration of the economic/social/political sectors in the
new urban region. Finally, in resurgent Megalopolis cities such as Boston,
governance involves multiple stakeholders, shared aims, interdependent
resources and actions, hazy boundaries among private, public, and social sector
actors. Institutional innovations and Governance models were developed in this
context in Boston to facilitate the translation of new economic growth into
inherited industrial urban space, and avoid market failure of spatially produced
goods and services. Such capacity is created from within the urban region
through collaborative innovation embracing many private, public, and social
sector actors (as well as individuals and firms).
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