Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
that go beyond the old locational factors approach to look at the whole context of
the city's environment. In Europe the ACRE project with researchers from several
European countries represents a good example (Musterd and Murie
2010b
). One
of its recent reports designed for policy makers provides a list of factors that seem
to be associated with what they called creative-knowledge development, together
with policy examples that illustrate the utility of these features from various Euro-
pean cities (Musterd et al.
2010
). These are grouped into three easily remembered
categories:
pathways
deal with the historical legacies of the city that may influence
future development;
place
, with the local characteristics that help attract and keep
knowledge workers and organizations;
networks
that are the ties that enable people
to obtain and share information and promote knowledge activity, a category that
acknowledges the role of tacit knowledge in innovative activity. This report is emi-
nently useful in providing a succinct summary of the key features in knowledge ac-
tivity development that will appeal to policy makers. It is also valuable in stressing
that there is no single path to success, for different cities with varied characteristics
have chosen alternative approaches. However more comprehensive approaches that
identify the many components of places that attract knowledge activities are need-
ed, especially those that apply the type of capital-asset of cities approach, initially
pioneered in studies of organizations (Edvinsson and Malone
1997
), and applied to
the urban case (Viedma
2005
; Carillo
2006
).
Essentially, this new Knowledge City approach begins with the idea that the
city is a capital system, which creates social surplus products from its capital store,
which can be viewed as all the value elements that can aid or repel new knowledge-
based development. Carillo (
2004
,
2006
) has provided one type of taxonomy identi-
fying the categories or domains within which individual indicators can be grouped,
but it does seem to have several weaknesses and has been revised in Fig.
11.2
to
create a more direct set of domains and indicators. It shows that the capital store
of a city or city-region can be disaggregated into five major groups or domains
of value elements: Human, Physical, Associational, Heritage and External Capital.
These five broad categories or domains summarize the large range of factors which
may, or may not, provide advantages for the growth of knowledge-activities and
provide leverage in value generation. Each of these domains can be subdivided into
a more detailed set of sub-domains which contain specific dimensions within these
five broad categories, which are summarized in Fig.
11.2
. By identifying, and later
measuring, the value of the various elements in the taxonomy in any city, a way of
understanding their advantages and disadvantages as a basis for the presence or at-
traction of knowledge-based activities is created.
11.6.1
Human or Agent Capital of Cities
This domain consists of the value-generating capacity of the human resources pres-
ent. These can be divided into three main categories, the attributes of people, growth
trends and their attitudes. In the
attribute
category, a key feature is the character
and skills of the population, such as whether they have high levels of intelligence,
