Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In the
Heritage Capital
domain, it is important to identify and solve weaknesses
in the local environment, such as clearing up pollution sites and creating a healthy
and attractive environment. It is also useful to build upon and develop a city's heri-
tage of distinctive features, such as its historical legacy of buildings or ways of life
and replace negative features. This may help attract and retain skilled and innova-
tive people.
In the
Human Capital
category the importance of having an
intelligent, edu-
cated and imaginative workforce
is essential, since this is most likely to have the
creativity and skills to produce innovations. There may be innate differences in
people, but a quality education is always essential to nurture and extend these skills.
This does not simply apply to science and technology learning, but also requires
an education that nurtures organizational, entrepreneurial and imaginative abilities,
which involves imaginative arts graduates as well as applied social scientists. The
importance of promoting
tolerance
is another crucial feature. In addition, it seems
useful to have a workforce that includes people who have
international perspectives
and come from varied ethnic backgrounds
. Unfortunately few cities have the ability
to have separate immigration regulatory regimes, although cities may be powerful
enough to lobby for such changes. Indeed surveys of key areas of knowledge-based
development, as in Silicon Valley, have shown that almost half of the 'start-ups'
are made by people of Indian and Chinese backgrounds. In this context the Euro-
pean Union has encouraged students to study outside their country to broaden their
experience and contacts through schemes such as Erasmus, which allows univer-
sity students to spend time at a university in another country. This leads to greater
language skills and knowledge of other places and reduces the cultural barriers to
labour mobility. In addition, it may be appropriate to
recognize and reward workers
in the knowledge industries, such as by instituting prizes or incentives to profile the
worth of these individuals during their productive years, not like the Nobel Prizes
which are rewards for past breakthroughs (TE
2010
, Brunt
2011
). Such policies will
demonstrate the contribution of these individuals to the city development. In addi-
tion, policies may be needed to improve the
health of the population
, especially in
less-developed countries. This is not simply because intermittent sickness reduces
productivity but because an early death means the premature loss of a human capi-
tal asset which has taken a long time to educate and maintain. Problems that exist
through identification of growth trends and increasing dependencies, such as an
increase in old and retired people, also need to be addressed.
Within the
Physical Capital
dimension of the Capital Inventory System most
reviewers emphasize the need to
remove environmental problems
and find ways of
creating resilience to natural hazards, issues discussed in Chap. 8. The
specific and
continuing investment in infrastructure and facilities is also vital.
At the minimum
this means improving transport facilities and utilities. One of the best examples of
direct investment to combine these two features can be seen in the successful 1950s
French metropole d'￩quilibres (Rodwin
1971
), although few of such bold initia-
tives seem attractive to policy makers today. The policy was designed to improve
the prospects of the main large regional centres in France because of the belief that
Paris was too dominant and was growing too fast, whereas the main peripheral
