Making competitive cities * Sako Musterd and Alan Murie (eds)
基于欧洲城市比较研究，质疑吸引创意阶层等流行政策能否真正提升城市竞争力，探讨知识产业与城市增长的关系。
Making Competitive Cities is the result of a large-scale international comparative research programme aimed at learning more about the urban conditions deemed essential in enhancing the competitiveness of urban and regional economies across Europe. It is part of the ACRE (Accommodating Creative Knowledge – Competitiveness of European Metropolitan Regions within the England Union) research programme—funded from 2006 to 2010 under the sixth Research Framework Programme for the European Commission—the wider context of which is one we are all conscious of. Today, it is hard (dare I say impossible?) to escape the long list of ‘off-the-shelf’ policy solutions captured from what appears to be working in economic hot spots at any one time, are then projected to every corner of the world as the answer to the question on many people's lips—what makes cities work? In the last decade, the list of policy ‘recipes’ has been seemingly endless—mega-events, cultural icons, retail malls, to name but a few—but what makes Making Competitive Cities so timely is that we live in a world where new solutions appear more frequently, diffuse more rapidly and have a more far reaching impact than ever before. Perhaps the most pervasive of these at present is derived from Richard Florida's identification of individual creativity as the fount of development; such that attracting the ‘creative class’ to your area is essential for economic development, and therefore must be the tactic employed by local policy elites the world over. But what is happening on the ground? Do any of these ‘off the shelf’ policies actually work? Do they, in fact, contribute to urban competitiveness? Does employment follow firms or do knowledge workers generate industrial development? Are creative and knowledge industries the cause or consequence of urban growth? Is the fast policy transfer of one-size-fits-all economic development strategies contributing to the production of non-distinct, placeless, cities? These questions are at the heart of Making Competitive Cities, making this book both timely and thought-provoking in equal measure. Indeed, Musterd and Murie are to be commended for pushing hard against the prevailing enthusiasm for these academic and policy orthodoxies, and for actually stepping back to ask questions which many are only too happy to overlook in the pursuit of the latest policy fashion. Indeed they take to task the assumption of Florida and his followers that urban economies can easily be engineered by local actors. But as with any good piece of research, this book delivers as many new questions as it provides answers.