Position paper : redefining knowledge-based urban development

The concept of knowledge-based urban development has first come to the urban planning and development agenda during the very last years of the 20th century as a promising paradigm to support the transformation process of cities into knowledge cities and their societies into knowledge societies. However, soon after the exponentially rapid advancements experienced, during the first decade of the 21st century, particularly, in the domains of economy, society, management and technology along with the severe impacts of climate change, have made the redefinition of the term a necessity. This paper, first, reports the findings of the review of the relatively short but dynamic history of urbanisation experiences of our cities around the globe. The paper, then, focuses on the 21st century urbanisation context and discusses the conceptual base of the knowledge-based development of cities and how this concept found application ground in many parts of the world. Following this, the paper speculates development of future cities by particularly highlighting potential challenges and opportunities that previously have not been fully considered. This paper, lastly, introduces and elaborates how relevant theories support the better conceptualisation of this relatively new, but rapidly emerging paradigm, and redefines it accordingly.

Creative suburbia : rethinking urban cultural policy – the Australian case

This article considers the question of whether creative workers demonstrate a preference for inner cities or suburbs, drawing upon research findings from the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project undertaken by a team of Australian researchers over 2008–2010 in selected suburban areas of Brisbane and Melbourne. Locating this question in wider debates about the relationship of the suburbs to the city, as well as the development of new suburban forms such as master-planned communities, the article finds that the number of creative industries workers located in the suburbs is significant, and those creative workforce members living and working in suburban areas are generally happy with this experience, locating in the suburbs out of personal choice rather than economic necessity. This runs counter to the received wisdom on creative cities, which emphasize cultural amenity in inner city areas as a primary driver of location decisions for the ‘creative class’. The article draws out some implications of the findings for urban cultural policy, arguing that the focus on developing inner urban cultural amenity has been overplayed, and that more attention should be given to how to better enable distributed knowledge systems through high-speed broadband infrastructure.

Developing a creative cluster in a postindustrial city : CIDS and Manchester

This paper takes the establishment and demise of Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service as an exemplary case study for the ways in which creative industry policy has intersected with urban economic policy over the last decade. It argues that the creative industries required specific kinds of economic development agencies which would be able to act as ‘intermediary’ between the distinct languages of policy makers and ‘creatives’. The paper discusses the tensions inherent in such an approach and how CIDS attempted to manage them. It suggests that which particular circumstances might have intervened the main reason for the demise of the CIDS was the domination of the ‘economic’ over the ‘cultural logic’ both of which are embedded within the creative industries policy discourse.

The art of re-industrialisation in Shanghai

This paper deals with the development of ‘art clusters’ and their relocation in the city of Shanghai. It first looks at the revival of the city’s old inner city industrial area (along banks of Suzhou River) through ‘organic’ or ‘alternative’ artist-led cultural production; second, it describes the impact on these activities of the industrial restructuring of the wider city, reliant on large-scale real estate development, business services and global finance; and finally, outlines the relocation of these arts (and related) cultural industries to dispersed CBD locations as a result of those spatial, industrial and policy changes.

Learning or legitimacy? an exploration of business planning amongst Australian social enterprises

In recent years, the value of business planning for new business ventures and small firms has been the subject of debate amongst entrepreneurship researchers (Brinckmann et al 2010: 24). Drawing on institutional theory, a number of writers suggest that business planning is primarily used to confer symbolic legitimacy on businesses seeking investment and engagement from external stakeholders ( Karlsson & Honig 2009; Zimmerman & Zeitz 2002; Delmar & Shane 2004). In this sense, business planning may not have any significant effects on firm learning, but may be used as evidence of good business operations in order to attract external resources. Meta-evaluation of the available empirical literature contests this proposition, finding that both the symbolic and organisational learning effects of business planning influence small firm performance (Brinckmann et al 2010: 36) While social enterprise – which we define as organisations that exist for a public or community benefit and trade to fulfill their mission - the study of social enterprise is a nascent and pre-paradigmatic area of inquiry (Nicholls 2010). As a consequence, there has been relatively little empirical analysis of the nature or effects of business planning amongst social enterprises (for two exceptions, see exploratory studies by Hynes 2009 and Bull & Crompton 2006). In this paper, we examine business planning practices amongst Australian social enterprises. Drawing on a survey of 365 social enterprises conducted in 2010 and in-depth interviews with 11 social entrepreneurs and managers from eight social enterprises, we find that social enterprises report being more actively engaged in business planning activities than their mainstream business counterparts. Our exploratory research suggests that both legitimacy and learning drive business planning amongst social enterprises, although legitimacy is the stronger driver. Our results also suggest that, as multi-stakeholder businesses led by mission, business planning can serve unique communicative and relational functions for this business type.

Creative industry clusters in Shanghai : a success story?

In 2005 the Shanghai municipal government adopted the notion of ‘creative industries’ as part of their economic development strategy. At the same time, they officially recognized a number of ‘Creative Industry Clusters’ (CIC) in the city; over the next five years these official clusters grew to over ninety in number. The active promotion of CIC by the local state can thus been seen as central to its adoption of the creative industries agenda, in turn part of its aspiration to become a modern, global metropolis. In the first part of this paper we look at the emergence of the creative industry agenda in China, making some general observations about the need to place such policy transfer in its specific context. We suggest how this agenda might be understood in the national context of China’s economic and cultural policy development. In the second we give a critical account of the development of the creative industries agenda in Shanghai and its relationship to that for CIC. We argue that this agenda had more to do with real estate development than the promotion of a ‘creative milieu’ or ‘ecosystem’, and we also give some reasons as to why this was the case. In the third section we provide some new evidence to suggest the increasing disjunction between CIC and such a wider ‘creative milieu’. In the final section we suggest some new ways in which these CIC might be approached by local government in Shanghai .

designing creative clusters : some indicators

This paper explores how the design of creative clusters as a key strategy in promoting the urban creative economy has played out in Shanghai. Creative Clusters in Europe and North America context have emerged ‘organically’. They developed spontaneously in those cities which went through a period of post-industrial decline. Creative Industries grew up in these cities as part of a new urban economy in the wake of old manufacturing industries. Artists and creative entrepreneurs moved into vacant warehouses and factories and began the trend of ‘creative clusters’. Such clusters facilitate the transfer of tacit knowledge through informal learning, the efficient sourcing of skills and information, competition, collaboration and learning, inter-cluster trading and networking. This new urban phenomenon was soon targeted by local economic development policy in charge of re-generating and re-structuralizing industrial activities in cities. Rising interest from real estate and local economic development has led to more and more planned creative clusters. In the aim of catching up with the world’s creative cities, Shanghai has planned over 100 creative clusters since 2005. Along with these officially designed creative clusters, there are organically emerged creative clusters that are much smaller in scale and much more informal in terms of the management. And they emerged originally in old residential areas just outside the CBD and expand to include French concession the most sort after residential area at the edge of CBD. More recently, office buildings within CBD are made available for creative usages. From fringe to CBD, these organic creative clusters provide crucial evidences for the design of creative clusters. This paper will be organized in 2 parts. In the first part, I will present a case study of 8 ‘official’ clusters (title granted by local govenrment) in Shanghai through which I am hoping to develop some key indicators of the success/failure of creative clusters as well as link them with their physical, social and operational efficacies. In the second part, a variety of ‘alternative’ clusters (organicly formed clusters most of which are not recongnized by the government) supplies with us the possibilities of rethinking the so-called ‘cluster development strategy’ in terms of what kind of spaces are appropriate for use by clusters? Who should manage them and in what format? And ultimately what are their relationship with the rest of the city should be defined?

Design of sustainable transport : opportunities

The need to find an alternative to our current transport situation is widely accepted. In most cities of the world, traffic congestion is commonplace and air pollution is normal. Road fatalities are a regular and almost accepted event. And (in most developed nations) as an indirect consequence of our transport choices, obesity is increasing at an alarming rate. The car is undeniably a major contributor to this situation. Additionally the very structure of our cities has evolved to the point that it can be creditably claimed that the city belongs to the car and not to humans. There are however alternatives. There is a plethora of experimental vehicles in all shapes and configurations. And yet, the car is still king. The question is, how do we pick a winner? What are the aspects of the car that make it so appealing? Are these aspects able to be translated into a more sustainable version? What do we need to incorporate in our designs of new vehicles to make them more appealing to the consumers? In this paper I explore these questions and propose a list of design criteria for more sustainable transport options.

Planning most-likely paths from overhead imagery

This paper is about planning paths from overhead imagery, the novelty of which is taking explicit account of uncertainty in terrain classification and spatial variation in terrain cost. The image is first classified using a multi-class Gaussian Process Classifier which provides probabilities of class membership at each location in the image. The probability of class membership at a particular grid location is then combined with a terrain cost evaluated at that location using a spatial Gaussian process. The resulting cost function is, in turn, passed to a planner. This allows both the uncertainty in terrain classification and spatial variations in terrain costs to be incorporated into the planned path. Because the cost of traversing a grid cell is now a probability density rather than a single scalar value, we can produce not only the most-likely shortest path between points on the map, but also sample from the cost map to produce a distribution of paths between the points. Results are shown in the form of planned paths over aerial maps, these paths are shown to vary in response to local variations in terrain cost.

Social infrastructure planning and sustainable communities : Example from South East Queensland, Australia

From its early birth through to the twenty-first century, the planning for social infrastructure has been viewed as a crucial element in promoting the development of healthy communities. The existence of good social infrastructure in every level of human settlement (i.e. neighbourhoods, districts, regions etc.) is vital because it is considered to be an element that impacts positively and meaningfully on the quality of life for members of the targeted community. The increasing importance of the sustainable development agenda in human settlements has prompted concerns over the cost of the government’s failure to provide for adequate social infrastructure for their communities. Part of this failure is attributed to the inconsistent outcome from the use of traditional planning standards that are based on population-to-facility ratios. This paper explores the literature discussion on social infrastructure for sustainable communities. It examines how a participation-oriented, need-sensitive approach in the planning and provision of social infrastructure is used as an alternative to the traditional standards that are based on population-to-facility ratios. It does this by giving an overview of its application in the planning and provision of social infrastructure for Australia’s fastest growing region of South-East Queensland.

Book review of Donald, S.H., & Gammack, J.G. 2007. Tourism and the Branded City : Film and Identity in the Pacific Rim. Aldershot : Ashgate.

In the decade since the destination branding literature emerged (see for example Pritchard & Morgan 1998, Dosen & Vransevic 1998), only a few books have been published. These are Morgan et al.’s (2002, 2004) edited volumes of international case studies and conceptual papers, and Baker’s (2007) practitioner perspective on branding small cities in the USA. This work by Stephanie Donald and John Gammack is the first research-based text related to destination branding, and is a welcome and timely addition to the field. In the foreword to the first issue of Place Branding and Public Policy, editor Simon Anholt (2004, p. 4) suggested “almost nobody agrees on what, exactly, branding means”, when he described place branding practice as akin to the Wild West. Indeed, this lack of theory was one of the motivators for the authors of this text. Tourism and the Branded City is part of Ashgate’s New Directions in Tourism Analysis series, edited by Dimitri Ioannides. The aim of the series is to address the gap in published theory underpinning the study of tourism, with a particular interest in non-business disciplines such as Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human and Social Geography, and Cultural Studies...

Financial planners and philanthropic planning

This article reports findings from a survey of Canadian financial planners. The focus of the study is learning more about the depth and breadth of philanthropic planning that is included in their advising services to their high-net worth clients. The findings indicate that a minority of financial planners (1) regularly broach the topic of philanthropy in their counseling, (2) believe their clients are interested in philanthropy, and (3) feel sufficiently knowledgeable to assist their clients with philanthropic planning. The implications of these findings and recommendations for improvement are discussed.

FPGA implementation of an evolutionary algorithm for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle on-board path planning

In this paper, a hardware-based path planning architecture for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) adaptation is proposed. The architecture aims to provide UAVs with higher autonomy using an application specific evolutionary algorithm (EA) implemented entirely on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. The physical attributes of an FPGA chip, being compact in size and low in power consumption, compliments it to be an ideal platform for UAV applications. The design, which is implemented entirely in hardware, consists of EA modules, population storage resources, and three-dimensional terrain information necessary to the path planning process, subject to constraints accounted for separately via UAV, environment and mission profiles. The architecture has been successfully synthesised for a target Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA platform with 32% logic slices utilisation. Results obtained from case studies for a small UAV helicopter with environment derived from LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data verify the effectiveness of the proposed FPGA-based path planner, and demonstrate convergence at rates above the typical 10 Hz update frequency of an autopilot system.

Do planning regulations matter? : a comparison of South East Queensland and South Florida

At one level the urban landscapes of South Florida and South East Queensland look quite similar. However at another level the context of planning and planning control and regulation is quite different. To understand the contextual differences between South Florida and South East Queensland, four themes will be used, some of which were based on Cullingworth and Booth. The four themes include: demography, governance, the law and regulatory philosophy. After having evaluated South Florida and South East Queensland across these four themes, we propose a framework for examining whether these differences have shaped planning outcomes and in particular, the built form.

Property, planning and purpose : legal concerns facing broadband rollout in Australia

The Australian government, and opposition, are committed to facilitating high-speed broadband provision. In April 2009 the (then) Labor government announced a proposal to facilitate provision by mandating “…the use of fibre optic infrastructure … in greenfield estates ….” Separately, the installation of (usually overhead) cables commenced in select brownfield areas throughout Australia. In the lead up to the 2010 federal election, the broadband policy focus of the (then) federal opposition was to enabling private investment rather than direct investment by government itself. High-speed broadband is essential for Australia’s economic future. Whether implementation is undertaken by government, government owned corporations or private investors, will impact on the processes to be followed. Who does what, also will determine the rights available to land owners. The next stage, of necessity, will involve the establishment of procedures to require the retrofitting of existing urban environments. This clearly will have major property, property rights and valuation impacts. As Horan (2000) observed “…preserving... unique characteristics … of…regions requires a compromise between economic ambitions and social, cultural, and environmental values”. The uncertainty following the federal election, and the influence of independants with individual agendas; presents unique challenges for broadband implementation. This paper seeks to identify the processes to be followed by various potential broadband investors as they work to establish a ubiquitous network. It overviews current legislative regimes and examines concerns raised by stakeholders in various government reviews. It concludes by plotting a clear way forward to the future, with particular regard to property rights and usage.