Driving Innovation and Growth in 21st Century City-Regions

Give a star academic researcher a full year to reflect on what the world understands so far about regional innovation and city-region dynamics and to offer suggestions to guide future economic development initiatives to encourage growth and the results are valuable for both his homeland of Canada and its southern neighbor, the U.S. The Conference Board of Canada named University of Toronto professor David A. Wolfe its 2009 CIBC Scholar in Residence in May of 2008. His lecture and the resulting report, 21st Century Cities in Canada: The Geography of Innovation,  is enlightening, insightful, and frustrating – the final adjective because we should, but do not, have the same well grounded and succinctly articulated understanding of how American cities-regions function systemically to encourage or thwart innovation and competitiveness.

It is increasingly clear, as Dr. Wolfe points out, well functioning city-regions are the principle centers for innovation. It isn’t particular companies or universities or federal research institutions or even particular individuals. It is all of them acting and interacting consciously and unconsciously within particular geographic places and across them through the Internet, World Wide Web, social media and more traditional means of connection.  Understanding the social dynamics of innovation and creativity and the economic dynamics of city-regions is critical to formulating public policy so city-regions effectively nurture and sustain those dynamics.

Keys for Dr. Wolfe are:

• Facilitating the movement away from government to strategic governance that blurs the boundaries between public and private actors for designing, implementing and managing innovation and economic development policy;
• Encouraging more civic engagement that integrates a broader swath of community stakeholders into the entire public policy arena for the city-region; and
• Strengthening global embeddedness of the city-region to positively affect knowledge flows contributing to innovation and economic growth.

Reading the Monograph
If you are looking for an impartial, concise summary of specialization/cluster and diversity/creativity theories for regional innovation (without the personalities, drama and bias we currently see between both camps in the U.S.), spend some time in the first two chapters of Dr. Wolfe’s monograph. 

Size matters. If you want to understand the different roles large, mid-sized and small city-regions play in supporting a national economy, particularly as roles evolve along with global economic transformation, pore over the third chapter.

If you want to better understand the theory, the academic research and the actual practice of making the transformation of government to strategic governance, delve into the fourth chapter. The principles of collaboration and partnership and the real practice of moving from government to governance are fundamental for effective TBED.

The fifth chapter explores methods a variety of Canadian city-regions have adopted to broaden civic engagement and involvement. The lessons and obstacles faced when attempting multi-jurisdictional collaborations should prove useful for most U.S. city-regions, where the number of political jurisdictions potentially involved is greatly expanded (large metro core cities, older suburbs, new suburbs, hinterland communities, townships, counties, regional authorities, states etc).

The final chapter lays out the challenges and choices for Canada’s city-regions. As throughout the monograph, the advice carries south of the border. Dr. Wolfe points out not all cities can make the transformation smoothly or to meet unrealistic aspirations of political leaders. This is particularly true as globalization leads to further concentrations of control of financial and informational sectors in fewer cities, truly world cities. The hierarchy of city-regions will continue to evolve as the national urban system is transformed by global economic factors. Yet the same keys of strategic governance and broader civic engagement are critical for smoothing the transition to their new roles that still will require solid policies for supporting innovation and creativity.

21st Century Cities in Canada: The Geography of Innovation is available at: http://www.conferenceboard.ca/documents.aspx?DID=3311