2001 Departmental Conference: Cities and the Knowledge EconomyReport of Proceedings
The Department held its annual conference in March at the University of Glasgow on the theme of ?Cities and the Knowledge Economy?. The conference, which was organised by Professor Bill Lever, welcomed 100 delegates from across the UK and heard presentations from researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from the private sector.
An interesting turn of events saw Wendy Alexander MSP (Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning) having to withdraw from the conference at the last minute in order to attend an emergency debate on the impacts of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the UK. Ms Alexander was replaced by Professor Duncan Maclennan CBE who, as well as being a member of the Department, is also a Special Adviser to the First Minister. Duncan outlined Scottish Executive?s plans to use information technology to help achieve social inclusion and detailed its actions to boost the spread of broadband infrastructure.
Sir Ian Robinson (Scottish Power) then convened a session with presentations by Professors Ron Botham and Bill Lever (University of Glasgow). Ron reported the findings of research into the use of knowledge clusters within regional development strategies in the UK. He argued that the rush to clusters had resulted in an oversight of traditional, local industrial sectors which were often internationally competitive and hi-tech, but not trendy or part of the ?new economy?.
Bill Lever addressed his remarks to the questions of defining and measuring the knowledge base and assessing the comparative advantage of particular cities. According to one global assessment, Europe has three cities in the world?s top ten for competitiveness in telecommunications infrastructure (including London), but none in the top five. Within Europe, there are large gaps between EU member states and transition economy countries in terms of the availability of such infrastructure. For example, there are typically three to four times as many personal computers per population in EU rather than transition countries. Turning to knowledge rather than information and communications, Bill reported that, according to a measure of academic publications per population, the UK had four of the top dozen urban regions in Europe.
The third plenary session comprised three presentations on the use of technology in the digital age. Dr Stephen Graham (University of Newcastle) discussed to what extent telecommunications development can be integrated into city development strategies. Charlie Watt (Scottish Enterprise) reported on the progress achieved so far in encouraging companies to adopt e-commerce techniques in their business-to-business transactions. Denis Johnston (BT?s Advanced Communications Technology Centre) gave a vision of what the future might look like if current trends in technological advancement continue. It seems that movies like Terminator, Blade Runner and 1984 weren?t far wrong, although a bit ahead of their time!
In workshop sessions, delegates offered their own thoughts after short presentations by practitioners. Dr Cathy Garner (University of Glasgow) discussed how universities can adopt strategies to convert academic understanding into commercial knowledge, something for which Glasgow has a very positive reputation.
In the second workshop, Professor Stuart Gulliver (University of Glasgow) and Paul Stephens (Leeds Development Agency) gave their views on what a knowledge-based strategy for city development might comprise. Paul noted that business services now equalled manufacturing as the main employment sectors in the Leeds metropolitan economy, each with around 55,000 jobs. The final workshop, led by David Coulter (Scottish Enterprise) debated the agency?s approach to developing economic inclusion through the knowledge economy.
In the final session, Professor Ade Kearns (University of Glasgow) gave ?Four Pointers to the Knowledge-Based Urban Future?. He emphasised that cities need to combine hard and soft assets to achieve both productivity and competitiveness. Successful urban societies and economies, he claimed, are founded upon a skill and resource base which can create knowledge but they must also have ambition, creativity and opportunity in order to be able to make the most of that knowledge. Such ambition and creativity can be boosted by policies that foster a creative and ambitious milieu in the public realm: cities need to shift from environments of despair to environments that inspire. Ade concluded that knowledge economy strategies have to be combined with supportive urban policies in order to achieve these goals.
The conference opened up public policies for knowledge and communications to comment and scrutiny. It helped to clarify issues Departmental Staff will be considering in future research, in particular as the Central Scotland case study for the ESRC?s Cities research programme nears completion.
For further information please contact Elizabeth Nicholson, tel. 0141 330 3664, E.Nicholson@socsci.gla.ac.uk