Abstract
Kresl and Ietri’s book on urban competitiveness is written in a highly accessible form and presents its case eloquently. The book focuses on some key facets: urban autonomy, the exclusive role of cities, the involvement of local needs and democratic participation. In this process, it considers the competitiveness of a nation as competitiveness of its urban centres. This is a welcome addition to the detailed theoretical underpinnings of urban competitiveness. Furthermore, it contributes substantially towards an empirical validation of ideas based on European and North American experiences.
As a probable departure from earlier works on urban economics and urban geography, the book provides considerable space for local aspirations, history, culture and needs, and their appropriate representation in urban competitiveness through democratic processes. Establishing a premise for studying ‘relative competitiveness’, the book surprisingly restricts its cases to the developed world. However, the authors explain they have left the cases of developing countries for another volume.
The first chapter introduces the reader to the theme of the book. Exploring opinions and counter opinions, the chapter emphatically argues for the pre-eminence of cities in the national and global economy. While promising to read cities through comparative means the authors underline three factors required for urban competitiveness. First, an openness to ideas, by which they mean acceptance and consideration of dissent, alternative cultures and perspectives. Second, to assign a distinctive role for each city provided that is economically advantageous. Finally, and most importantly, they press the issue of taking local needs and histories into account for enhancing urban competitiveness.
The following chapter deals with the broad context within which cities function. Referring to Peter Hall’s Metro-City region the authors emphasise the importance of contiguity and agglomeration for city development but also attend to smaller cities that are unable to reap the benefits, by participating in networks and associations instead of geographical agglomerations. They argue coherently that cities can prosper even if they are not at the command of the global economy by carving their peculiar niche and hence making themselves more attractive to capital. While providing a counter argument to Friedmann’s flattening, Kresl and Ietri bring to light the perpetuating spatial, social and economic inequalities in developing countries; thus providing a sufficient ground for considering consequential significance of internal forces along with the external forces of globalisation. And at the concluding section the chapter provides sufficient logic as to why an ageing population is good for city economy in spite of being burdensome on the national economy.
The third chapter concerns greening of the urban economy and how greening itself can be a catalyst in instigating and perpetuating economic health. Reflecting on how urban density lowers energy consumption which gets amplified more with public transport, the chapter surveys greening strategies of cities in the USA and Europe. The following chapter analyses and assesses urban competition. It voices concern for local aspirations and the role of democracy in ascertaining the objectives of a competitive city. And when it comes to the measurement of urban competitiveness the authors chart the two elements of competition as economic and strategic, while the former is easy to measure the latter seems difficult for them. It is, however, in the final and more important part of the chapter where the authors emphasise the importance of soft determinants of urban competitiveness that includes interaction and cultural activity. Also, they emphasise roles such as reducing social inequalities and tolerance of diverse culture and traditions as symbolic of a heightening urban competitiveness.
The fifth chapter is something that epitomises the objective of the book. Strongly written, it traces the history of urbanisation in Europe and the USA and arrives at a conclusion that cities are rapidly moving out of the clutches of the state while more functions are being divulged to the supranational entities. Second, invoking the works of Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, Jordi Borja, Manuel Castells and Edward Glaeser as being influenced by Friedmann’s work, the authors question these urbanists’ enthusiasm for large cities. Following from that, they conclude that there is no absolute relation between large cities and urban competitiveness. The following paragraphs voice the active role of innovation, culture and creativity in shaping the fate of a city irrespective of its size. Largeness is determined more by the ‘competitive core’ or the population that actually contributes to urban life. However, the way the authors have addressed the status of capital cities as ‘state-anchored industrial districts’ is generally accepted but nonetheless debatable.
The book advances many useful insights but the most important is the voicing of urban autonomy that the authors’ claim is increasing in absolute terms. Though they consider autonomy as a linear function, they miss nuances of autonomy as having a number of non-discrete characteristics while being heteronomous (Bulkeley et al., 2016). However, given the broad dimension it covers, the book has less scope for such a comprehensive explanation. Second, their idea of a ‘competitive core’ as something that matters for urban competitiveness is an appropriate ground for attributing smaller cities with similar values as large metros, provided the core of the city is competitive enough. Castells’ space of flows is referenced for making a case for cities that are smaller in geography but larger in ‘attractiveness’. Third, in tune with the New Urban Agenda (United Nations, 2016), the authors discuss right from the start the prioritising of culture and cultural diversity in the competitive process. This concern for the context has built strong foundations for including local needs and aspiration as a crucial factor in urban competitiveness.
The case studies in the sixth chapter provide enough evidence that disregarding path-dependency has in fact worked for number of cities. This has serious implication for cities in the developing world, especially India where most of the larger cities have eroded their historical base of economy and have subscribed to new economic formats. Lastly, diverging from the technocratic rationality of most of the other urban economic and geographic theorising, the authors have repeatedly emphasised soft determinants of competitiveness such as inter-personal interactions, cultural activities, undifferentiated society and creative ambiance. Such an outlook broadens the scope of urban competition and makes it more inclusive.
Kresl and Ietri have exhaustively pressed the cause of agglomeration much in resonance to the seminal paper by Scott and Storper (2015) and the New Urban Agenda (UN, 2016). But, they have not simply restricted it to spatial contiguity but also included networked space, referring to the work by Borje Johansson and John Quigley (2004), and associations as an alternative to spatial proximity. Thus making sufficient space for smaller urban centres to function and prosper through engaging in development networks and associations.
The book seems to be lacking on two fronts - firstly, ‘conforming to disciplinary stereotypes’ (Bunnell, 2015) a reader like myself would have appreciated a couple of maps in the sixth and the seventh chapters, especially as one of the authors is a Geographer by profession. The authors seem to be reluctant in acknowledging a state’s active participation in city formation. Reading a beautiful response by Walker (2016), we can understand how agglomeration is brought about by state-generated surplus. That is, state action is inevitable for agglomeration effects to take place.
This book is a worthwhile addition to the urban competitiveness literature given one of the authors’ long-standing contributions. It provides important insights into facets of urban economics for scholars of urban studies.