Winner of the 2016 Jim Lewis Prize

In 2014 European Urban and Regional Studies awarded the first Jim Lewis Prize. The prize was established to mark the contributions of the former Editor, Jim Lewis, and to highlight the most innovative paper published in the previous year in the journal (see editorial announcement in volume 21, number 1, 2014). Following nominations from the journal’s editorial board members and careful consideration of these nominations among the journal’s editors, we are delighted to announce that the 2016 prize is awarded to Max Nathan for his paper “After Florida: towards an economics of diversity”, European Urban and Regional Studies 22(1): 3–19.

Nick Henry Editor-in-Chief

Adrian Smith Deputy Editor

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Max Nathan is Senior Birmingham Fellow in Regional Economic Development at Birmingham Business School, and is a Deputy Director of the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth. He is an economic geographer with a background in public policy. His research focuses on urban economic development, in particular the economics of immigration and diversity; innovation systems and tech clusters; and public policy for cities, especially policy design and evaluation. Max has over 15 years’ public policy experience in think tanks, consultancy and government, including at the UK Department for Communities and Local Government as an Economic and Social Research Council-funded Senior Policy Adviser. Max also co-founded the Centre for Cities, where he ran the research programme for its first three years.

I am hugely honoured to have won the 2016 Jim Lewis Prize for this paper, which is essentially an extended remix of the introductory chapter in my PhD thesis. It is a project that had its origins in the public and media debates about immigration and demographic change in the UK in the late 2000s; immigration had become a much more salient issue in Britain earlier in the decade, and the public conversation even then was highly charged. Like many Western countries, the UK has seen growing cultural, ethnic and religious diversity, with immigration one of the main drivers of change (Goldin et al., 2011; Putnam, 2007). Much of this new diversity was, and is, urbanised: cities have always enacted a strong pull on migrants, and “super-diversity” has emerged in some neighbourhoods (Vertovec, 2007). Some researchers have lined up to either praise these bigger, more cosmopolitan societies (Gilroy, 2004); others have focused on the social costs, often with little supporting evidence (Collier, 2013; Goodhart, 2013).

Richard Florida’s work was particularly interesting to me. Here was someone making an unabashed economic case for cultural diversity, but coming under academic fire both for his research methods and for his high-impact approach (Peck, 2005). I had written a highly critical piece for the Centre for Cities thinktank, where I was working at the time (Nathan, 2005); I wanted to see if a stronger economic analysis could be developed for thinking through the costs and benefits of diversity, especially for cities and urban places, and to fill in gaps in our knowledge of the UK experience.

The empirical analysis looked at the British urban system, at firms in London (Nathan and Lee, 2013), and at clusters of scientific inventors (Nathan, 2015). The seminal work of Ottaviano and Peri (2005, 2006) helped me develop a wider framework for thinking about diversity and urban economic outcomes, building from standard urban economics model to incorporate immigration shocks and changes in population mix. As it turns out, those papers also inspired a new community of researchers working at city, neighbourhood, firm and group levels. This important body of work identifies impacts on the production side (through task specialisation, innovation, entrepreneurship and trade) and on the consumption side (through amenities and the housing market). In theory these may be positive or negative; in practice, aggregate impacts are generally net positive, although this may hide important distributional gains and losses.

The paper in European Urban and Regional Studies summarises this emerging “economics of diversity” field, as it was in 2012, as an alternative to Floridian ways of thinking about diversity. Looking back, the paper accidentally captures an important pivot in Florida’s own research agenda, towards a more critical, reflexive take on urban growth trajectories and tough policy problems (Florida, 2010, in press).

Since the paper was written, the economics of diversity field has also continued to grow and evolve. More recently, a second wave of research has used firm-level microdata data to explore transmission channels in more detail (see Lewis and Peri (2015) and Kemeny (2014) for reviews). Other researchers have focused on diasporas and trade links (Docquier and Rapoport, 2012) and on high skilled migrants (Kerr et al., 2016). Just as importantly, new analysis has started to uncover both all-gains scenarios, and winners and losers from demographic change (Borjas and Doran, 2012; Bound et al., 2015; Moser et al., 2014). Now that migration and identity are at the core of political and economic crises across Europe, it has never been more important to understand the economics of diversity and to develop effective responses.