I was sleeping longer than usual but this quote (see below) woke up my urge to participate.
There has been an ongoing discussion if mega-regions – a term massively leveraged by Richard Florida – are the actual and even more the next big hubs of economic growth. Politicians, sociologists, and economists started not only graphing existing and future hot-spots but were also discussing what’s necessary to stay or become such an economic hot-spot.
My hometown Vienna (t d f), Austria certainly is a lively place, it’s of mid-size with a diverse economy. Still I’m not sure if Vienna will ever become such a mega-region – likely not I’d say. I remember there was once the ambition to find & define something like creative industries here. The idea was to garden a diverse environment that might attract talent and innovative thinking leading eventually to economic success. Still I have the feeling that around here we lack something like entrepreneurial spirit. Even worse I think that gardening efforts make no difference. They just petrify the status quo. On the other hand I experience a lively self-organized discussion culture in Vienna (evolved around initiatives like BarCamps), might be echo-chambers but then you need to start somewhere.
I can’t tell you though what’s right. Richard Florida’s article in the Atlantic (see quote below) just made me recapitulating what’s already known. A next step might involve forward thinking and talking about what emerges from an economic reset that’s going to happen.
How the Crash Will Reshape America – The Atlantic
(March 2009): “The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.”
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Tags: creativity, economy, Politics
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