Retrospect and prospect: from a new dark age to a new dawn of planning enlightenment

ABSTRACT

This is a summary of the Editorial of the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of European Planning Studies. The editorial summarizes three representative articles from planners and economic policy actors published in 1993, the first year of publication of the journal. These write of threats and possibilities from privatized planning, from the European Single Market and the prospects for regional innovation policy. In the second part, nine papers are summarized. These range from an exegesis of the Anthropocene, the rise of populism and the transition in neoliberalist planning, and migration as a city planning issue in European cities. Other papers then analyse aspects of evolutionary change upon city and region policy and process dynamics. Finally a group of papers explore the rise of creative cities, 4.0 era industry and services and the role of ‘starchitects’ in city renewal as well as 4.0 digital settlements.

KEYWORDS:

• Privatization
• Single Market
• regional innovation policy
• Anthropocene
• neoliberalism
• migration
• spatial dynamics
• 4.0 era
• digital settlements

Introduction

This Special Issue of European Planning Studies (EPS) is the culmination of an enjoyable process of assembling a variety of contributors, reviewers and supporters of the journal to mark its 25th Anniversary. EPS opened its doors to display its first publications in January 1993, having been established in the previous year, when all the hard work of networking with those aforementioned contributors, reviewers and supporters to call on their willingness to help the new journal actually occurred, although the networks were in many cases already real and by no means ‘virtual’. One of these involved colleagues at KU Leuven in Belgium – especially Chris Kesteloot who invited me to present a lecture at the Geography department in 1981 on my forthcoming book Theories of Planning & Spatial Development (Cooke, 1983). Being a Catholic university meant some professors were dog-collar-wearing priests and my thesis was fashionably Gramscian – or as they may have thought Marxian – as my memory is of being critiqued for presenting a pessimistic, indeed ‘disappointed’ perspective on life. To disprove that, we and new friends like Erik Swyngedouw, went to Mort Subite (‘Sudden Death’) in Brussels in the hope of meeting Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism (1975) who was a regular there, but not that night.

Nevertheless, it was and, in my recent experience, still is, a convivial ‘intellectual’ bar with a certain fin de siècle charm. Later, it became a meeting place involving the Johns Hopkins European Centre for Regional Planning and Research, based over the border at Lille, represented by associate director Frank Moulaert, who assisted Jack Dyckman the celebrated planning theorist (contemporary of leftish John Friedmann, Harvey Perloff and Lowdon Wingo; Gleye, 2014) in running the centre. In the preface to a succeeding book (Cooke, Wells, Moulaert, Swyngedouw, & Weinstein, 1992) I wrote:

This book is dedicated to Jack Dyckman, who died in the spring of 1987. The research on which this book is based was a project … whose birth was an evening at the Brasserie de la Paix, hosted with typical generosity by Jack at his favourite restaurant in Lille.

At approximately that time I was introduced by Erik to head of KU Leuven’s Institute of Urban Planning, Louis Albrechts. By then, 1983, my book had been published and kindly reviewed in IJURR by no less than Ed Soja, late professor of planning at UCLA. Indirectly, this eventually led to a KUL Visiting Professorship from 1985 to 1990. On each annual lecturing visit discussions among Erik, Louis and me led to the formation of an idea to establish a journal to promote, publicize and critique European planning studies. It was in the era of the European Monetary System and the run-up to the Maastricht Treaty on a European Single Market defined by the theory of open internal borders, consolidation of EMS into a common currency and fuller implementation of the four freedoms of free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour. To set EPS up, Louis and I agreed to meet legendary CEO David Green at the Carfax publishing HQ in Abingdon which, being towards Oxford meant we ‘detrained’ at Didcot. The upshot was a successful meeting, a publishing agreement and, probably, lunch at a Thames-side inn like the Ferryman’s, followed by a visit to design the cover in an Oxford design house opposite the Blue Coyote. Accordingly, we had a journal to publish.

In this brief editorial, apart from odd reminiscences, I shall both introduce some key 1993 contributions and summarize the articles commissioned or selected for inclusion in this commemorative Special Issue. Accordingly, I will also say something about the changing themes and perspectives that strike me as significant retrospectively and prospectively. Readers of sound mind will recall that the general context was one of reasonable optimism. There was above all a new perspective on the implications for economic development and spatial policy caused by the recent emergence of the European Structural Funds, a light touch subsidiarity-respectful guidance for a spatial planning perspective and the prospect of new instruments from the EU Directorates of Research, Regions, Enterprise and Innovation to further regional innovation policy. Above all, there was a European recognition of the importance of environmental planning underlined by widespread acceptance of the importance to human existence of a commitment to sustainability, if not yet full awareness of the perils associated with climate change. So some of the retrospective flavours of issues arising and interventions of representative contributors are given in the following section while similar thematic structuring is given to the content of the current anniversary Special Issue in the one after that.

Retrospective: dawn of a new dark age?

In our first volume and first issue in 1993 Peter Hall was invited to write the first article. I knew Peter from a commission stint I did organized by the Regional Studies Association into the spatial effects of Margaret Thatcher’s administration upon the North/South Divide. Just as today, with even more venom, Tory governments had presided over massive policy and financial support to London and South East England at the expense of deindustrialization, unemployment and despair elsewhere (Thatcher’s ‘Moaning Minnies’ said it all). I had eventually to make myself known to the mainly Social Democratic Party (SDP) membership of this ad hoc grouping as a delegate from Wales (geographically South, if economically North) by taking issue with Peter and others’ discourse about south Wales being ‘the subsidised end of the M4’. They looked on a bit sheepishly as I listed some of the billions of government money that subsidized London civil service jobs, transport infrastructure, docklands redevelopment, cultural investment, defence expenditure, tourism promotion and such like, for which no equivalent amounts of public subsidy occurred either in Wales, northern England, Scotland or for that matter Northern Ireland. My Gramscian reading had come in useful in enlightening my colleagues on how hegemony worked even among those of ‘metropolitan’ provenance nominally interested in and concerned about ‘uneven development’.

Nevertheless, as, later I got to know Peter better when I became an examiner at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, I found him both combative and courageous in defending the planning interest against the more powerful architectural interest represented on various examiner’s boards. Thereafter, we got on well, as did most people who got to know him: even the architects. In his article, originally presented to the AESOP-ACSP joint conference in Oxford in 1991, he stressed that both in Europe and in the U.S., there was a major difference for planning in the switch from boom to recession. During the 1990s a major challenge would be to find new ways of public–private partnership in financing new urban infrastructure at a time when developer contributions – a major innovation of the 1980s – would have, he thought, dried up. This particularly applied to the European high-speed train system – one critical element of which would run through the East Thames Corridor, one of Britain’s major urban developments in the coming years. In the U.S., planners were likely to remain more locally focused, less internationally concerned, than in a Europe in which national barriers were rapidly eroding. This was interesting because he was both an academic and a government adviser on land use-transportation strategy for East London. The rail link was built and it was even more privatized though significantly publicly subsidized, as was the Thames-side Docklands Development Corporation, the Thatcher government’s preferred urban infrastructure investment vehicle. But as noted he was seeing effects of the current recessionary hiatus after various ‘Black Wednesdays (or Fridays)’ including the U.K.’s expulsion from the EMS. As for the U.S., it certainly became more ‘locally focused’ after 2016, until when it had been the hegemon (albeit massively unevenly developed) in the push towards total economic globalization (Bridle, 2018).

In tune with our keenness to engage academic thinking about spatial processes with that of relevant policy communities, the second article in our inaugural issue was by Romano Prodi (1993), later twice Italian Prime Minister (1996–1998; 2006–2008) and, in between, President of the European Commission (1999–2004). I met him when he was an economist at Nomisma a left democratic research consultancy in Bologna. As such he was, as I recall, fearful of Maastricht because he thought it meant the core (or ‘kernel’) of the Italian banking and finance system would reveal its weakness thus being vulnerable to foreign takeover. This partly explains why, in Brexit, financial services are hardly affected as much as other sectors by freedom of movement in services and Italy was by no means alone in sharing that fear. However, his article analysed the need for clarification of the competences to be attributed to national or local authorities in Italy in the face of new protagonists for economic development recognizing the regional level of industrial policy. In particular, the article underlines the fact that the variation between the north and the south of the European Community is the result of a variety of initial conditions, whose presence presupposes (as in Germany) a stable social and institutional reality, motivated towards development which cannot be guaranteed by the lack of an efficient local public system (as in Italy), endowed with adequate resources and competence to deal with new processes (market-led technological innovation) of development. In other words, he was looking for a more federal Italy with greater powers for regional innovation policy and intelligent urban planning policy.

Well, his masterful analysis was far from fulfilled. The Italian banking system has been in a critical state for the past decade. It was kept afloat only by enormous financial transfers from the Italian state that contributed to pushing up its debt-to-GDP ratio to over 137%. Its largest bank UniCredit is today in merger discussions with French bank SocGen (Société Générale) amid Italy’s prevailing, volatile economic situation. An alliance between The regionalist League (formerly Northern League), anti-immigrant, anti-regional development transfers (to the South or Mezzogiorno) and The Five Star Movement (MS5) that is anti-EU, anti-Eurozone and willing to breach EU fiscal protocols, is the apotheosis of Prodi’s worst fears about the possible disintegration of Italy, departure from the EU and loss of control of the core Italian banking system. Needless to say, the long post-war absence of resilience in Italy’s deprived South has eventually been resolved by being deemed impossible to achieve. Accordingly, such historic developmental transfers as may have provided a long-lasting life-support system for the regions have been effectively terminated.

Whereas a recent commentator on the ‘new dark age’ heralded by populism, social media and ‘fake news’ berates the ‘computational thinking’ – reductionist, linear, and ‘solutionist’ – for much of the system ignorance most modern humans experience and display, the opposite is beginning to be true. Accordingly, where ‘solutions’ can no longer be ‘planned’, the problem can be ignored and policy efforts are abandoned. Thus beyond ‘incrementalism’ the conservative policy paradigm, much practised by neoliberalists, policy has reached the ‘minimal state’ nirvana of ‘impossibilism’. We can see this having begun in the pre-Trump American ‘Rustbelt’, the deindustrialized cities of northern England (where instead of a politically promised ‘Northern Powerhouse’ dream, neoliberal private rail franchise policy resulted in the nightmare negative dialectics of ‘impossibilist’ train scheduling, including failed emergency train timetabling). The author in question (Bridle, 2018) blames these on ‘system complexity’ which, elsewhere, are referred to as ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow, 1999) caused by over-ambitious corporate financial and goals-achievement miscalculation, over-centralised private control (much blame attached here for northern England’s train service meltdown), reckless over-reliance on government outsourcing (the heart of London’s Grenfell Tower housing disaster that cost 71 lives) and incompetent regulatory risk- and project-management by local and central government. Perrow (1999) blames ‘tight coupling’ among inter-related systems as a proximate cause of normal disasters. But recent experience leads to a different, worse conclusion, where systems are out of human control. Thus in London’s Grenfell Tower disaster and the July 2005 underground train bombings, by Islamist bombers, professionals did not know, were untrained, or mis-trained so that neither citizens nor responsible authorities knew who was in charge. Comparison with Nordic experience shows active learning, training and disaster-planning is designed to give the fire service primacy in such circumstances unless it is later determined that a crime has been committed, in which management primacy passes to the police. In the U.K. victims of terrorist bombing were left bleeding because ambulance services could not reach the sites of the underground explosions. In Grenfell Tower different fire commanders gave different, conflicting advice to potential victims – including staying put inside a blazing inferno, which cost unnecessary lives. This was to reap the whirlwind of no planning or a little, failed non-planning action that had been left to a kind of ‘institutional invisible hand’. In other words evident is an absence of judicious planning competence and methodology where, in Pasteur’s terms ‘fortune favours the prepared mind’.

In our third reprise of an article from 25 years ago, embodying some of the thinking that retrospectively marked the projected aims of the new journal, is that written by then, and until relatively recently, Brussels desk-officer for regional development at the European Commission Mikel Landabaso (Landabaso, 1993). Both Louis Albrechts and I believed in improving academic engagement and we secured meetings with various officers of DG Regio (then DG13). Often with Mikel Landabaso’s chief, Bob Shotton, we would find an hour in one or other’s offices or sometimes in the bar of Kitty O’Shea’s Irish pub before DG13 moved away from the Berlaymont and nowadays to a central bureau and a back office in a kind of Alphaville on the Brussels outskirts. Always on the agenda was how spatial analysis and policy might become more attuned to evolving more ‘innovative regions’ i.e. to get away from the cognitive straitjacket of simplistic thinking on budgetary allocations, through emphasizing policy content over process (‘planning and spatial development’). To begin to do this involved discussions on how to build alliances with DG Research and the Luxemburg-based DG 16 where, the nascent Innovation and Enterprise (Entrepreneurship) interests lay. Initially, it was less the geographical than the cognitive distance that lay between these three policy fields. Regional development had large budgets to disburse to lagging regions, once the Structural Funds had been established, DG 10 managed the sizeable Science & Technology Framework Programme for research, while DG16 which housed Innovation and Enterprise had negligible budgets. At that time, regional aid was perceived largely as funding infrastructure, notably highways, ports and airports and that involved negotiating with large construction and logistics firms. Research largely meant universities, participating larger and some SME firms (including public and private research consultancies). Innovation and enterprise was ultimately there to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It took the best part of 20 years for the regional development interest to integrate regional innovation policy. This followed pioneering experimental measures to promote Regional Technology Plans, later Regional Innovation Strategies that morphed into structural allocation funds in support of all regions submitting a Regional Innovation Strategy (3) to receive funds for innovative and entrepreneurship policy content as well as fitting in with EU allocation procedures. Many EPS contributions laid out theoretical and practical studies of actual or projected regional innovation systems and/or strategies and these were often cited contributions to the evolution of this approach (e.g. Colletis, 1993; Uranga & Etxebarria, 1993).

In 2017 Landabaso was one of 8 from 18 staff of Romanian DG Regio Commissioner Corina Creţu to resign in protest at her work habits. Staff grew so concerned that the commissioner was taking too much time off that Landabaso, as her chef de cabinet, warned against blocking her schedule for ‘commissioner time’ or ‘no meetings’ because it might look suspicious. Staff sources said an open schedule meant she usually was not working during those times. Creţu said the blocked time in her calendar was ‘for reading’. She had made few legislative proposals although she oversaw spending of more than €350 billion on economic development projects in the EU’s poorer regions for the 2014–2020 period, roughly one third of the EU’s budget. Accordingly, Mikel Landabaso, confronted with ‘carrying the can’ for this egregious regime of policy ‘impossibilism’, departed in September following disagreements with the commissioner over the lack of rigour in her work schedule and how she spent her time on official business trips. After unsuccessfully warning her of these risks and resigning, Landabaso moved to EU Strategy and its Communications unit. Can it be any wonder that even U.K. friends who are EU ‘Remainers’ were appalled by this corruption and dereliction of duty while serious, competent and experienced ‘fonctionnaires’ were sidelined, all at the questionable behest of such a favoured member of ‘Team Juncker?’ (Palmeri, 2015).

This scandal has echoes of events at the neighbouring DG Research directorate whose Commissioner, former French prime minister, Édith Cresson was dismissed in 1999 after being indicted for fraud, embezzlement and nepotism after trying to appoint her dentist as an HIV/AIDS expert, a subject about which he knew nothing. The whole European Commission led by former Luxemburg prime minister Jacques Santer resigned in 1999 after it was criticized by an independent investigative panel for allowing prevailing egregious administrative practices, before in 2006 Cresson herself was found guilty as charged by the European Court of Justice but allowed to keep her Commission pension. The new Commission was led by its President Romano Prodi 1999–2004 who presided over the introduction of the Euro.

Ironically, the 20-year time-lag for the gestation period of regional innovation policy to evolve coincided with a continuation of the growing gap between EU and the U.S. innovation indicators. Nevertheless, accounts began to emerge at the end of the period suggesting that ‘peak innovation’ may have been reached. Authors including Gordon (2016); Erixon and Weigel (2016); Lindsey and Teles (2017); and Mazzucato (2018) argued that despite the appearance of a massively successful reformulation of the innovation paradigm whereby start-ups had displaced large enterprises as the innovation leaders, data suggested neither SMEs nor, in particular, large corporate enterprises of the kind traditionally aided by organizations like the EU, were actually innovative. Gordon compared innovation in the 2000s unfavourably with that of the 1890s when steam engines, electricity, pharmaceuticals and the automotive industries were truly and deeply transformative. The other three in various ways concluded that large corporations no longer innovated, but survived by unproductive rent-seeking practices where, for example, taking copyright (music) or trade-mark rents (fashion brands) from others or squatting on long-dead patents had become just another income stream (Taplin, 2017). Finally regulatory capture by corporates that may have once been recent start-ups (e.g. Facebook or Google) that were often perceived as ‘innovative’ were simply reorganizing traditional products or processes such as bookselling, communicating or, especially, advertising and could not seriously be considered ‘innovative’ in any meaningful way. If so, this places, on the one hand, a large question-mark over the perspicacity of policy ‘global controllers’ like the EU. While, on the other hand, turning their historic obsession with U.S. ‘innovation catch-up’ into another of those negative dialectics marked ‘impossibilist’ and blamed on EU over-attention to academic credulity, hubris or ‘fake news’. If the last were true, credulity would be more appropriately assigned to policy-makers in general (regional, national and supra-national) who got into policy branding like ‘clusters’, ‘resilience’, or ‘smart specialisation’ in their desire to be neoliberally ‘holier than thou’ than their often American industrial economist advisers for whom space is equally ‘impossibilist’.

Prospective: planning eclipse or a new dawn of enlightenment?

One of the ‘big shifts’ that is noticeable in the journal’s interests as briefly discussed above compared with those of the present day and prospective future is that the scale of analysis and the nature of the issues being tackled is so much greater. Thus, the earliest contributions were focused on local and regional colouring of an often blank canvas whereas nowadays, as the sketches to be depicted show, the scale has moved much higher, the challenges more ungovernable and the complexities far more ungraspable. An astute observer like Wolfgang Streeck (2016) even entitled his pessimistic neoliberal critique ‘How Will Capitalism End?’. There are five causes: first, the challenge to U.S. military and economic hegemony; second, large-scale collapse of consumer markets; third climate change; fourth artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics; and fifth, conflict between capitalism and democracy.

So, as three immediate examples demonstrate: the paper by Maria Kaika discusses the implications for planning of recognizing a new geological age – the Anthropocene – which involves thinking that is both messily empirical and soaringly abstract in its ambitions to overcome established ‘power laws’ by creating critical narratives and imagining society-friendly environmental limits to technological capital. This was once considered common-sense at the dawning of the planning era after the free-market hegemony that had prevailed hitherto. A question to ponder for this, as well as other ‘wicked problem’ areas (Rittel & Webber, 1973) that implicitly or explicitly urge action upon analysts as academics and planners, is how to break through the over-arching neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’ hegemony? In the past, hegemonic ‘assumptive worlds’ were eroded first, by critique, then by sustained mobilization of socio-political movements, or at least, sentiments, and finally by the achievement of political power and international influence and effects. We may cite the U.S. in F.D. Roosevelt’s time or the reforming post-war U.K. regime, where Labour defeated Churchill’s Tories or even, the Thatcher-Reagan ‘revolution’ that ushered in global neoliberalism from the former’s ‘Tory revenge’ election of 1979. Academic thought and protest had pre-figured this discourse-action process. Maria Kaika’s contribution here concentrates on the depredations wrought on the planet by the onset of the Anthropocene, dating – from in some arguments (Lewis & Maslin, 2018) – the sixteenth century Conquistador devastation of pre-Columban South America.

But a failure of contemporary socio-spatial political writing is a mystifying absence of critique. Intellectual work has become nearly indivisible from neoliberal apologetics – an opposite variant of the sociological aspiration for ‘performativity’ – but in the wrong direction. Most spatial science has, it seems, swallowed, then forgotten what has only temporarily become a would-be permanent (end-of-ideology) hegemonic political discourse. Kaika (2017) recently published a paper on ‘Don’t call me Resilient – Again!’ – a critique of the whole evangelizing ‘resilience’ and ‘smart cities’ discourse. Its rarity reminds the reader of Deresiewicz’s (2015) literary criticism argument about modern academe in his book parsed as ‘Excellent Sheep’, which is on the mis-education of students and the lowering of higher educational standards. Planners, regional scientists and spatial policy-formulators have become especially prone to grasp and recommend policy brands like ‘clusters’, ‘resilience’, ‘smart – this or that’ in an uncritical, ‘solutionist’ fashion. So, following beyond Kaika’s and others’ present contributions there is an urgent need to re-introduce critique into applied social scientific pedagogy as a desired first step, or a prelude to critically reconstructing practical advice and action in the spatial planning field.

A second example is presented in the contribution by Bob Jessop who argues that despite the emergence of critical narratives on neoliberalism and its depredations, exerted upon socio-economic communities by processes of uneven development, little real policy change has yet been registered. To the contrary any shift in hegemony appears to have been rightward, populist in inclination, protectionist and xenophobic. This has been seen in Trump’s U.S. and in Europe, in the U.K., Italy, Austria, many Eastern European countries, Slovenia being only the latest, and to lesser degrees in France and Germany. Reflections upon the U.K. case, living with a widely-considered ill-informed plebiscite result and facing self-ejection from the largest trade bloc in the world, with implications for economic development disparities, are also provided in the contribution. So populism is hardly a liberal shift, let alone a neoliberal one, demonstrating how difficult to read political scientists, economists and other social scientists have found the turbulent nature of ‘identity politics’ on which to construct a more progressive, planning-friendly platform.

The third big issue with uncertain planning implications is migration, tackled by Manfred Kühn for Germany, but also from a wider perspective. Closely inter-linked with populist political responses as mentioned – from politically relatively minor (not numerically) to major in Italy and somewhere in-between in Britain – this is a global process well-beyond the competence of the EU as a would-be ‘global controller’ of biblical scale movements of desperate and often desperately poor and/or war-stricken people. For example, Syria earns the baleful title of ‘site of the first climate change war’ in Bridle’s (2018) account of the wider question of global environmental change. It was in Syria but across the Middle East and North Africa that devastating drought, the rise of civil protest, leading in many cases to civil war, and subsequent repressive state terror led to the migration of hundreds of thousands, later to rise into the millions of refugees knocking on the doors of EU member states and cities. As Kühn states: Cities face a dilemma. They are responsible for integrating migrants but not for recruiting them. Urban growth policies and urban planning approaches often aim to attract highly skilled workers, creative classes and students. But cities have no control over the inflow of refugees, so the contribution seeks to assess which immigration strategies German cities are developing and whether a shift from reactive integration plans to proactive immigration policies is occurring.

Moving on, the next group of contributions seeks to tackle some of these issues, notably yawning disparities, at least on the level of explanation for ways in which heterodox, evolutionary and theoretically informed thinking may move us towards a pathway out of the complexities, not to say chaos, of the neoliberal non-planning hegemony. As Robert Hassink and Klaas Fröhlich indicate, we live in times of high economic and political instability, times in which ‘fake news’ and alternative facts are created and in which some people are losing trust both in the state, the political establishment, as well as in science. In such times, it seems more essential than ever for academic researchers to work with clearly defined concepts and rigorous research methods. In regional studies, this is not only essential for making scientific progress, but also from a policy perspective. In many cases, however, fuzzy concepts do not emerge overnight, but develop over time in a process that has been termed ‘conceptual stretching’, a process in which concepts start to mean different things at different scales and to different authors In this contribution, regional ‘resilience’, an influential concept in the academic field of regional studies and among regional policy-makers, is analysed from a conceptual stretching perspective. However, at the same time, it has been criticized for being fuzzy, and for having been quickly adopted by policy-makers without clearly defining and understanding it. The origin of the concept (mainly in ecology) might have implications for conceptual stretching and re-conceptualization. Resilience originates from neighbouring disciplines. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at analysing the literature on regional resilience from a conceptual stretching perspective.

Taking up some of Kaika’s concerns in thinking about how new narratives and new imaginaries may be fashioned to break through, for example the global economy’s continuing ‘carbon lock-in’, Franz Tödtling and Michaela Trippl investigate how new regional growth paths emerge and what policy concepts are most adequate for nurturing their evolution. New industrial paths are often portrayed as the result of market-driven processes and Schumpeterian entrepreneurial efforts. This view evangelizes a neoliberal policy approach that restricts the role of public interventions to the setting up a suitable regulatory frame and supporting an entrepreneurial climate. The theoretical underpinnings and policy perspectives of this approach have been challenged by the innovation system literature, which offers a systemic view on the rise of new growth paths and advocates a more proactive role of public policy. This article investigates the role of policy models beyond these traditional ones. The authors contrast different variants of systemic and multi-scalar policy concepts for new regional industrial path development. Their ‘green-inflected’ literature-based policy study shows that more recent models go beyond new path development and growth per se, paying more attention to the direction of innovation and change, and to policy approaches for achieving more sustainable forms of development. They scrutinize the theoretical and empirical bases of these new policy models and discuss why they are superior to neoliberal and older systemic ones.

Finally, for the moment, Fiorenza Belussi reminds us that early-stage thinking about what became a regional policy mini-hegemony from the 1990s onwards regarding industrial districts (old discourse) and clusters (more modern discourse) is based on seminal writings of Alfred Marshall (father of neoclassical economics but also a proponent of ‘Garden Cities’) and is thus both ‘home and away’ with the laissez-faire dogma of his century and that succeeding it. Marshall’s industrial district story was re-discovered by the heterodox Florentine economist, Giacomo Becattini, who ‘socialised’ the more arm’s length Marshallian concept of an Italian ‘industrial district’. This was more based on trust, co-operation and reciprocity than pure competition and the various Marshallian spillovers (externalities) from fortune among functioning economic communities such as he found in Italy. But the concept of a ‘cluster’ that was promoted during the 1980s by Michael Porter, and highlighted the importance of geographically clustered and interconnected firms and institutions emphasized only the ‘competitive advantage’ enjoyed mainly by firms in highly specialized and particular fields. Both models have often been described as static and locally self-contained. However, various empirical research studies have suggested their increasing involvement in processes of change, renewal, and – above all – internationalization. In this context, the study of cluster lifecycles is of particular interest. It shows the presence of an irreducible heterogeneity, both in the initial conditions of cluster formation and during the various evolutionary path dependences followed. These show the emergence – including that of global ‘superclusters’ – like inter-continental smartphone constellations (competitive but reliant on trust and co-operation) and far from the stereotyped Porterian image. The recent entry of multinationals into such clusters, and the phenomena of homegrown (‘born global’) multinationals themselves, not only question the canonical cluster models, but contribute to showing how interwoven the evolution of local economies and multinationals is. A rich number of empirical cases are presented in the paper.

The Special Issue moves on with a paper of mine that bridges intentionally the evolutionary spatial agglomeration analytics of the preceding meso-analyses with more urbanized, local yet also global economic change and economic development processes. My paper on the latest ‘supercluster’ engagement of diverse local-regional technological innovation platforms is the bridge towards recent contributions to path renewal and new path formation in the creative and cultural industries. But first, changes in leading-edge urban and regional development processes and policies are significantly led by the rise of the ‘Quaternary’ or 4.0 Era of economic growth. Few such growth spaces exist yet but they have prodigious global reach from locations like Cambridge (as the exemplar here), Israel and Silicon Valley. Their surface spread has led to the designation ‘thin globalisation’ compared with ‘thick’ antecedents based on manufacturing and routine services (Rodrik, 2011). Each displays ‘post-cluster’ or ‘platform’ inter-connectivity and even early signs of ‘de-globalisation’ via on-shoring of suppliers (an effect of Trump administration protectionism). Pioneers in ‘crossover’ innovation 4.0 platform evolution include ‘flagship’ corporations like FAGAMi (Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft). These and other flagships acquire and site labs in proximity to Cambridge’s and other university research institutes and talent. They work to what seems like a neoliberal ‘Plan for the Future’ in at least three cases embedded in futuristic urban design utopias. This further advantages innovation ‘microsystems’ like Cambridge and innovation ‘macrosystems’ like Silicon Valley that evolve diversified ‘platform-clusters’ of ‘crossover’ innovations flowing from interactions among microelectronic systems, advanced mobility, machine learning, AI, robotics and healthcare. The research problem is how can such extreme uneven growth polarization be corrected?

A rather neglected part of the dynamic business growth chain played by the entrepreneurial university is the role of the entrepreneurship department. This operates both within and beyond the institutional level, involving wider local, regional and national economic development interests as studied by Rhiannon Pugh and colleagues in France and the U.K. They propose investigation into entrepreneurship departments, and indeed other types of departments not yet captured in the literature, as key drivers of regional economic development within and beyond the concept of the entrepreneurial university. So much has the new technology start-up model grown in reputation since its inception in the late 1960s in Silicon Valley that many industrial and entrepreneurship economists assign it the main source of innovation-led productivity in advanced economies. As shown above, this function seems now to have been forsaken by ‘rent-seeking’ larger corporations (Erixon & Weigel, 2016). But now the likes of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (also former U.S. federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen) have observed that new technology SME ‘business dynamism’ declined from 70% of U.S. gross job creation from 1992 to 2011 down to 10% today. In the U.K. some official concern is expressed regarding SME ‘zombie firms’ kept on life-support by quantitative easing and cheap credit. So an innovative take on university and other entrepreneurship start-up dynamics might be to study if and why this happens to the same extent in Europe (‘The American Dream is now a myth’; Stiglitz, 2015).

A different but still impressive path renewal trajectory has been researched and conceptualized by ‘Rosella’ Lazzeretti and Stefania Oliva in their study of the new growth by ‘mindful deviation’ of an old centre of Renaissance Art confronted with a pressure for urban transformation to diversify an over-heating tourist industry by evolving as a global fashion leader, not only in production, fashion-design and luxury consumption but also ‘experience’. This occurs through establishing fashion as ‘spectacle’ in the form of interesting architectural design museums but also those of leading fashion brands like the Gucci Museum and that of Dolce and Gabbana. Moreover, the Barberino and Regello ‘designer outlets’ were in 2017, shopping destinations for 6 million tourist visits to Florence, mainly from China, Russia and South Korea (Willan, 2018). As the rest of this paragraph shows and even more the following paper on the role of ‘starchitects’ in the urban transformation of traditional, sometimes ex-industrial, cities here represented are the artefacts of contemporary ‘commodity fetishism’ rather as laid out in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished ‘Arcades Project’ as described by Jeffries (2017).

But what Benjamin draws attention to again and again, particularly his long laboured-over but at his death incomplete Arcades Project, is how the endless substitutability of commodities (both things and humans), and our immersion, under capitalism, in a fantasy world of material well-being, ensure that we lose sight of the class struggle that underpins this phantasmagoria. It is as though capitalism, having rubbed out the true nature of class struggle and airbrushed historical contingency, had covered up the tracks of its murder and diverted us from our detective work with the captivating allure of commodities. But that seeming heaven is exposed by Benjamin as a kind of unwitting damnation – a ring of hell in which the consumerist faithful endlessly buy and sell, eternally deluded in believing that this activity will bring fulfilment. (Jeffries, 2017, p. 87)

So the paper aims to contribute to the debate of the economic transformation of cities discussing the case of Florence and its evolution from ‘art city’ to ‘creative fashion city’. According to the evolutionary vision of the path dependence model, the paper analyses the birth, development and establishment of the fashion industry within the city. This analysis seeks to understand if cultural and creative resources may contribute to the emergence of new trajectories or to the renewal – or decline – of existing ones. Results show that the existence of an endowment of cultural and creative assets and a base of knowledge and competences historically related to the artisanal tradition fosters the creation of a fashion cluster. Despite the specificities of the case, the paper may give some insights of the risks and opportunities related to rethinking local economic transformation following a cultural-led and creativity-oriented approach.

Concluding the Special Issue is the paper by Bartmanski et al., that explores ‘Situating Architectural Performance: “Star Architecture” and its Role in Repositioning Cities’. This refers to a Benjaminesque ‘phantasmagoria’ which started with the ‘Bilbao Effect’ showcasing the first major international work by leading ‘starchitect’ Frank Gehry in 1997. Thereafter, many ambitious, even hubristic city administrations have paid for marquee architectural practices to inscribe signature buildings upon their often moribund cityscapes. It doesn’t always work, as the Calatrava-led extravaganza in Valencia revealed (Boix, Rausell, & Abeledo, 2017). However, in this case of mid-size cities it has a symbolic performative role more than a competitive one, so correcting the received perspective considerably. More recently, though, the likes of Gehry and the U.K. practice of Norman Foster have been seen designing the neo-company towns of the social media giants Facebook and Google in their pursuit of 4.0 era industrial settlements to capture much-needed talented software and artificial intelligence (AI) workforces in urban laboratories and ‘fablabs’. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted at the Quayside (Toronto) announcement by Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs: ‘The genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of “all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge”’. Similar sentiments could have been uttered by Norman Foster whose practice announced its plan for Facebook’s Willow Campus company-town on land bought at Menlo Park, California by Facebook. Thus the prospect for leading edge planning is private not public and decidedly non-democratic for as Sadowski (2017) observes competing municipalities now coax tech companies by offering benefits like looser regulation and lower taxes. They create ‘innovation ecosystems’ made up of things like hackathons, incubators, and co-working spaces meant to attract programmers and venture capitalists. Digital districts, like the one being developed by Sidewalk Labs in Toronto, are the next-level version of these lures.

And so, readers will want to turn to read the articles assembled in this 25th Anniversary Special Issue. They are serious academics concerned at the neoliberal turning away from the idea of publicly-managed intervention to secure liveable outcomes for better quality urban and rural living and sustainable regional economic growth. As a final tribute to their commitment and my role as editor – which has had at times the exquisite qualities of high-heels tightrope walking – consider the following explanation for being a bit overdue by Bob Jessop:

… I was knocked off my bike by a van 8 weeks ago, breaking my jaw in three places, losing five teeth, fracturing my right elbow, and damaging my right shoulder and wrist … I could not type properly for four weeks. … If I can have 5 days, you will get a very good first draft.

Confronted by such fortitude in the face of U.K. urban transportation recklessness, this reminds us – with Walter Benjamin how, in his last essay, he wrote:

There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Jeffries, 2017, p. 23)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.