The adoption and adaptation of good practice : Cross-national knowledge transfer in placemaking using the peer review method

The transfer of knowledge is a prominent feature in transnational networks regardless of whether they are aimed at practitioners, policy makers or researchers. Yet the process of transferring knowledge between countries and organisations is poorly understood, while the inclusion of citizens in the knowledge transfer process receives very little attention. This paper makes a contribution towards closing this gap in knowledge by presenting the outcomes of transnational knowledge transfer project aimed at community engagement in placemaking processes. The paper analyses the process and the outcomes of the knowledge transfer before critically discussing the barriers and challenges that were encountered. It concludes that knowledge exchange needs to be organised not only between officials but also between them and the communities they want to engage in their home cities. The concept of shared leadership has been found to capture the dynamics of knowledge exchanges well, but to ensure that organisations benefit from the application of new knowledge shared leadership needs to be balanced with strong strategic leadership. The implications of including citizens in a learning process through which tactic knowledge is shared between officials and communities are also discussed.Non peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Knowledge Transfer in Commercial Feature Extraction for the Retail Store Location Problem

Location is the most important strategic decision in retailing. The location problem is markedly complex and multicriteria. One of the key factors to consider is the so-called balanced tenancy —i.e., the degree to which neighboring businesses complement each other. There are several network-based methodologies that formalize the notion of balanced tenancy by capturing the spatial interactions between different commercial sectors in cities. Some of these methodologies provide indices that have been successfully used as input features in location recommendation systems. However, from a predictive perspective, it is still unknown which of the indices provides best results. In this work, we analyze the performance of six of these indices on a set of nine Spanish cities. Our results show that the combined use of all of them in an ensemble model such as random forest significantly improves predictive accuracy. In addition, we explore the effect of knowledge transfer between cities from two different perspectives: 1) quantify how much the quality of solutions degrades when the balanced tenancy of a city is explored through the indices obtained from another city; 2) investigate the interest of network consensus approaches for knowledge transfer in retailing.Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through Excellence Network under Grant RED2018-102518-T, in part by the Spanish State Research Agency under Grant PID2020-118906GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and in part by the Junta de Castilla y León Consejería de Educación under Grant BDNS 425389

Identification of the regional and economic contexts of sustainable urban logistics policies

Urban logistics policies have become instrumental in achieving sustainable transport systems. Developing and emerging countries still lag far behind in the implementation of such policies when compared with developed countries. This exposure gap provides an opportunity for policy transfer, but this is a complex process requiring knowledge of many contextual factors and involving multiple steps. A good understanding of those contextual factors of measures by cities may be critical for a successful transfer. Our study aimed to identify the different contexts of urban logistics measures or policies worldwide and to assess their significance for policy transferability. In this study, urban logistics measures discussed in the literature were retrieved with a systematic literature review method and then the contexts were recorded, distinguishing between economic development levels and geographical regions. The analysis revealed that the economic level and geographical location of cities both have a strong association with the type of measure implemented. Barriers and drivers were identified by assessing policy transfer between developed and developing countries. Institutional and physical barriers appeared to be highly pertinent for a range of measures, while drivers or facilitators were identified from specific problems in developing countries and the respective measures in developed countries. Thus, the analysis of contextual factors can provide a first response to the key challenges and opportunities of sustainable urban logistics policies transfer to developing countries

Soft Skills, Tacit Ties: Exploring the Role of Non-Geographical Proximities in International Knowledge Transfer

Abstract The global city theoretical framework explains the paradox of growing concentration of economic activity in certain places in an era of globalization, in which distance appears to be “tamed” by information technology, by stating global cities manage the complexities that arise from the fact that firms increasingly operate in multiple markets. The sheer complexity of the skills and tasks performed in global cities is often believed to require ‘hypermobile’ professionals. However, literature concerning the geography of knowledge suggests that tacit knowledge (the type of knowledge the aforementioned professionals are assumed to deal with) is hard to transfer without a shared context and tends to be spatially clustered, while codified knowledge has a much more universal character and is more or less flowing freely around the globe. There thus seems to be a tension between the notion of a hypermobile, footloose elite on the one hand and the geographical embeddedness of their tacit knowledge on the other. However, in the literature on the geography of knowledge it is hinted that there could be other, non‐spatial forms of proximity (relational/cultural/institutional) that play a role in facilitating or hampering the transfer of tacit knowledge. Nevertheless, these assumptions have not yet been empirically scrutinized. In an attempt to shed light on these non‐spatial proximities and the role they play in shaping peopleʹs and knowledgesʹ global trajectories, highly skilled Indian employees of Capgemini in the Netherlands were interviewed. The employees dealing with tacit knowledge indeed report on an extensive adaptation process when changing geographies, companies or occupations. Deserving of special mention is the “global corporate sphere” the interviewees experienced at all multinational corporations they worked for. This sphere provides a common interpretational framework for tacit knowledge in different geographical settings, while at the same time it does not hamper the flexibility of the professionals involved

How To Transfer Tacit Knowledge for Living Lab Practice:Consideration on Tacit Knowledge Representations

Despite strong attention and wide ranges of practice, living labs have hardly scaled up for a decade as expected. For living labs as one of the innovative methods for social challenges in cities with high complexity and uncertainty, one of the critical challenges is in knowledge transfer of its practice. Practical tacit knowledge for living lab is often embedded within process, organization and operation, and hardly externalized. The inexperienced practitioners face a lot of uncertainty in implementation of living lab without clues where to tackle. Aiming at promoting the living lab practice widely, this paper investigates tacit knowledge externalization with three different representations. The analysis and comparison of external representations indicate a strong compatibility pattern between representation styles and practitioners’ maturity level on the relevant field. In the living lab practice, how to convey tacti knowledge should be considered carefully, depending on practitioners’ maturity level

Smart City Development with Urban Transfer Learning

Nowadays, the smart city development levels of different cities are still unbalanced. For a large number of cities which just started development, the governments will face a critical cold-start problem: 'how to develop a new smart city service with limited data?'. To address this problem, transfer learning can be leveraged to accelerate the smart city development, which we term the urban transfer learning paradigm. This article investigates the common process of urban transfer learning, aiming to provide city planners and relevant practitioners with guidelines on how to apply this novel learning paradigm. Our guidelines include common transfer strategies to take, general steps to follow, and case studies in public safety, transportation management, etc. We also summarize a few research opportunities and expect this article can attract more researchers to study urban transfer learning

Influence of atmospheric boundary layer depth on the ventilation performance over idealized urban surfaces

The mechanism of flows and scalar transfer over urban areas is complicated by the random city surfaces in which a detailed investigation is required in its parameterization. Despite the collective effort made by the researchers on urban air pollution problems, our knowledge on the interaction between flows and aerodynamic resistance over cities is limited. Apart from the roughness effect induced by the bottom of the urban boundary layer (UBL), the local atmospheric environment conditions and the city-level air quality are closely correlated but their importance is apparently overlooked. Therefore, as a pilot attempt, this study is conceived to examine the effect of UBL depth on the ...published_or_final_versio

How do cities approach policy innovation and policy learning? A study of 30 policies in Northern Europe and North America

This paper reports on a study of current practice in policy transfer, and ways in which its effectiveness can be increased. A literature review identifies important factors in examining the transfer of policies. Results of interviews in eleven cities in Northern Europe and North America investigate these factors further. The principal motivations for policy transfer were strategic need and curiosity. Local officials and politicians dominated the process of initiating policy transfer, and local officials were also the leading players in transferring experience. A range of information sources are used in the search process but human interaction was the most important source of learning for two main reasons. First, there is too much information available through the Internet and the search techniques are not seen to be wholly effective in identifying the necessary information. Secondly, the information available on websites, portals and even good practice guides is not seen to be of mixed quality with risks of focussing only on successful implementation and therefore subject to some bias. Officials therefore rely on their trusted networks of peers for lessons as here they can access the ‘real implementation’ story and the unwritten lessons. Organisations which have a culture that is supportive of learning from elsewhere had strong and broad networks of external contacts and resourced their development whilst others are more insular or inward looking and reluctant to invest in policy lessons from elsewhere. Solutions to the problems identified in the evidence base are proposed