Positioning the Urban in the Global Knowledge Economy: Increasing Competitiveness or Inequality in Aarhus, Milan and Vienna

Major cities are increasingly focused on being competitive on an international scale, developing innovative service sectors and investing in human capital. This has contributed to reshaping local socio-economic systems towards a knowledge economy by strategically fostering key business clusters. But what happens in terms of social inequality in this process? The purpose of this article is to analyse whether issues regarding challenges of social inequality and polarisation are considered in the strategies of urban centres positioning themselves in the global knowledge economy. This leads to a discussion about how the cities’ strategies address potentially growing inequalities, combining goals of competitiveness, internationalisation and social inclusion. The article builds on case studies from Milan in Italy, Vienna in Austria and Aarhus in Denmark. The three cities are all drivers of growth in their respective regions and countries and are embedded in different national welfare regimes. At the same time, they display internal spatial differentiation in that the municipality covers areas of growth and affluence as well as deprivation. In the article, we combine analysis of policy documents and interviews with governance, business and community actors from the three locations. Our results show that the association between competitiveness and integration is shaped through specific state-city relationships, highlighting both the importance of the welfare framework and the specific urban policy tradition

På vej mod social mix? Konsekvenser af ufrivillig fraflytning fra udsatte boligområder

Sammenfatning: I de kommende år vil ommærkning, nedrivning og frasalg af almene boliger i de »hårde ghettoer« tvinge beboere til at fraflytte deres bolig. Denne form for ufrivillig fraflytning som konsekvens af strukturelle omdannelser af udsatte områder har vi ikke erfaring med i Danmark. For at kvalificere processen omkring og resultaterne af omdannelserne vender denne artikel blikket mod lande med lignende indsatser for at få svar på, hvad de internationale erfaringer med ufrivillig fraflytning fra udsatte boligområder er, og hvad vi kan lære af dem i dansk kontekst

Entrepreneuring in Diverse Neighbourhoods: Policies and Minority Business in Copenhagen, Istanbul, Milan and Warsaw

Recent literature claims that minority entrepreneurship is changing, e.g., entering non-ethnic sectors. A change partly related to spatial transformations (such as gentrification) in neighbourhoods where minorities are settled and to policies affecting their ventures. This article aims to disentangle how targeted and general policies affect minority entrepreneurship in neighbourhoods characterised by ethnic and class diversity in Copenhagen, Istanbul, Milan and Warsaw. Based on a comparative analysis of qualitative interviews, this article aims to answer the following questions: How do changes in neighbourhoods characterised by population diversity affect minority entrepreneurship? Are policies – especially those at city and neighbourhood level (including regeneration measures) – sustaining or challenging minority entrepreneurship? Our findings show that, despite local variations in terms of political economy, welfare structure and urban governance, notwithstanding displacing effects related to national and local policies, many minority businesses are responsive to neighbourhood changes and succeed to extend their market range beyond the ethnic or impoverished clientele

Contexts and Interconnections: A Conjunctural Approach to Territorial Cohesion

This article contributes to current debates around EU policy on territorial cohesion and its place-based approaches. Based on substantial empirical research in seven member countries in an on-going EU Horizon 2020 project, the article develops a conjunctural approach based on Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of place to provide insight into how local development functions in spatial and temporal dimensions. One of the main objectives of the case studies is to compare policy programmes and practices that seek to alleviate territorial inequality and generate economic growth and territorial cohesion. In such a comparison, the issue of conflating and rescaling administrative territorial units and boundaries demands particular attention. Administrative boundaries do not necessarily reflect the complexity and interconnections between policy actors, businesses, and local communities. Local specificities make it difficult to compare the local political room for manoeuvre due to different administrative principles, unequal degrees of devolution of competences or differences in constitutions, e.g., federal states versus unity states. In this article, we argue that, faced with an analysis of highly diverse cases, a conjunctural analytical approach can help to capture and unpack some of the places’ complexities and regional interconnections and be a useful supplement to more conventional comparisons of more similar places. Through two examples, the article discusses what the application of this conjunctural approach means in practice, how it helped shape our understanding of how differently and how it can be further developed to accommodate place-based approaches to researching territorial cohesion