Local development initiatives as promoters of social innovation: evidence from two European rural regions

Social innovation entered the academic discourse several decades ago and has since been seen as a way of tackling existing problems in various contexts. Although an extensive body of research has been conducted into the role of social innovation in urban context, there is still a gap when it comes to studying the role of social innovation in the development of rural areas. In this paper, an attempt is made to look at the role of Local Action Groups (LAGs) and Local Development Associations (LDAs) as promoters of social innovation in rural areas in Austria and Portugal, aiming to understand the role of such organisations and the challenges faced by the latter in promoting social innovation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

From global to local creative dynamics: the location patterns of art galleries

The aim of this chapter is to analyze art galleries’ locational patterns. We successively investigate regional, city and district scales. Firstly, we show that art galleries are concentrated  within historical centers of the art market in Western Europe and North America. Nevertheless, we highlight the emergence of gallery polarities in new art market areas in Asia or Latin America. Secondly, within these regions, galleries are concentrated in a few cities such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Thirdly, in each of these cities, most galleries are located in a few districts, either in affluent inner-city neighborhoods or in semi-peripheral areas subject to urban transformations. We assume that these location patterns can be explained through various agglomeration forces such as wealth, urban and cultural assets, and connectivity. But the formation of art gallery districts also results from the collective endeavour of art world actors’ to differentiate from the already established art districts, and from the strategies of private or public urban developers to enhance land value

Does urban shrinkage require urban policy? The case of a post-industrial region in Poland

The problem of depopulation in towns is present in most European countries. In Central and Eastern Europe it emerged primarily after the political transformation at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the often-significant demographic decline, the problem did not immediately become part of agenda-setting in towns’ local strategies. This paper discusses the above topics, focusing on the principal reasons for trivialization of depopulation in local policies of towns in the Silesian Voivodeship, Poland. In the discussion an emphasis is placed on the fact that in this region the issue of depopulation and urban shrinkage ‘vied’ with another consequence of transformation: unemployment. Because the Silesian Voivodeship is one of the largest regional labour markets in Europe, the confrontation of the two phenomena in local and regional policy took an original course characterized by phenomena such as policy taboo, trivialization, informal agenda-setting and mismatch strategies. The paper shows that while all the mentioned attributes of urban policy with respect to depopulation may be regarded as negative, considering the gigantic scale of the unemployment and depopulation phenomena and lack of experience in urban governance, they were a ‘natural’ reaction of the local authorities to the accumulated problems. It also indicates that in the studied region issues such as strongly marked morphological polycentricity and its (post)mining and (post)industrial nature were also not without significance