Author Archives: Patrick Willcocks
European Funding in the West Midlands 2014-20
I thought it was worth sharing my presentation to the West Midlands Economic Forum’s event on ‘Financial Flows’. My presentation was on European Funding in the West Midlands. After all the doom and gloom it turns out when you add the figures up the initial allocations to the region are 18% higher that in the […]
Greater Birmingham: The Name is not the main Game
In the wake of Evan Davies’s series ‘Mind the Gap‘ on London and its pre-eminence in the UK there has been much debate in Birmingham about the city particularly when yet again a poll carried out for the TV programme found that Manchester was viewed by many in the UK as the second city. There […]
Smart Specialisation in England; is this really LEPland?
As many of you may be aware ‘England’ is drawing up a smart specialisation strategy (S3) to fulfill the ex ante conditionality required for an England ERDF Operational programme. i.e. it is developing a national strategy to focus innovation investment under the ERDF programme as it has to under ERDF regulations. This is a tall […]
Creating successful Smart Cities in 2014 will be an economic, financial and political challenge, not an engineering accomplishment
Originally posted on The Urban Technologist:
Why insurers, pension funds and politics will be more important to Smart Cities in 2014 than “Living Labs” or technology. (The 2nd Futurama exhibition at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In 50 years’ time, how will we perceive today’s visions of Smart Cities? Photo by James Vaughan) I…
Birmingham City Council gets more Strategic
One of the focuses of this blog is to document strategies and plans arising from the Council. Why do I do this? Well after having worked for many years for the Council I was acutely aware that there was little internal debate about the coherence and delivery of these strategies and little debate about their […]
Cycling Copenhagen Style in Birmingham
This title is drawn from the recent press release (here) from Birmingham City Council outlining a new survey and reporting system to document peoples views on cycling in the city and progress in encouraging more of us to cycle on a biennial basis. It wants to emulate an approach put in place in Copenhagen – […]
Mapping Smart Cities in the EU: A New Study
The European Parliament has just published a report mapping Smart Cities in the EU. Now firstly one must welcome this attempt to try and assess the number of ‘smart cities’ and the scale of activity across Europe. As always with such reports it is a weighty tome and hard to get to grips with. It […]
Greater Paris – one of France’s new metropolitan areas
This is a really interesting blog post from Mark Kleinman picking up on the the creation of a Greater Paris metropolitan area. The French Government is in the process of creating three such bodies for Paris, Lyon and Marseille and below that is allowing cities and surrounding communes, who wish to, to consolidate decision making […]
Cities, Structural Funds and Smart Specialisation- What is the emerging picture
I want to look at the emerging role of cities in the new EU structural funds in a forthcoming blog post and wondered if there was feedback/ or anyone had information/sources on 1) Proposed Delegations down to Cities under the ITI initiative 2) Whether the 5% figure for Sustainable Urban Development is a minimum or […]
Smart Spaces – Smart Energy Bills
I came across a press release from Birmingham City Council today with a podcast outlining its involvement in a project called SmartSpaces. This is of interest to me because it is about energy saving in public buildings and it is funded through Europe. For the specialists amongst you it is funded through the CIP ICT […]
UrbanPivot 