Author Archives: Patrick Willcocks
Birmingham’s Overseas Visitors – Flatlining for a decade
Tourism is very important to Birmingham; the Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP has recently chosen it (In its Strategy for Growth) as one of the key sectors it wants to grow. Recent figures produced from the International Passenger Survey confirm that Birmingham is treading water when it comes to overseas overnight visitors. The chart below […]
Birmingham Made Me – Dont Miss this
Birmingham’s second Design Expo is coming up next month and I wanted to post a short piece on it as it looks really good. The event over 16 days hosted largely in Millennium Point covers a lot of interesting ground; taking Design in its widest sense. It’s programme can be seen on its website (here). […]
Towards Sustainable Transportation: Cooperation and Transport challenges in European Metropolitan Regions
CATCH-MR: An EU Interregional Project Seven metropolitan regions, stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, worked during 2010-2012 to investigate strategic approaches to achieve more sustainable transport. The joint planning office for Berlin and Brandenburg was lead partner, and the final conference was organized by the Province of Rome. The 12 project partners organized their […]
What link is there between Digbeth and SimCity
You may not have noticed but for the first time for many years there is a new version of SimCity; the urban planning video game. In an interview (here) with the lead designer Stone Librande he discusses how it has developed. Now what is the link to Digbeth. (For those of you not cognisant with Birmingham; […]
Air pollution: the hidden and neglected killer!
Now this is not my area of expertise but I thought I ought to raise at least the issue of air pollution in our cities, particularly outside of London. I have been following recently the impact of the EU Air Quality directives on the UK and the fact that at many sites in the UK […]
Quirky Festivals for Quirky Places
I recently did a blog post on the forthcoming Digital Shoreditch Festival which seems to exactly fill the billing for the title of this post. Shoreditch is a fascinating area, close to the City of London but with none of its coldness. It draws from the artistic and entrepreneurial drive of its host borough Hackney […]
Transport in Cities of the Future – Yes we may be car less!
Now this is interesting stuff. Don’t read the LEP strategy or even any current Birmingham City Council strategies if you want to know what this might look like. Just listen to Julia King in the video opposite to see what we need to do and then come along to see Professor Miles Tight. His lecture […]
Digital Shoreditch – An Interesting Festival
If you are a techie/a social media junkie or someone like me who is interested in the link between digital, innovation and place there is a really interesting week coming up in Shoreditch – titled Digital Shoreditch. A week focussing on Tech City Tomorrow’s World – what’s coming up round the corner Future Brands – […]
Greater Birmingham’s Strategy for Growth: A step forward
An ambitious plan for the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership was launched today. I will review this in the next few days but on a quick look, it is an advance of where we were, but it is tentative on the how, tentative on what is needed to happen and how it will […]
Measuring Innovation in Europe – How the UK and West Midlands fare
Originally posted on Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands:
Recently the EU published two major documents on Innovation within the EU. Firstly the 2013 Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) (download here) which looks at EU and national performance on Innovation and secondly the 2012 Regional Innovation Scoreboard (download here) which attempts albeit with fewer datasets to look…
UrbanPivot 