Category Cities
UK City Productivity Musings
There has been much comment (and some puzzlement) in the last year about how and why productivity growth at national level has not returned back to pre-crisis levels. This article in the Economist goes over some of the theories behind why this might be happening. Given the publication of a broad measure of productivity […]
Overseas Visitors to England’s Core Cities
The ONS has just release figures for overseas visitors in England broken down at a County or Unitary Authority level. I have just had a quick play with these to pull out figures for the Core Cities (Not there CA/FUA definitions). These figures are averages from the period 2011-2013. The following graphic and table show […]
The Development of Policies Towards Cities in England in the last 10 years – (or so)
I am writing this as I have been asked to help organise a visit of Dutch policy makers who are keen to learn from our experience of City policy in England and whilst I have lived through it and had an input into some of it – I couldn’t find a succinct summary of this […]
Is Greater Birmingham connected and contributing to the debate on the future of English Cities
Today another important report has been published on the role of cities in the English economy by the City Growth Commission. The report titled Connected Cities: The link to growth argues that investment in infrastructure in UK has historically been low compared to our competitor countries and argues that a focussed approach on investment in […]
Cities and Regions at EU Open Days
This is just a short post to let you know about a fantastic event that happens every year in Brussels – EU Open Days – where cities and regions and a range of experts get to talk about how they are investing EU structural funds but also to consider deeper things like the review of […]
Where is the public debate on City Region Governance in Birmingham
I am returning to an old bug bear today. This was not planned but I was following by chance a public event/debate in Manchester relayed on twitter about #joiningtherevolution . This was a public debate with Howard Bernstein and others talking about the importance of working together with Liverpool and Leeds to further the economic […]
London’s Transportation Investment is not the Problem
There has been a lot of comment in recent months and years about the imbalance of transport investment between London and the rest of the English cities and regions and undoubtedly it is fair comment – investment is hugely imbalanced as the following graphic from the recent IPPR North report Still on the Wrong Track (May […]
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 […]
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…
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 […]
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