Introduction

The creation of a ‘competitive’ city is a goal that has proved consistently alluring to local economic development policy makers. Yet the notion of ‘urban competitiveness’ remains a somewhat nebulous one, its conceptual turbidity rendering its measurement notably problematic. The purpose of this chapter is to begin to address this by exploring both the means by which competitiveness might be conceptualised in a rather firmer way, and the ways in which it might be measured. Our aim in doing so is to suggest a prototype approach, which can help detect, and make sense of, variations in urban competitiveness across a range of cities.

Academic comment on the concept of urban competitiveness has been notably extensive, in part reflecting disagreements about its meaning (or, at a deeper level, its value). Its popular usage has tended to be as an equivalent of economic performance in the broadest sense of the term, but it is a concept that remains highly contested. Much of the debate has been fractured between two near-antithetic conceptions. At one extreme is the view – prominent, for example, in the wide-ranging economic geography literature on the subject – that an array of contextual components dictates the competitiveness of particular geographical areas. ‘Networking’, ‘innovation’, and ‘agglomeration’, for example, are all frequently cited as essential underpinnings to (and consequences of) a place’s competitiveness. ‘New industrial districts’, ‘neo-Marshallian nodes’, ‘learning regions’, ‘Porterian clusters’ or (sundry) other variants are all examples of the sorts of places in which these competitive circumstances are held to apply most graphically (Boddy, 1999). Porter (1990), for example, contends that the competitiveness of nation-states is the result of a variety of forms of intervention, from broad macroeconomic policy at one level, to business management practices and procedures on the other. And, at the same time, sub-national policy intervention – for instance, in skills and education – also has an important role in creating competitive advantage for certain localised clusters of industries, according to Porter.

By contrast, more equivocal readings challenge the degree to which places (as opposed to firms) can ever be said to be ‘competitive’. The crux of this critique centres on the degree to which, in the context of a global economy dominated by transnational firms and flows of capital, national economic performance (or competitiveness) can have any real meaning (Buckley et al, 1988; Rapkin and Strand, 1995).