Information and Communications Technology as Potential Catalyst for Sustainable Urban Development

Experiences in Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Marseilles and The Hague

Leo van den Berg, Willem van Winden

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138723559
• eBook ISBN: 9781351756624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This title was first published in 2002: The information revolution has deeply influenced the development of Europe's large cities. They are faced with new opportunities and threats from the information and communication technologies (ICTs) and require strategic policy responses. By examining and comparing five European cities - Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Marseilles and the Hague - this book sheds light on the impact of ICTs on urban development and considers the consequences for urban management. Case studies show how cities use new technologies to improve the delivery of municipal services, to increase civil participation and local democracy, to help their citizens and businesses make the shift to the information society, and to fight the digital divide. These analyses reveal strategic challenges and potential pitfalls for ICT policy. The book offers a unique international perspective on the impact and potential of information technologies on urban development. The integrative approach - taking economic, social and accessibility issues into account - reveals many new insights.

PART ONE INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT

Chapter One

ICT and the City: An Introduction

1 Introduction

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, information and communications technologies (ICTs) are at the centre of interest for both businesses and governments. Increasingly, urban policy makers are also concerned with the new developments, opportunities and threats offered by digital revolution, and feel the need to respond strategically.

Usually, technology policy is not associated with the urban level but rather with the national or European level. Many types of technology policy do indeed take place at these levels: European and national technology policies are concerned with the stimulation of research and development (R&D) in large and small firms or in specific sectors such as commercialisation of research, technology adoption, standardisation, legal issues, property rights and so on. However, cities can pursue technology policies as well, as a means to reach economic and social objectives, as well as objectives intended to raise the quality of life and improve the internal and external accessibility of the urban region.

To shed more light on the impact of ICT on urban development and the consequences for urban management, the European Institute for Comparative Urban Research has been invited by the city of The Hague to carry out an investigation into the ‘state of the art’ concerning the use of information and communication technologies in five European cities. This book contains the results of an analysis of the impact of new technology and new technology policies in the cities of Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Marseilles and The Hague.

This chapter introduces the themes that will be discussed in more detail in the book. Section 2 elaborates on the aim of the research project, explains the methodology that was used, and elaborates on the case studies. Section 3 introduces the case studies of Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Marseilles and The Hague. Section 4 shows how the rest of the book is organised.

2 Aim and Methodology

This book has the ambitious aim to help to understand how ICT affects urban development and change. More specifically, we try to:

• understand the role of cities as attractive places for ICT companies;

• understand how the deployment of ICT can make a city more attractive in general;

• describe and analyse examples of good practice in urban ICT policies in several European cities;

• identify opportunities and pitfalls regarding ICT policies, based on experiences in the case-study cities;

• provide lessons for other cities and learn what urban managers and other decision-makers can do to make optimum use of the new technologies.

Much use has been made of existing literature, particularly of earlier Euricur studies on growth clusters in European metropolitan regions (Berg, Braun and Van Winden, 1999). Fieldwork, however, yielded the key input for this book. Most of this book’s content is the result of an explorative study into the way European cities deal with ICT developments. We investigated five European cities: Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Marseilles and The Hague. For each city involved we reviewed the available reports and studies on the subject thoroughly. On that basis, we were able to identify and select key actors. After that, we visited the case cities and interviewed the selected persons.

3 Introduction to the Cases

The cities included in our study are interesting for our purposes for several reasons. First (although they are not the only ones in Europe), each of the cities has an explicit ICT strategy and seeks to translate that strategy into concrete actions. In all of the cities, ICT is a policy spearhead. Second, each city has a different emphasis in their policies and deploys ICT for different purposes and in different ways: this helped us to understand and describe the wide range of possible ICT policies. Third, the case-study cities are located in four different European countries. This European perspective enriches the study, as it reveals similarities and differences in ICT development and policy opportunities in several national contexts. Table 1.1 shows the focus of our separate cases. Below, their content is briefly described.

Table 1.1

ICT and the city: 5 case studies

City	Topic
Eindhoven	ICT and future living: e-city, an ICT experimental neighbourhood
Helsinki	ICT and inner city development: Lasipalatsi
Manchester	ICT cluster development and policies
	ICT adoption: reducing the digital divide
Marseilles	ICT and public service delivery
The Hague	ICT cluster development and policies
	ICT and public service delivery

Eindhoven

In the Eindhoven region, we studied the development of the ‘e-city’. In this public/private project, 80,000 citizens have broadband connections and access to the Internet. Firms and local government develop electronic services for the population in this experimental zone. The experiment enables companies to offer services on a sufficient scale and thus speeds up the transition to the information society. Many of the experiences may be applied on a large scale later on. The case shows how a region can build a lead by creating conditions for experimentation.

Helsinki

This case study centres around an innovative project in Helsinki named Lasipalatsi (‘glass palace’), a media centre in the inner city of Helsinki. The public building serves to disseminate innovations in the ICT and new media, bring technology closer to the people, and improve contact between technology developers and users. The combination of these functions in a leisure-like setting is new for Europe. For the city of Helsinki, the specific public/private organisational form of the project is innovative; additionally, for Helsinki the project was the first large project in which European money was involved.

Manchester

In this case study, we first focus on how ICT offers new opportunities for both economic and social regeneration, and how urban management seizes them. Furthermore, we describe and evaluate regional policies to further the ICT cluster. Second, we address the question how ICT can contribute to the inclusion of less favoured groups into the information society, and show some examples of projects in Manchester in this field.

Marseilles

This case study shows how the municipality uses new technologies to improve service delivery to its population. Some examples of ICT projects are presented, showing not only how ICT can contribute to the solution of problems and the seizing of new opportunities, but also what technical and organisational difficulties may arise in these renewal processes.

The Hague

The City of The Hague has the ambition to become a strong centre of ICT and telecom activity. In this case study, we analyse the state of the art of the ICT-cluster in the region: what ICT-related actors can be discerned in the Haaglanden region, how they interact and what their location considerations are. Also, we assess and judge the policies and ambitions of the different public players in the region.

4 Organisation of the Book

Figure 1.1 shows how this study is organised. Each chapter can be read separately. Chapter Two sketches the context of this study: what is happening in urban Europe, what are the threats and challenges that cities face, how can cities react strategically? Finally, in this chapter we introduce a conceptual framework that helps to understand how new information and communication technologies affect urban development, and how urban management may respond strategically.

Chapters Three and Four present and analyse the core findings of the study. Chapter Three focuses on the potential role for ICT firms as new engines of economic growth in urban regions in Europe and provides strategic lessons for cities. The subject of Chapter Four can be summarised as ‘ICT and urban attractiveness’: how can ICT be deployed as a tool to improve the urban product and its accessibility? What are the technical possibilities, organisational pitfalls and bottlenecks and what is the state-of-the art in European cities? In Chapter Five, we bring the themes together, draw conclusions and suggest topics for further research. The separate case studies can be found in Chapters Six to Ten.

Figure 1.1

Organisation of the book

Chapter Two

Context: Urban Dynamics in Europe and the Role of ICT

1 Introduction

Although the impact of ICT on urban development is pervasive and allembracing, it is also part of other, more general developments that occur in Europe’s urban regions. In this chapter, we sketch some major developments affecting urban Europe, as a context for our analysis. After this contextualisation, we develop a conceptual framework that helps to understand the role of ICT in urban development. This is not an all-encompassing theory, but rather a fruitful means to analyse the role of ICT in the improvement of the well-being of citizens and companies in a city, and a useful tool to derive ICT policy options for urban management.

This chapter starts, in section 2, with a more general analysis of the dynamic developments that affect urban regions throughout Europe: globalisation, localisation, informationalisation, the rise of polycentric regions and the growing urban competition. This analysis leads to the conclusion that urban regions need to improve their attractiveness in order to be socially and economically successful in the long run.

In section 3 the notion and importance of urban attractiveness is further elaborated and conceptualised. The focus then shifts to the question of how the information revolution affects the attractiveness of a city for citizens, companies and visitors. On this basis, we formulate the scope for urban ICT policy in section 4. Section 5 concludes.

2 Mega Trends

Urban dynamics is determined by certain trends that manifested themselves in Europe halfway through the 1980s (Braun and Van der Meer, 2000). Globalisation has fundamentally influenced the international urban development process and thereby also the competitive positioning of cities (Hall, 1995). More and more commercial activities are looking at the world as a whole when making location choices, while national borders seem to play an ever-decreasing role (Ohmae, 1995). Companies can, in this way, expand their markets, but will at the same time experience more competition in their home market. How far this is favourable for the region depends on the regional competitive capacity. The strength of this competitive capacity, in turn, depends on, amongst other things, the international orientation, the size of the regional commercial activity, the presence of decision centres in the region and the presence of strong economic clusters with growth prospective. Globalisation appears to manifest itself increasingly on a local level: the success of cities and regions seems to be based on local factors and institutional structures and the use that strategists are able to make of them (Swijngedouw, 1999).

Paradoxically the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things – knowledge, relationships, and motivation that distant rivals cannot match … What happens inside companies is important but clusters reveal that the immediate business environment outside companies plays a vital role as well (Porter, 1998).

Globalisation has become possible through information and communication technology. The transition to an information society has considerably strengthened the position of cities as nerve centres of the ‘New Economy’. Cities provide the daily context for the increasingly global and footloose interactions within the economic, social and cultural spheres. The centres of large cities are historically the locations where information was made known and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Part One: Introduction and Context
• Part Two: Ict and the City: Conclusions and Synthesis
• Part Three: Case Studies