This book discusses the promotion of wellness-oriented urban economic development. Wellness is a holistic view of personal health-promoting attitudes and actions. For some decades it has been mainly associated with spas, fitness, beauty products and treatments, healthy nutrition, alternative medicine, and meditation. A particularly strong association with the spa economy has kept it, to a degree, on the margins of local economic development policy. Indeed, in previous decades, wellness may not have looked like a particularly viable option for local politicians, public managers, or developers, when compared with high-tech, advanced business services, or creative industries. This is rooted in the view of wellness as a low-paid and low-skill sector, but it is biased in some important respects. In short, business boosted by the rising global lifestyle and wellness trends is expanding and diversifying, and it seems that the time is ripe for integrating it into the local economic development agenda.
A wellness cluster as a geographic concentration of interconnected companies and institutions that contribute to wellness business has an indirect impact on the overall atmosphere, image, and vitality of a city. Its businesses generally have a low barrier to entry and in many fields it employs people who cannot be employed by companies that require university degrees or high-level technical skills. It also has a much stronger connection with the locality than many other industries. However, it is important to keep in mind that the wellness industry has another side that encompasses technology, knowledge, and know-how intensive high value-added activities. For a particular paradigmatic reason, wellness discourse has tended to downplay the medical, scientific, and technological aspects of the wellness economy, but this is about to change and take it in new directions.
A particular interest here is the uniquely integrative nature of wellness and its ability to perform âpatchingâ in urban economic development. It is a growing global business with established industries and several high value-added segments, at the same time it plays a special supportive role in locality development by forming an important part of urban amenities and by bringing homegrown elements into the picture through traditional healing, local food, local natural assets, local culture, and spiritual traditions. It adds an authentic flavor when attracting capital, talent, businesses, and visitors to the locality.
A conditioning factor worth taking into account when assessing the significance of wellness for urban economic development is the emergence of a post-industrial economy, a contextual factor behind the economic restructuring that swept through the advanced industrial economies after World War II. This refers essentially to the loss of industrial production to low-cost countries and the higher reliance on high-tech and services. It is a statistical fact that in many industrialized countries manufacturing has been declining for decades while services have increased their relative importance. This spurs the rise of urban wellness and connects it with such fundamental issues as service innovation, integration, and transformation (Nielsen et al. 2013).
Another setting for wellness discourse is the development of modern health care systems. Something interesting is happening in this respect, for public health care systems are being reformed throughout the Western world due to harmful bureaucratic features, legitimation crises, effectiveness problems, increasing demand, and rising costs. Health care reforms are accompanied by the increased role of both preventive care and public health within the health care sector, which increases business opportunities at various points of the âhealth continuumâ (Kickbusch and Payne 2003). What seems to be happening is the transformation of major hospital districts into health care hubs with medical schools, life science research, and medical industries at their core; at the same time wellness centers with varying profilesâfrom sauna and massage to fitness to meditationâhave surged as holistic health destinations. They are becoming closer to each other as the medical paradigm is aligning with prevention and public health, and the wellness paradigm is becoming more evidence-based and sophisticated with the help of new technologies.
A background factor worth a special mention is the dramatic change in the scope and volumes of wellness businesses. Modern wellness businesses gained currency in the post-war decades and started to diversify in the 1970s. Among the early signs of the approaching revolution were the establishment of destinations like Canyon Ranch health resort in Tucson, Arizona, in 1979. The business expanded in the 1990s and 2000s due to a lifestyle-related demand for wellness products, services, events, and activity environments. A related boost came from technological advancements that created new business opportunities in this sector. Paul Pilzer (2007) was among the first to popularize the rise of wellness as âthe next trillion dollar industry.â In 2007, The Economist (January 4, 2007) published an article with the title âThe wellness boom: Helping consumers to lead healthy lifestyles is becoming a big business.â Around the same time, health care hubs and wellness research centers became visible parts of urban development (e.g. Blankenhorn 2010). A few years later The Huffington Post published a story that claimed the mid-2010s was the time when businesses became aware of the benefits of workplace wellness (Huffington 2015). All such news stories were signs of the rapid expansion of the wellness industry, which by the mid-2010s had grown to be a market of some USD 3.7 trillion, and at a faster pace than the global economy as a whole (Global Wellness Institute 2017).
A fundamental factor behind the wellness revolution was an increased awareness of problems with a modern hectic and consumption-dominated lifestyle, which triggered the search for new health-conscious values, lifestyles, and methods. Wellness-oriented lifestyles are particularly appealing to well-educated people with a high income, which is a special incentive to the business community (Dvorak et al. 2014). However, the mainstream trend is accompanied by the alternative views of a younger generation fascinated by sharing, downshifting, mindfulness, slow living, and sustainability. It addresses such issues as threats to environmental resilience, lack of fairness in society, and institutionsâ widespread failures to show social responsibility. There are thus two paths for ...