How to be a distinctive city

Here's a dilemma for UK cities. Should they specialise in a distinctive niche industry or two, to gain a bit of an edge over other cities? Or should they go for diversity, and spread their exposure around?

Distinctiveness and diversity are both promoted as great economic development strategies:

• Liverpool is now building up its niche in creative industries, following the success of Capital of Culture. And Science Cities like York and Newcastle are promoting their cutting-edge science base.
• Meanwhile, Bristol (another Science City) prides itself as one of the most diverse urban economies in the UK - with strengths in financial services, retail, aerospace, plus a sizeable public sector.

The recession has probably tilted the scales in favour of diversity. Niches are all very well in a strong economy, but they can suddenly look very vulnerable in a recession. Just look at financial services in Leeds and Edinburgh. A nice combination of distinctiveness and diversity is obviously the best bet.

So how does a city become distinctively diverse? Ivan Turok, at Glasgow University, sheds new light on this, in his report The distinctive city: pitfalls in the pursuit of differential advantage.

Ivan says that distinctive niches are useful for cities. But here's the catch - cities tend to pursue distinctiveness in, well, the same kind of way. In their search for distinctiveness, they sort of end up looking the same.

There's a "similar recipe" for distinctiveness, which goes something like this - develop a new or nascent industry (like bio-tech or life sciences), get or expand a university (to attract highly-skilled workers), build a few signature buildings (Sage, Baltic, Beetham Tower, etc), and do a bit of fancy branding to attract the latte and laptop types. Sound familiar?

Here are the main messages I took from Ivan's report:

• Know your own city. Cities will do better if they really understand their own strengths and weaknesses. Importing ideas from other cities might not work.  
• Don't forget the basics. Instead of getting distracted by the latest fad (e.g. bio-tech cluster, creative quarter), cities should make sure their basic infrastructure is up to scratch.
• Build on what you've got. Diversity is good, but not easy to achieve. It's quite hard for cities - especially small, ex-industrial ones - to broaden out into brand new sectors. Better to support existing assets and capacity, instead of going after unrealistic aspirations.
• Don't just do flagship buildings. Cities have been far too obsessed with shiny new buildings, and not focused enough on the more mundane (and difficult) task of narrowing disparities and tackling long-run worklessness.
• More graduates need more jobs. Cities that expand their universities also need to trigger a corresponding increase in demand from employers, otherwise the graduate talent will leak out. 

There's loads more in there, so give it a read. It makes a refreshing change from a glossy economic development strategy, but is probably sobering reading for quite a few cities...

Comments

[John Charlesworth]

A good article. In Lincolnshire where, for years, its agriculture has been way down on the list of the Country's prioriites - a change is taking place. Good farm land has been sold off, in the past, to Housing, but the region is now focussing again on its core business. Plenty of diversity for other industries but, to me, problems could have been avoided with foresight! Alas this has been in short supply.

Humberside, and the recent problems there, might also benefit from such an approach. It needs coherent and local will power to work together.

[Glenn]

There's only been a few examples where cities have set out some revolutionary aspirations (based on new industries where they have no or very little comparative advantage) and met them - e.g. Singapore, Helsinki. In Singapore's case this took 40 years, and they had the benefit of being a sovereign state.

I think the mistake that is often made is that policy makers do not look at the underlying assets and attributes needed to build new sectors or clusters - i.e. skills, business base, supply chains, current economic linkages.

They also do not think in terms of the underlying skills or competencies that are the foundation for new sectors - e.g. for creative industries, a lot of the foundations of success are in software programming and software development.