Suchergebnisse

This text brings together academics, artists, practitioners and 'community activists' to explore the possibilities for and tensions of social justice work under the contemporary drive for community-oriented 'impact' in the academy.

AbstractOne of the fundamental aspects of the economic and social viability of the local and regional areas of Turkey is the degree to which they have access to the wider national economic and social system. Accessibility is, therefore, of major social, economic and political significance in Turkey and it directly affects Turkey's regional growth and the quality of life in local communities. However, the importance of the economic and social viability of the communities is increasingly complicated in the face of rapid global economic recession. It is argued that countries need to develop knowledge economies to compete successfully as knowledge is a critical factor for growth. This paper integrates accessibility and the importance of knowledge creation in understanding local and regional economic development. This empirical study has shown that although there is a high correlation between the accessibility index and the population figures of Turkey, accessibility to knowledge differs across Turkish provinces.

This paper explores and unpacks the nature of the processes shaping regional economic growth in Turkey using an econometric modelling strategy. Economic modelling is an important approach to the analysis and understanding of regional growth and development. Over the decades, there have been a range of attempts to measure and understand the dynamics of regional growth through the modelling of underlying internal and external forces. However, existing empirical research in this field has focussed on regions in economically advanced and technologically innovative economies and comparable studies of less developed and emerging countries and their regions that suffer from poverty, unemployment and regional disparities are far fewer. As a consequence, the broader picture of the dynamics of regional development in less developed countries, particularly its social and political origins and the overall changes in regional inequality, have remained elusive and less clear. However, as globalization deepens and processes such as Europeanization and regionalization facilitate and accelerate the implementation of externally developed policies, less developed and emerging economies have started to adopt the 'successful' regional economic planning policies and practices developed and implemented in totally different national contexts. The problem with this issue is that those policy ideas have only partial relevance in the developed country context potentially making them even less relevant in developing economies. To explore this problem, this paper seeks to understand, empirically, the drivers of local and regional development in Turkey and how they can be used to develop a theoretically informed econometric analysis in the context of an emerging market economy. Not only has this form of analysis not been undertaken in Turkey, but the theories of local and regional economic development have had a major impact on the Turkish regional planning process. A set of econometric models is developed to explore the validity of a range of theoretical propositions in explaining the trajectories of regional economic change in Turkey between 2004 and 2008. Growth is calibrated in terms of employment and changing rates of unemployment in the chosen time period in the eighty one provinces of Turkey. The results of the study explain that implications of the current local and regional economic development theories are a Curate's Egg – good in parts – because these theories are only partially relevant in the Turkish context.

AbstractThis paper explores and unpacks the nature of the processes shaping regional economic growth in Turkey using an econometric modelling strategy. Existing empirical research in this field has focussed on regions in economically advanced and technologically innovative economies. As a consequence, the broader picture of the dynamics of regional development in less developed countries, particularly its social and political origins and the overall changes in regional inequality, has remained elusive and less clear. In this study, a set of econometric models is developed to explore the validity of a range of theoretical propositions in explaining the trajectories of regional economic change in Turkey between 2004 and 2008. Growth is calibrated in terms of employment and changing rates of unemployment in the chosen time period in the 81 provinces of Turkey. The results of the study explain that implications of the current local and regional economic development theories are a "Curate's Egg"—good in parts—because these theories are only partially relevant in the Turkish context.

Finding new approaches to overcome complex urban problems such as climate change has always been of interest to policymakers and academics. The changing dynamics of urban development result in the diversification of new practices during which experimentation is used to inform urban practice. Amongst these approaches, urban living labs (ULLs) have become a popular form of urban experimental innovation in many countries in the last decade. These ULLs respond to the increased complexity of future challenges calling for local solutions that acknowledge the local conditions - political, technical, and social. Even though a great deal of attention has been given to this form of urban innovation, there has been little consideration of the learning and innovation processes within ULLs. Based on a comparative case study of three innovation projects in a ULL in the city of Amsterdam, we analyse and discuss the claims of ULLs regarding innovation and the different orders of learning they foster. We argue that in the processes of experimentation within ULLs, combining mechanisms of learning and innovation is key to promoting the development of particular local solutions. However, since the learning processes are especially concerned within a particular ULL learning setting, there is a mismatch between the expectations of policymakers, industry, citizens, and knowledge institutes, as well as how the lessons learned can be useful for other contexts.

With the urgency to adapt cities to social and ecological pressures, co-design has become essential to legitimise transformations by involving citizens and other stakeholders in their design processes. Public spaces remain at the heart of this transformation due to their accessibility for citizens and capacity to accommodate urban functions. However, urban landscape design is a complex task for people who are not used to it. Visual collaborative methods (VCMs) are often used to facilitate expression and ideation early in design, offering an arts-based language in which actors can communicate. We developed a co-design process framework to analyse how VCMs contribute to collaboration in urban processes throughout the three commonly distinguished design phases: conceptual, embodiment, and detail. We participated in a co-design process in the Atacama Desert in Chile, adopting an Action Research through Design (ARtD) in planning, undertaking and reflecting in practice. We found that VCMs are useful to facilitate collaboration throughout the process in design cycles. The variety of VCMs used were able to foster co-design in a rather non-participatory context and influenced the design outcomes. The framework recognized co-design trajectories such as the early fuzziness and the ascendent co-design trajectory throughout the process. The co-design process framework aims for conceptual clarification and may be helpful in planning and undertaking such processes in practice. We conclude that urban co-design should be planned and analysed as a long-term process of interwoven collaborative trajectories.