Innovation Districts as a Strategy for Urban Economic Development: A Comparison of Four Cases

Authors
Joshua Drucker, Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Carla Maria Kayanan, Post-Doctoral Researcher, School of Geography, University College Dublin
Henry Renski, Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract
Innovation districts are a relatively new strategy in urban economic development. They have been fast gaining attention and popularity, due in part to energetic third-party promotion and the apparent successes of two early adopters:  Barcelona and Boston. As additional cities establish and promote innovation districts, it benefits policymakers to possess information regarding their characteristics and suitability as an economic development approach.

We conduct in-depth case studies of four innovation districts in the United States—located in Boston, Detroit, Saint Louis, and San Diego—that present contrasting settings, policies, and outcomes. The empirical information is drawn primarily from interviews with the innovation district creators and implementers and the entrepreneurs embedded within them. We assess the expectations, design, implementation, and operation of these innovation districts, with reference to stated and normative policy goals along with theories of regional economic development. Our purpose is to provide scholars and policymakers with guidance as to how and how well innovation districts may achieve the aim of urban economic development to generate economic dynamism and prosperity.

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The future of work is an open question

Beth Gutelius | Julia Goldberg, Santa Fe Reporter

The Santa Fe Reporter newspaper conducted a Q&A with Beth Gutelius, associate director of the Center for Urban Economic Development and senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute at UIC, about her recent co-authored report that examines technology’s impact on the current and future warehouse industry and workforce.

The Oct. 21 installment of the New York Times’ “Op-Eds From the Future” series envisions Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unveiling to the media an alleged state-of-the-art, human-free robot-run fulfillment center in Phoenix, circa 2034. Except it still needs people, and relies on independent contractors that don’t receive benefits.

That piece was plausible fiction. The actual impact of technology on warehouse workers remains to be seen.

An extensive Oct. 22 academic report on the future of warehouse work examines the issue. Santa Fe resident Beth Gutelius, an associate director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, co-authored the report and spoke with SFR about her findings. The interview has been edited for space and clarity. The full report can be read online at: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2019/Future-of-Warehouse-Work.pdf

Full Interview from The Santa Fe Reporter

 

Little Village pastor works to reduce gang violence

Teresa Córdova, director of the UIC Great Cities Institute and professor of urban planning and policy, was interviewed in an ABC 7 segment about Chicago gang violence in the wake of a 7-year-old girl being shot while trick-or-treating in Little Village.

“It’s the age-old phenomenon where people feel the need to defend their territory,” said Teresa Cordova, director of the University of Illinois – Chicago’s Great Cities Institute.

Cordova recently co-authored a report about gangs in Chicago. She said Little Village has the youngest population of all Chicago neighborhoods, and the two gangs there, like other gangs in the city, recruit young. She emphasized alternatives for kids to reduce gang activity.

“You have to provide more opportunity so that the choices that they make are better choices,” Cordova said.

Full Story from ABC 7 Chicago »

Combatting False Solutions in Climate Policy

José Bravo is the Executive Director for the Just Transition Alliance (JTA), where he works directly with Environmental Justice (EJ) Communities and Labor (organized and unorganized) to develop best practices and build meaningful and impactful alliances. José is also the National Campaign Coordinator of the Campaign for Healthier Solutions (CHS), a community driven campaign towards healthier discount stores.

Bravo’s work in social justice issues is rooted from his upbringing in the Southern California fields alongside both his parents. Bravo has also been doing work on immigrant rights issues since his days as a student organizer in the 80’s to the present. His participation in the Environmental Justice (EJ) movement since 1990, has over the years gained him recognition as a national and international leader in the EJ movement and co-founder and leader of the Just Transition Movement.

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Cooperatives and Capabilities: International Perspectives

Last month, with Manufacturing Renaissance, we were so pleased to host a delegation from the Basque Country on building a sustainable and inclusive society. The Basque Country is the home of Mondragon – a world leader in the development of worker cooperatives.

The Basque County is a semi-autonomous region in northern Spain that represents a model of development that is inspiration and provides an excellent example of the power of advanced manufacturing as a foundation for building a society that is productive, secure, and inclusive.  Their programs and approaches are useful models that we can learn from in developing a close and effective partnership between manufacturing companies, government and civil society.

Included in this delegation was Jorge Arevalo, Deputy Minister for Vocational Training and Nicolas Sagarazu, Director of Planning and Organization of the Department of Education. They and other visitors spoke about their unique approach to vocational training, providing a number of useful insights about how to establish conditions for a creative learning environment.  Click here to view their presentations.

Worker cooperatives have a long history in many societies throughout the world and even in Chicago.  As national and local networks have formed to assist the formation of worker cooperatives, GCI produced a report last year on Policy Recommendations for Amendments to the State of Illinois Worker Cooperative Statute.

In keeping with GCI’s continued effort to elevate worker cooperatives as an important community development strategy, we are pleased to feature a report back from Lucas McGranahan, Senior Research Specialist, Great Cities Institute, on human development and worker cooperatives.

Cooperatives and Capabilities: A Report from London

Lucas McGranahan, Senior Research Specialist, Great Cities Institute

In September I had the opportunity to present at the annual conference of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, hosted this year by University College London. I put together a panel for HDCA because I believe in the organization’s holistic vision of development: the point isn’t just to increase nebulous economic indicators such as GDP but to enhance people’s effective freedoms—their capabilities—across a range of dimensions including health, education, work, and more.

The point of economic development isn’t economic development: it’s human development.

The panel I chaired, “Cooperatives and Capabilities,” considered a topic that many of us at the Great Cities Institute are deeply interested in: the advantages of the cooperative business form in enabling people to live stable, autonomous, and dignified lives. My own presentation argued that it’s not enough for development scholars and practitioners to focus on decreasing unemployment. They need to focus on improving the quality of work, which in turn depends on the structure of work—who owns capital and who makes decisions at all levels of the enterprise.

My co-presenters backed up my theoretical paper with concrete studies: Kenneth Stikkers From SIU Carbondale outlined how capabilities are fostered by the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain, a successful network of enterprises that explicitly treat capital as instrumental to labor; and Pasquale de Muro of Roma Tre University discussed how producer cooperatives in developing countries help individual farmers achieve collective agency, affording them access to markets and credit that would otherwise be beyond their reach.

The audience of the three-day conference was highly international and interdisciplinary, with a mix of academics and practitioners arriving from scores of countries. This eclectic assortment made for interesting conversations at every session, every coffee break, and every informal pub meetup. What everyone had in common was an idea that is worth preserving: poverty is multidimensional, not just a lack of money or resources. The dimensions of poverty include a lack of autonomy, democracy, and healthy interdependence in people’s economic lives. It is here that cooperatives show a way forward.

Next year, the annual conference of the Human Development and Capabilities Association (HDCA) will be in Aukland, New Zealand from June 30- July 2, 2020.

What The West Side Lost

(Manuel Martinez/WBEZ)

Teresa Córdova, director of the UIC Great Cities Institute and professor of urban planning and policy, is a featured expert in a WBEZ story about manufacturing companies disinvesting in Chicago and the effect on neighborhoods that is still felt today, particularly on the city’s West Side. Cordova says that manufacturing still presents the greatest opportunity for job growth and if a company were to relocate in a neighborhood with an available workforce, the overall positive economic impact could be experienced beyond just those who are directly hired.

Teresa Cordova, director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said manufacturing still presents the greatest opportunity for job growth.

“The kind of manufacturing that was here probably isn’t coming back,” Cordova said. “But there’s new kinds of manufacturing that’s occurring. There’s something that we now refer to as precision manufacturing, or advanced manufacturing.”

Full Story from WBEZ »

Robots aren’t taking warehouse employees’ jobs, they’re making their work harder

A new report from researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago shows what the effects of technology on workers will really be. Visual China Group via Getty Images (Excerpted from Vox Media)

Recode, Vox Media’s technology news website, features a story about a new report from Beth Gutelius, associate director of the Center for Urban Economic Development and senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute at UIC, and Nik Theodore, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development, UIC professor of urban planning and policy, and fellow at the Great Cities Institute, that examines how technology will impact the warehouse industry and workforce over the next decade. The report, commissioned and released by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and Working Partnerships USA, says that rather than technology creating widespread job loss, it will lead to declining job quality in warehouses.

According to a new report by researchers at the University of Illinois that focused on warehouse work automation and was shared exclusively with Recode, emerging technologies aren’t actually going to replace the over 1 million warehouse workers in the US anytime soon. But over the next 10 years, the technology may make their lives harder.

The report shows how technologies are modifying the day-to-day work of people who organize, store, and package physical goods in warehouses. It found that technology and automation can help workers by reducing the “monotonous and physically strenuous activities” of, say, lifting heavy packages. But it also could affect workers’ health, safety, and morale, and accelerate the rate at which employees are replaced. That’s because tools like self-driving shelving carts, body sensors, and AI-powered management systems are putting pressure on workers to work harder, faster, and under more scrutiny. This is helping boost productivity but could be bad for workers, the report argues.

“The next decade is a story not about job loss, but more so about changes in job quality,” said Beth Gutelius, associate director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who authored the paper along with colleague Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy. “Technology has led to workers being pushed harder and also their privacy getting violated.”

Full Story from Vox Media »