Regional Cultures, Economies, and Creativity by Ariella Van Luyn Eduardo de la Fuente

Author:Ariella Van Luyn, Eduardo de la Fuente [Ariella Van Luyn, Eduardo de la Fuente]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138310674
Google: n8plzgEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 49891686
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Constructing the Knowledge City Index

To better understand these impacts on our cities and regions, this chapter builds a Knowledge City Index (KCI) for Australian cities. We examine the 25 largest urban areas in the country and analyse each of them according to knowledge capital (the underlying knowledge infrastructure of a city that includes human and non-human assets) and knowledge economy (the knowledge activation and performance within a city).

In presenting the KCI, we note that statistical information can operate in ways that affect the phenomena under consideration. In this respect we are mindful of the bind that researchers can find themselves in, as MacKenzie (2006: 12) suggests with respect to the use of statistics, in that they can shift the ontological basis of our understanding of the economy and function like an engine that feeds into the phenomena under consideration rather than merely providing a representation, like a camera. In presenting our index, we are mindful of this tendency for statistics to be used to “make up people” as objects of scientific inquiry (Hacking 2006). We also note that the production of indices has come under criticism in that they tend to privilege and isolate dimensions of the economy without considering the interconnections. In constructing our index, we are mindful of these critiques and provide our index with the important qualification that we use proxy measures that only approximates, rather than directly signals, the knowledge-intensiveness of Australian cities.

We combine six different measures through a data-standardisation process to provide a comparative overview of all 25 cities. In doing so, we employ an approach that attempts to compare regions and cities across Australia for the purpose of providing details into the changing nature of work and how it is impacting on geographical areas in distinct ways. The framework can also be extended to comparisons of other cities around the world and will be repeatable over time in order to understand the changing nature of Australian cities and regions. The Knowledge City Index presented in this chapter has been developed to allow for comparisons of 25 significant urban areas (SUAs): that is, geographic boundaries that are delimited with a methodology provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to represent cities and towns with populations over 10,000 people. Unlike adopting conventional administrative boundaries to define cities and regions, our use of SUAs aims to focus on labour markets that evolve and seep across administrative boundaries. By focusing on these geographical areas, we then explore qualities associated with knowledge that are situated across two core domains:

Knowledge capital, which measures the existing knowledge infrastructure of a locality and the resources, both human and technological, which the local knowledge economy can draw upon.

Knowledge economy, which examines the knowledge activity located in a particular city’s region and that is related to its prosperity.

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