The Rise of the Co-creative Class: Sustainable Innovation-Led Urban Regeneration

Abstract

While it is clear that cities are the ideal setting for the rise of the creative class, it is not yet clear how to detect emerging innovation in cities and how to implement it in a sustainable way. This paper builds on and moves forward a research project undertaken on Smart Specialisation Strategy and starts to operationalize a previously theorized novel approach to assess the emerging innovation in cities, based on unveiling factors, tools and triggers allowing cities to enable sustainable innovation-led urban regeneration. The case study of Media City UK has been used to test whether some of the findings emerged from the previous studies would be suitable to allow understanding the potential of an emerging innovation hub and its potential sustainability. Findings from Media City UK show that: conventional indicators can be successfully complemented with dynamic proxies capable to capture the changing nature of innovation; geographical boundaries should be set up as dynamic edges capable to capture the rationale of social innovation in the open networks. It is also recommended to explicitly include equity among the goals to be pursued through innovation-led urban regeneration strategies, to ensure that social innovation -and not just innovation- allows achieving urban inclusive growth.