Abstract
This chapter examines Australian cities in an increasingly competitive world and how these cities perform compared to each other and globally. The conceptualisation of urban competitiveness is moving from an economic-centric approach to an integrative approach that incorporates economic growth, social equity, and environmental sustainability. This new conceptualisation is changing the way urban competitiveness is measured. This chapter measures the competitiveness of Australian cities, especially its gateway global cities, Sydney and Melbourne, to reveal their competitive strengths and weaknesses in the global urban system. It also investigates intercity competition, within Australia’s national urban system, to demonstrate that attracting people and talent is associated with the cities’ knowledge economies and innovation capacity. These conceptual and empirical examinations draw attention to the role of innovation in a city’s competitiveness in a knowledge economy, which underpins the concluding argument for developing knowledge-based agglomerations in cities.
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Appendix: Methodological Note on the IUCI
Appendix: Methodological Note on the IUCI
The IUCI contains six dimensions, and each dimension contains three indicators with specific measures as presented in Table 3.3. We used relative weighting and equal weighting to compute the index: relative weighting is used for each indicator; equal weighting is used for each dimension and the overall index. We collected data for the 18 indicators from individual case study cities. The original data were in different forms and were standardised for each indicator. Of the 11 cities, the city with the highest value (or best performance) was standardised as 10, while the city with the lowest value (or worst performance) was standardised as 1, and the remaining cities were weighted according to their original values between the highest and the lowest. This standardisation method means that the values for one city’s indicators are relative rather than absolute; that is, their values are relative to the values of the other cities in the group. With a maximum value of 10 and a minimum value of 1 assigned to each indicator, we computed the value for each dimension by aggregating the values of the three subordinate indicators, and the overall IUCI by aggregating the values of the six dimensions. The underlying assumption for the aggregation is that the three indicators are of equal weight in each dimension; and the six dimensions are of equal weight in the IUCI. Thus, an ‘ideal’ city could achieve a value of 30 for performance in each dimension, and a value of 180 for the IUCI.
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Blakely, E.J., Hu, R. (2019). Australian Cities in Competition. In: Crafting Innovative Places for Australia’s Knowledge Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3618-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3618-8_3
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