CREATIVE CITY NEWSLETTER: JULY 2001

ISSUE 2: DEFINING THE NEW ECONOMY

Creative City Top Five Issue Areas
Topical Articles and Studies
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Rochester, NY
Meeting Notes from the First Creative City Meeting


TOPICAL ARTICLES AND STUDIES

TOP STORY RELATED ARTICLES

"The e-Achievers List"
"When it comes to the New Economy, no metropolitan area is without assets - and precious few have a monopoly on success."

Synopsis: Though one seems the hip, tech-savvy hub of New Economic activity and the other seems like a frozen, stagnant model of old business habits, Los Angeles, CA and Rochester, NY are surprisingly parallel in their potential for success in today's financial climate. Each city, by seizing their distinctive strengths (in Rochester's case, the strong economic infrastructure provided the local University and corporate network, and in LA's, the net-literate population and tech-savvy business leaders) can secure their success as "e-Achievers" - future players in the New Economy.
www.governing.com/6econ.htm

"Cities in the New Global Economy"
Have traditional central cities lost out to 'edge cities' detached from the old urban terrain? Does economic restructuring inevitably lead to greater urban inequality and intergroup conflict? Can public policy at the urban, regional, or national level affect these trends, and if so, how? Can an increasingly fragmented and divided metropolitan citizenry cope?

Synopsis: The New Economy urges urban centers through a process of strain and evolution; while "edge cities" pull high-tech pioneers out of the central metropolis and into the frontier, will the traditional urban hub take on new life as a "world city" - a global hub of information exchange along the new telecommunication traderoutes? Or will urban economic restructuring rot the city-core through geographic and economic polarization - pushing the middle-class out into suburbs, and trapping the urban poor into a dismal cycle of inadequate education and fiscal dependence on low-wage jobs? One thing is certain - as global cities become viewed as information-rich centers of transaction rather than command-posts for top-down organization, cities must identify and exploit those competitive functions will enable them to prosper, or else face extinction.
www.prospect.org/print/v4/13/mollenkopf-j.html

"The Metropolitan New Economy Index: Benchmarking Economic Transformation in the Nation's Metropolitan Areas"
Published by the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Case Western Reserve University's Center for Regional Economic Issues. This report uses 16 economic indicators to rank areas in five subcategories - knowledge jobs, globilization, economic dynamism, transformation to a digital economy, and technical innovation capacity.
www.neweconomyindex.org