Case study selection
All the case studies represent city regions, which are:
- not leading in the European urban hierarchy,
- don’t belong to the first range global cities,
- overshadowed by the ‘giants’ like London or Paris in their international functions.
We consciously did not select London or Paris. Nor did we want to select only obvious success stories. Studying the biggest European cities and/or only the cities with a clear success regarding creativity would easily result in insights that are difficult to implement in other, more ordinary European cities.
The idea is to study the efforts, made by the smaller city regions to accommodate creative knowledge and to improve their competitiveness.
The aim is to find out if and how ordinary European cities, in the East and in the West, in the North and in the South can be competitive in the field of creative knowledge and to discover the factors that promote and/or prevent success in this respect. In particular we intend to find out the factors determining success, the difficulties that city regions experience in becoming successful as well as the way how to overcome these difficulties.
The case studies include eight West European cities and five post-socialist cities of Central and Eastern Europe. Five of the thirteen consortium partners represent the European South.
Among the case studies there are:
- several national capitals,
- cities with ‘partial’ capital city functions (like Milan and Munich),
- several cities with a rich industrial history (Birmingham, Toulouse, Leipzig, Poznan).
The geographical and structural variety of case studies reflects the diversity in Europe, provides complementarity between the participants, and ensures the complexity of the research.
