The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
© The Wick 2020A lot of cities try to promote creative activity as a tool for economic growth. A lot of creatives — and activists — worry that arts districts and the like are simply the first step to gentrification, pushing out the original artists as …
Continue reading »Summer is a good time for academics to catch up on reading, and I’ve finally found time to go through this v interesting post on Crypto Cities by Vitalik Bukterin, who is always worth your time. (It’s also helpful for the Smart Cities course I teach at…
Continue reading »The Thick of It, BBC TV (2012)As researchers and policymakers, we all say we want evidence-based policy; so why is there little good evaluation evidence about, and why do many decision-makers seem reluctant to use it?I’m back from a trip to Paris, wher…
Continue reading »GEOINNO has become an essential conference for the large community of researchers working at the intersections of urban economics, networks / complexity analysis, economic geography and the economics of innovation. I’m very happy to see Manchester host…
Continue reading »London, April 2020.New/old paper news: I’m very happy to have the lead article in this Urban Studies special issue on COVID-19 and cities. It’s open access!Many thanks to Scott Orford, Yingling Fan and Phil Hubbard for having me.This article is a time …
Continue reading »I have a new City Talks podcast with Eliza Easton (Deputy Director of the Creative PEC) and Centre for Cities CEO Andrew Carter. We talk about creative clusters, whether creative industries drive city growth, and what policymakers can do to help.The po…
Continue reading »Job alert! I am recruiting an economist and a data scientist to join my new UKRI-funded project. We’re looking at the effects of diversities on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship in UK firms and cities.The project is based at UCL, and is joi…
Continue reading »Change in creative vs. non-tradable jobs, UK urban travel to work areas, 1998–2018Creative and cultural industries are very urbanised. What are the impacts of these creative clusters on their surrounding cities?In a new open access paper with Diana, Ta…
Continue reading »Heads up — I have a new clusters paper out, open access, written with Emmanouil Tranos and Christoph Stich.It’s largely technical — we develop a new set of tools for tracking cluster evolution using geolocated business website text and metadata, then t…
Continue reading »Some self-promotion — a team I’m leading has won one of seven new big ESRC grants for productivity research.Our new project will explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces — and the wider role of urban diversity — on entrepreneurship,…
Continue reading »Some self-promotion — a team I’m leading has won one of seven new big ESRC grants for productivity research.Our new project will explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces — and the wider role of urban diversity — on entrepreneurship,…
Continue reading »I haven’t read the Levelling Up White Paper yet but I’m going to talk about it anyway.I haven’t read it yet because it’s very long, I’m quite busy with other things right now — it’s a busy teaching term — and because many smart people have read and sum…
Continue reading »I haven’t read the Levelling Up White Paper but I’m going to talk about it anyway.I haven’t read it because it’s very long, like many of you I’m quite busy with other things right now, and because many smart people have read and summarised it already.B…
Continue reading »The City and the Virus, reduxI’ve got a new paper on COVID-19 and cities published in Urban Studies. You can read the whole thing here: it’s open access.I say new — it’s actually an extensive update and rebuild of this long blogpost I did in 2020. Not …
Continue reading »Anna and I have a new paper out in Research Policy. Publishing this has been an epic experience: six years in the making.The TLDR; we introduce a brand-new measure of innovative activity — media-reported product and service launches — and run it throug…
Continue reading »The lovely people at the KooZA/rch platform have published an interview with me, on the theme of the ‘deactivated city’: how COVID-19 has altered urban form and processes, and how far these changes might stick around.They’ve also added some superb phot…
Continue reading »Incubators, accelerators and urban economic developmentI’ve got a new paper on incubators, accelerators and cities out in Urban Studies. It’s written with Margarida Madaleno, Henry Overman and Sevrin Waights.Why should you read it? I think there’s four…
Continue reading »Will coronavirus cause a big city exodus? A long read.Continue reading on Medium »
Continue reading »Cities are the epicentres of the coronavirus pandemic. Why?Continue reading on Medium »
Continue reading »City in the Air, Arata IsozakiCentre for Cities have put up a new City Talks podcast I did with CEO Andrew Carter, talking about cities, clusters, cluster policy tools and the Tech City programme. Later on we also go into some more nerdy stuff about po…
Continue reading »Did the Tech City cluster programme actually help East London tech firms? Let’s find out.Continue reading on The Startup »
Continue reading »Anna and I have a new CEP Discussion Paper out looking at innovation and productivity in UK firms. Read it here.It’s quite technical. Working with the data science firm Growth Intelligence, we combine rich administrative info with media text and machin…
Continue reading »Some job news: I’m excited to say that I’m taking up a new role at UCL in September. I’ll be a new Associate Professor in Applied Urban Sciences at the Centre for Applied Spatial Analysis (CASA), part of the Bartlett faculty of the built environment.Th…
Continue reading »© Tim Mazzarol 2014Back from Glasgow, where I’ve been at the University talking about entrepreneurial ecosystems. Many thanks to Ben Spigel and Fumi Kitagawa for inviting me, and for organising such a nice group of people.It was a pretty striking event…
Continue reading »The original Silicon Roundabout. © Matt BiddulphI have a new paper out in the Journal of Economic Geography, written with Emma Vandore and Georgina Voss.It draws on 10 years of fieldwork by the three of us, and looks at tech clusters, specifically how …
Continue reading »© Andy GilmoreA What Works Centre piece, part of our industrial strategy design guide.It features in our 10 Principles report, which forms the centrepiece of a major programme of work with central and local decisionmakers in 2018 and 2019.As a fast rev…
Continue reading »Design principles for a West Midlands local industrial strategyHere’s something I wrote for the 2018 Birmingham Economic Review, produced by my colleagues at City-REDI.In the UK, like many other countries, industrial strategy has been back on the polic…
Continue reading »Thank you! Appreciated.
Continue reading »WeWork.I’ve written a new CEP Discussion Paper on co-working, incubators, accelerators and what they mean for local economic development policy (co-authored with Margarida Madaleno, Henry Overman and Sevrin Waights). It builds on two toolkits for the W…
Continue reading »TL,DR; the economics says Manchester.Channel 4 is moving 300 staff out of London, with most going to a major British city.* The HQ2 shortlist has just been announced, and seven city-regions are on it: Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Greate…
Continue reading »