Local and Regional Development

Daily interaction of housing and labour markets in North West England, Regional Studies. The importance of the daily spatial interaction of housing and labour markets has long been recognized due to the role that housing and labour market interaction plays in structuring cities and regions. However, the extent to which policies are sensitized to the interaction of residential and workplace locations is questionable. This paper undertakes a systematic examination of the daily interaction of sub-regional housing and labour markets drawing on 2001 Census commuting data from North West England. The intention is to provide evidence of the nature of the daily spatial interaction of housing and labour markets to inform policy.

This paper examines the degree to which creative industries stimulate regional productivity growth in a developing country, Indonesia. The Indonesian government promotes long-established 'traditional' craft businesses as creative industries, but they pay less attention to new knowledge creation and focus on highlighting heritage values as selling points. Our findings show that the 'real' creative industries are still scarce and found mostly in fairly advanced urban regions. These industries are more likely to be an indicator than a driver of regional economic development. Meanwhile, those traditional businesses are much larger than creative industries and potentially contribute to regional productivity through consumption activities, thereby requiring different policy strategies.

There is a long lineage in neighbourhood research that has underpinned sustained academic and policy interest in the UK centred on understanding how spatial ‘clusters’ of neighbourhood-based deprivation might be destabilised. This has seen the privileging of composite indices in the analysis of deprivation which have been criticised for fostering a common perception that deprived neighbourhoods are homogeneous in terms of their compositions and underlying structures. Such indices have also been criticised for being ineffective at capturing temporal change, providing only static snapshots of deprivation at particular points in time. This paper focuses on patterns of deprived neighbourhood change in the Greater Manchester city-region between 2001 and 2007. It develops a typology of neighbourhood change that is triangulated with three complementary typologies capturing the socioeconomic and demographic compositions of deprived neighbourhoods; the functional roles played by deprived neighbourhoods in redistributing population through migration; and the spatial contexts in which deprived neighbourhoods are located. The analysis reveals that an over reliance on static indices to measure deprivation has long-served to conceal complexities in the way that deprived neighbourhoods change, owing to their variable structures and contexts. It illustrates the danger that lies in treating all deprived neighbourhoods in the same way.

The article discusses the problem of barriers in local development strategic management related to personal qualities of local authorities. In its initial parts the author presents the rationale for their research as well methods he has applied. Then, discusses the key article categories: local development and local development strategic management. Next he lists all identified groups of barriers, referring to such management. In the main part of study, he focuses on these which refer to personal qualities of local authorities. The article results from several years of practice and research conducted by the Author in the domain of local development strategy conceptualization and implementation.

Artykuł prezentuje wyniki badań przeprowadzonych w połowie 2014 r., mających na celu identyfikację oczekiwań władz małych miast wobec polskiej państwowej polityki rozwoju lokalnego. Jako źródło informacji o tych oczekiwaniach wybrano grupę 46 burmistrzów małych miast, natomiast jako metodę badawczą zastosowano sondaż diagnostyczny oparty na długim wywiadzie osobistym. Zidentyfikowane oczekiwania dotyczyły reformy systemu stałego finansowania gmin, zmian systemów dystrybucji środków unijnych, wyposażenia samorządów lokalnych w nowe instrumenty oddziaływania na ponadlokalne relacje ich gmin, redukcji antywzorców prowadzenia polityki, usuwania sprzeczności i niejasności prawa, a także zmian zasad funkcjonowania organu stanowiącego i wykonawczego władz lokalnych. Oczekiwania te można i należy traktować jako współczesne wyzwania państwowej polityki rozwoju lokalnego, ponieważ dotyczą one jej gruntownych, wielowymiarowych zmian. Ponadto rozpatrywane łącznie tworzą dla tej polityki wyzwanie, które można określić jako jej współczesne wyzwanie generalne. Jest nim oczekiwanie władz lokalnych, że władze państwowe zwiększą ich podmiotowość w definiowaniu i kreowaniu rozwoju kraju, pogłębiając swoją aprobatę dla paradygmatu rozwoju lokalnego.

[The article presents the results of research carried out in mid-2014 to identify the expectations presented by the authorities of small cities in the light of Polish state local development policy. 46 mayors were selected as the source of information about these expectations and a diagnostic survey based on long personal interviews was chosen as the research method. The expectations concerned the reform of the municipalities’ permanent funding system, changes in the systems governing EU funds distribution, providing local authorities with new instruments for shaping their municipalities’ supra-local relationships, reducing anti-patterns in policy and politics, eliminating contradictions and ambiguities in law, and changes in the rules governing both decisive and executive bodies of local authorities. The expectations discussed should be approached as contemporary challenges for state policy on local development, since the mayors refer to thorough and multidimensional alterations to that policy. Furthermore, if analysed jointly, the expectations constitute a challenge for this policy, which can be referred to as its general contemporary challenge. Local authorities expect that the state government will increase its subjectivity in defining and creating local development by extending its approval for the local development paradigm.]

The international literature offers a number of motives which should incline local authorities toward strategic planning of local development; it also emphasizes that they should be strongly motivated to do that. Meanwhile, their actual motivation for such planning can remain low and dominated by motives so far unrecognized in the literature. The article presents research confirming this assumption, conducted in 2014 among the authorities of Polish small towns. The results reveal that the general motivation for strategic planning of local development among 37.7% of the authorities of Polish small towns is low. It also disclosed that the motive for obtaining means from the EU funds (so far unrecognized in literature) was and is motivating strongly at least 68.6% of these authorities for the discussed planning and, moreover, that it is a short-lived motive. The article indicates that this situation may also refer to other local authorities, not just the Polish ones. It also indicates that it is an unintended effect of the dependence of municipal development projects' support by the means from the EU funds on including them in the local development strategy. The final part of the article presents recommendations of actions to rectify such an unfavorable situation and for further studies of planning motives followed by local authorities.

The article presents how local authorities of Polish small towns perceive and form at the strategic level, these supra-local relations of their towns, which are connected with local culture. The article begins with key categories explanation: local system (LS), local development (LD), local culture, supra-local relations of local system, local development strategic governance (LDSG) and its supra-local perspective. The next part presents rationale, objects, goals, questions, methods of research and information sources. It is followed by discussing the research results divided into 4 parts, corresponding to types of supra-local relations of local systems and activities for their pro-developmental formation.

The article is devoted to strategic planning issues in communes, districts and regions. The author presents his own model procedure standard for the construction of territorial self-government unit development strategy. It was constructed based on Polish self-government experiences, professional literature, as well as research and implementation studies conducted by the author in a few dozens of Polish self-government units during the last fifteen years. Initial part of the article presents conditions to be met by such plan. The main body describes nineteen stages of territorial self-government unit development strategy construction. The crucial issues covered are: the decision about strategy construction, the choice of its executor, diagnoses, social consultancy, strategic analysis, mission, vision, objectives, strategic tasks, horizontal and vertical compliance, financing, approval and implementation.

The article is devoted to strategic planning issues in communes and districts. The author presents his own model procedure for the construction of territorial self-government unit development strategy. It was constructed based on self-government experiences, professional literature, as well as research and implementation studies conducted in a few dozens of European selfgovernment units. The main body describes nineteen stages of territorial self-government unit development strategy construction.

The article discusses the problems of planning in Polish self-governments. Its introduction presents the whole plethora of implemented planning processes. Next the author concentrates on twelve rules for preparing such documents, the identification of which results from the research he has conducted. The discussed rules are as follows: compliance with the development strategy, internal compliance, vertical compliance, horizontal compliance, legal compliance, meeting social, economic and environmental needs, sustainable development, external financing sources maximization, internal consultations, financial feasibility, implementation procedures, monitoring and evaluation procedures. The study is completed with comments on the permissible deviations from their application, as well as application tips.

In the domain of image processing, face recognition is one of the most well-known research field. When humans have very similar biometric properties, such as identical twins, the face recognition system is considered as a challengeable problem. In this paper, the AdaBoost method is utilized to detect the facial area of input image. After that the facial area is divided into some local regions. Finally, new efficient facial-based identical twins feature extractor based on the geometric moment is applied into local regions of face image. The used feature extractor is Pseudo-Zernike Moment (PZM) which is employed inside the local regions of facial area of identical twins images. To evaluate the proposed method, two datasets, Twins Days Festival and Iranian Twin Society, are collected where the datasets includes scaled and rotated facial images of identical twins in different illuminations. The experimental results demonstrates the ability of proposed method to recognize a pair of identical twins in different situations such as rotation, scaling and changing illumination

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of 23 urban or regional high-technology clusters (media, ICT, energy, biotechnology) all over the world, analyzing how they were created, how they are managed and how they operate, and the strategies followed to improve and excel in their fields of action. Special attention is given to issues related to descriptive aspects, R&D, performance of the clusters, location factors and incentives to attract companies. The empirical analysis applied to the identified clusters was done through a questionnaire sent to the representatives of the cluster's management. When analyzing the data, the study has combined quantitative and qualitative methods, depending on the information to be processed. The data collection was done through a selection of indicators chosen in order to cover the different elements that cluster literature coincide in consider essential to develop a competitive economic cluster in urban regions. The main obstacle we find with the information available to carry out this study has been its heterogeneity and different quality of the data. 22@Barcelona appears to be in a good position to compete with other excelling clusters, but it still needs to improve in areas such as financial supply for R&D and start-ups and coordination between the different actors involved in urban economic development. Our research also contributes to the discussion on the role of public institutions in the cluster development policies. In the clusters studied here, especially in 22@Barcelona, we have seen that a capable and resourceful public administration can determine the success of the cluster initiative.