The strategic management of urban economies and the scope for intermunicipal cooperation

This stems from the origins of the concept in Europe where the creation of a third tier of policy making, the European Union, and the adoption of the principle of subsidiarity as a central tenet of the Single European Act of 1992, had a profound impact on the relative powers of both national and sub–national, or regional, levels of the member European states. [...] Building on this distinction between the business and the civic dimensions of social capital, we have formulated the concept of civic capital to analyze the contribution that more cooperative forms of behaviour make to the success of local and regional economies (Wolfe and Nelles 2008) and subsequently applied it to analyze the emergence of new forms of inter–municipal cooperation. [...] In his comparison of the economic growth trajectories in the two ‘rustbelt’ cities of Youngstown, Ohio and Allentown, Pennsylvania, Safford attributes the relative failure of the first and relative success of the second to the quality of social networks in each place, and argues that “differences in the underlying structure of inter–organizational relationships in the two cities shaped the strateg [...] Ottawa: Associative Regional Governance The distinguishing feature of the Ottawa case is the strength of its local ‘institutions of collaboration’ and the unusual degree to which they are integrated with the formal institutional structure of the regional municipality. [...] The membership of TOP included the chairs of the region’s business and economic development agencies, and representatives of its municipal council, the higher education sector, and the business community at large.