Innovation, Industrialisation and the City

Presenting author: Stuart Gray

Other author: Richard Le Heron (University of Auckland)

The paper attempts to inject economic geography realism into the contemporary debate and rhetoric about the fragility and thinness of global supply chains which is widely seen as disrupting the course of commerce in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The paper's approach is to contextualise, situate and ground the global agri-business assemblage known as Fonterra Co-operative as a basis for exploring dimensions of global supply chains in which Fonterra is embedded and new global value chains that Fonterra is attempting to materialise. Using Fonterra's past, present and indicative experiences, the discussion tries to provide nuanced 'framings' and 'provisional' claims relating to the themes posed in the Sessions abstract

Presenting speaker: Ville Santala (University of Wollongong)

Numerous smart city strategies in Australia highlight the critical role of experimentation in successful smart city implementation and for the 'meaningful' engagement of citizens in local smart city development. This paper focuses on innovation competitions, e.g. hackathons and challenges, as a specific technique of experimentation that enables cities to simultaneously facilitate community engagement but also drive local economic development.

Drawing on theoretical debates on citizens' roles in smart cities, this paper explores the framing, practices and materialisation of innovation competitions aiming to shed light on their potential implications in shaping emergent citizens' subjectivities in the context of Australian smart cities. Findings indicate that while smart city competitions are often framed as 'open for everyone', they mostly engage businesses, start-ups and business-minded individuals looking for new economic opportunities. Nonetheless, from a governmentality perspective, competitions as a mechanism of experimentation embody several related logics of smart urbanism and shape entrepreneurial citizens in several modes: start-ups and entrepreneurs are enabled to innovate and to act in smart city space and, simultaneously, citizens' skillsets and entrepreneurial potential are built. This paper reflects on the implications of smart city competitions for emergent smart citizenry and notions of citizen participation.

Presenting author: Nick Lewis (University Of Auckland)

Other author: Donna Wynd (University of Auckland)

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated state interventions in economic activities, the likes of which we have not experienced for decades. New Zealand experienced the pandemic under the watch of a centrist Labour government and bound into a set of state-led economic policy interventions. Sustainable development, regional development, Maori economic development, and well-being accounting were all very much live projects. So too was a 20 year national economic development model underpinned by an extrastate governmental infrastructure, fiscal conservatism rather than austerity, and a strong economic nationalism. The mix meant that the New Zealand state was able to swing rapidly into action to support an economy fundamentally reliant on international trade and tourism.

While little could be done to keep tourism operating, a state that had withdrawn into writing policy documents and issuing, monitoring and evaluating contracts for external providers found itself called to upon to 'do' economy for the first time 30 years. As many point again to the value of demand management, we document some of what state agencies actually did and ask whether there is a practice-centred argument to be made to invoke a post-neoliberal state in which public ownership is again on the agenda. 

Presenting author: Phillip O'Neill (Western Sydney University)

The Sydney metropolitan economy grew at a stunning rate between 2013 and 2020. A growth coalition delivered runaway rates of jobs creation, dwelling completions and infrastructure rollout. This paper examines the portion of this coalition whose investments focus on freight. Members include large developers, real estate investment trusts (REITs), logistics firms, and privatised transport infrastructure operators.  The 2013-2020 growth surge saw this group build and grow new spatialised flows throughout Sydney around the movements of freight, providing the rationale and returns to justify vast edge-of-urban greenfields investments. COVID-19 not only stress tested the economic resilience of this logistics-oriented sprawl, it also expanded opportunities for new investments for coalition members. The paper appraises these pathways, noting they have become primary vehicles for next rounds of economic growth.

Presenting Author: Thomas Sigler (The University of Queensland)

Other Authors: Zachary Neal (Michigan State University), Kirsten Martinus (University of Western Australia), Julia Loginova (The University of Queensland)

'The Globalisation of Australian Cities within Global City-Networks' Cities play an important role in brokering flows of information, capital, labour, and other resources in the global economy. Networked approaches to urban geography look to place cities within urban systems operating at global, national, and regional scales. This presentation reports on the findings of a multi-year project on the role of Australian cities in global city networks. It first outlines how city networks are constructed using firm level data, and then explains how we can understand the dynamic positionality of cities from the vantage point of global networks. It concludes that cities' globalisation is to a large degree determined by dominant industries and their level of global engagement.

Presenting author: Kirsten Martinus (University of Western Australia)

Other authors: Natashi Pauli (University of Western Australia), Jane Heyworth (University of Western Australia), Marit Kragt (University of Western Australia)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had the surprising impact of refocusing importance on economic geography. This has been through two means. First, it has directly highlighted the inextricable links of human consumption and production activities to climate change and disease outbreaks. And second, it has brought into focus the indirect role of global production networks and local consumption choices in the emergence and spread of disease. COVID-19 has without a doubt added new dimensions to how we understand the connection between global and local economies and individual choices. These new understandings will restructure our economic and social lives, as we seek to minimise the impacts of future disease outbreaks. Indeed, a large volume of scholarly work has shown that COVID-19 is not a once-in-100-year black swan event - the next 'pandemic' disease already exists.

Drawing on the 'DPSIR' model (Driving Forces, Pressures, State, Impacts and Responses) which is frequently used to understand society-environment interactions, we examine how behaviours and decision-making by citizens, industry and governments worldwide might increase the risk of disease emergence and spread.

We present a conceptual model to show how local consumption and production decisions in one area of the world influence land use changes elsewhere. We present five land stewardship interventions to minimise the risk of future pandemics, focusing on the implications for economic geography.

Presenting speaker: Pauline McGuirk (University of Wollongong)

Other speaker: Robyn Dowling (University of Sydney), Pratichi Chatterjee (University of Sydney)

The concept of urban entrepreneurialism has a well-established lineage in urban political geography. Yet recent urban scholarship has begun to trouble the performances, roles and practices it assumes of municipal states. This paper explores evolving theorisations of urban governance through the lens of urban entrepreneurialism by engaging with the entrepreneurial municipal statecraft involved in smart city governance. Utilising empirical research on smart city governance across Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, we identify and tease out the active roles and the constitutive and experimental practices involved in smart city governance. We frame these as 'extrospective' or 'beyond-the-state' in which new forms of partnerships are forged, and 'introspective' in which the dispositions, capabilities and competences of the municipal state itself are reformed. The paper enriches entrepreneurial accounts of smart cities and the situated agenda pursued in the name of governing 'the smart city'. It highlights plural municipal state agendas and the reworking of practices and performances of the municipal state these entail. It remains imperative, the paper concludes, to attend critically to the ways that smart co-constitutes the state in unpredictable ways.