Product Description

This innovative text provides a critical and integrated examination of local and regional development theory, institutions and policy. A valuable text, it is grounded in concrete empirical examples from Europe, North America and Latin America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51270 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Review

There is no better guide to the challenges and opportunities of local and regional development. Theoretically broad-minded and international in scope, this book sets the standard for work in the field.  
Jamie Peck, University of Wisconsin-Madison

As governments download responsibility for uneven development to subnational levels, cities and provinces struggle to shepherd their economies in positive ways. Local and Regional Development offers a masterful synthesis of circumstances, strategies and outcomes. In delightfully readable fashion, the authors explore territory where few geographers and economists ever go. In making an optimistic case for successful bottom-up development, they argue that governance matters, that equity is as important as efficiency, and that lodging responsibility close to home means greater transparency and accountability. Their tour is truly global, touching down in Busan, Jalisco, and Ontario as well as their home turf, Europe.
Ann Markusen, University of Minnesota

From the Back Cover

Local and regional development is an increasingly global issue. For localities and regions, the challenge of enhancing prosperity, improving wellbeing and increasing living standards has become acute for localities and regions formerly considered discrete parts of the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. Amid concern over the definitions and sustainability of ‘development’, a spectre has emerged of deepened unevenness and sharpened inequalities in the development prospects for particular social groups and territories.

Local and Regional Development engages and addresses the key questions: what are the principles and values that shape definitions and strategies of local and regional development? What are the conceptual and theoretical frameworks capable of understanding and interpreting local and regional development? What are the main policy interventions and instruments? How do localities and regions attempt to effect development in practice? What kinds of local and regional development should we be pursuing?

Local and Regional Development addresses the fundamental issues of ‘what kind of local and regional development and for whom?’, frameworks of understanding, and instruments and policies. Local and Regional Development outlines what a holistic, progressive and sustainable local and regional development might constitute before reflecting on its limits and political renewal. With the growing international importance of local and regional development, this book is an essential student purchase, illustrated throughout with maps, figures and case studies from Asia, Europe, and Central and North America.

About the Author

Andy Pike is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), University of Newcastle, UK.

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is Professor of Economic Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, UK.

John Tomaney is Professor of Regional Governance and Director in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), University of Newcastle, UK.