Planning Local Economic Development

Written by authors with years of academic, regional, and city planning experience, the classic Planning Local Economic Development has laid the foundation for practitioners and academics working in planning and policy development for generations. With deeper coverage of sustainability and resiliency, the new Sixth Edition explores the theories of local economic development while addressing the issues and opportunities faced by cities, towns, and local entities in crafting their economic destinies within the global economy. Nancey Green Leigh and Edward J. Blakely provide a thoroughly up-to-date exploration of planning processes, analytical techniques and data, and locality, business, and human resource development, as well as advanced technology and sustainable economic development strategies.

Since the appearance of the first edition in 1990, Planning Local Economic Development has become the foundation for an entire generation of planners and academics teaching planning. Building on the success of its predecessors, the Fourth Edition continues to explore the theories of local economic development and address the dilemmas communities face. The authors investigate planning processes, analytical techniques, business and human resource development, as well as high-technology economic development strategies. Written by authors with many years of academic, regional, and city planning experience, this book will prove invaluable to professors of economic development, urban studies, and public administration. Economic development specialists in local and municipal government, as well as nonprofit organizations, will also find this an essential reference. New to the Fourth Edition: - Completely revised and updated with current research - Provides more guidance oriented to third world readers - Includes more on issues of urban sustainability such as energy and brown field development - Contains added material on the redesign of neighborhoods for sustainable purposes to include new firms and recycling techniques and technologies as new economic engines

Exploring the theories of local economic development that are relevant to dilemmas facing communities today, this third edition expands on issues such as the planning process, analytical techniques and high-technology strategies.

This textbook looks at economic development at the local, community or regional scale. It provides students with a comprehensive introduction to contemporary thinking about locally-based economic development, how growth can be planned and how that development can be realized. Globalization, Planning and Local Economic Development: • Provides students with a thorough understanding of current debates around local and regional development and how that body of work can assist them in helping communities grow; • Equips students with a ‘toolkit’ of strategies that enable them to both plan for development and deliver that development through their professional lives; • Offers a roadmap for economic development that helps students make sense of place-based development by providing a ‘meta narrative’ of how regions grow and how those processes can be enhanced. This integrating perspective will be organized around the concept of competitiveness and how that concept can be understood and operationalized in various ways; • Introduces students to a range of techniques essential to success in economic development planning. In addition to a wealth of case studies and pedagogical features in the book, this text is also complemented by online resources. In offering a full toolkit of economic development knowledge, techniques and strategies, this text will thoroughly prepare students for a career in urban planning, transport planning, human geography, applied economic analysis, geographic information systems, or work as an economic development practitioner.

Regional economic development has attracted the interest of economists, geographers, planners and regional scientists for a long time. And, of course, it is a field that has developed a large practitioner cohort in government and business agencies from the national down to the state and local levels. In planning for cities and regions, both large and small, economic development issues now tend to be integrated into strategic planning processes. For at least the last 50 years, scholars from various disciplines have theorised about the nature of regional economic development, developing a range of models seeking to explain the process of regional economic development, and why it is that regions vary so much in their economic structure and performance and how these aspects of a region can change dramatically over time. Regional scientists in particular have developed a comprehensive tool-kit of methodologies to measure and monitor regional economic characteristics such as industry sectors, employment, income, value of production, investment, and the like, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, and focusing on both static and dynamic analysis. The 'father of regional science', Walter lsard, was the first to put together a comprehensive volume on techniques of regional analysis (Isard 1960), and since then a huge literature has emerged, including the many titles in the series published by Springer in which this book is published.

This book offers insights into the process and the practice of local economic development. Bridging the gap between theory and practice it demonstrates the relevance of theory to inform local strategic planning in the context of widespread disparities in regional economic performance. The book summarizes the core theories of economic development, applies each of these to professional practice, and provides detailed commentary on them. This updated second edition includes more recent contributions - regional innovation, agglomeration and dynamic theories – and presents the major ideas that inform economic development strategic planning, particularly in the United States and Canada. The text offers theoretical insights that help explain why some regions thrive while others languish and why metropolitan economies often rise and fall over time. Without theory, economic developers can only do what is politically feasible. This text, however, provides them with a logical tool for thinking about development and establishing an independent basis from which to build the local consensus needed for evidence-based action undertaken in the public interest. Offering valuable perspectives on both the process and the practice of local and regional economic development, this book will be useful for both current and future economic developers to think more profoundly and confidently about their local economy.

Much of our understanding of local economic development is based on large urban agglomerations as nodes of innovation and competitive advantage, connecting territories to global value chains. However, this framework cannot so easily be applied to peripheral regions and secondary cities in either the Global South or the North. This book proposes an alternative way of looking at local economic development based on the idea of fragile governance and three variables: associations and networks; learning processes; and leadership and conflict management in six Latin American peripheral regions. The case studies illustrate the challenges of governance in small and intermediate cities in Latin America, and showcase strategies that are being used to achieve a more resilient and territorial vision of local economic development. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of local economic development, urban and regional studies, and political economy in Latin America as well as to policy-makers and practitioners interested in local and regional economic development policy.