The 1st INTA Summer Course in Villa Angelina near Sorrento (Italy) was a success. European practitioners and local authorities executives exchange during a week long course with high level course leaders from the United Kingdom, USA, Italy, France, Belgium, Peru and The Netherlands.
City-rankings have become a central instrument for assessing the attractiveness of urban regions. City-rankings are used by the cities themselves to sharpen their profile and to improve their position: a top-rank in a highly reputed city ranking helps to improve the international image of a city and can therefore play a central role in its marketing strategy, said Michel Sudarskis, Secretary General of INTA, at the opening the Summer Course.
Producing indicators for measuring the performance of public policy is not enough unless it contributes to thinking and aligning public services to create value, promoting small businesses, artisans, jobs and social cohesion, especially in difficult neighbourhoods, rather than to cut costs, underlined Kent Hudson from the USA.
For Eric Corijn, the integration process in Europe makes necessary for each city to improve the "uniqueness" of its urban-regional profile. Concetta Fallanca and Robert Kloosterman stressed that urban competitiveness and related strategic approaches with specific goals and appropriate (effective and efficient) instruments have become important components of urban policy. This ability is not a function of size because even medium or small-sized cities may do it.
Patrizio Fiorilli underlined that since investors, as well as policy makers, ask for clear results that can easily be communicated, most rankings aim at finding the best or most attractive city in general terms. Consequently these indicators try to cover all fields of local attractiveness totally ignoring the fact that different activities need different conditions said Michel Gahagan adding that a city that offers a high quality of life does not necessarily have to be the ideal location for all industrial branches.
For Rachel Granger, the strategy of specialisation is based on an accurate examination of existing economic, social and environmental potentials in order to find specific niches. Amongst other instruments the comparison and ranking of cities, explained Dominique Gaudron from Algoé, is an effective approach to identify citys comparative advantages, potentials and weaknesses.
This 1st Course is a component of the overall Urban Development Training and Education programme of INTA. The University of Versailles-St Quentin-en-Yvelines (France) offers its facilities to host the second edition of the INTA Summer Course on Urban Development to take place in August 2009.
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