ACRE

Accommodating Creative Knowledge – Competitiveness of European Metropolitan Regions within the Enlarged Union

The project is funded under the priority 7 ‘Citizens and Governance in a knowledge-based society’ within the Sixth Framework Programme of the EU.

About the project

In this project we aim to assess the impact of the emerging ‘creative class’ and the rise of the ‘creative industries’ on the competitiveness of EU metropolitan regions. While the traditional ‘hard’ location factors that firms use will remain important for international competitiveness, new ‘soft’ location factors that are mainly related to attracting the required ‘talent pool’ would deserve increasing attention.

The central research question we will address is: what are the conditions for creating or stimulating ‘creative knowledge regions’ in the context of the extended European Union? We will compare the recent socio-economic development trends and strategies in several metropolitan regions across Europe to get more insight in the extent to which creativity, innovation and knowledge are indeed the keys to a successful long-term economic development.

The metropolitan regions in the ACRE project are: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Birmingham, Budapest, Dublin, Helsinki, Leipzig, Milan, Munich, Poznan, Riga, Sofia and Toulouse. The most important topic to consider is which metropolitan regions might develop as ‘creative knowledge regions’, and which regions might not. With the results of this study the EU might seriously consider strengthening the profile of metropolitan regions within the EU area as regards creative knowledge branches and activities in the face of increasing competition with other growth regions in the world.

In this research leading European experts with complementary disciplinary backgrounds from places with clearly different pathways concerning the creative knowledge economy will be brought together. This will help to significantly improve our understanding of the conditions that shape the emergence of a creative knowledge economy and of its importance for enhanced competitiveness.