TRIPLE HELIX noms.pmd

O-043The Triple Helix and Evolution of Smart Cities under the CulturalReconstruction and Governance of the Urban RenaissanceLoet Leydesdorff, Mark Deakin, Edinburgh Napier University, ScotlandThis paper sets out to demonstrate how the Triple Helix model enables us to study the knowledge base of an urban economyin terms of civil society's support for the evolution of cities as key components of innovation systems. It argues that cities canbe considered as densities in networks among three relevant dynamics: the intellectual capital of universities, industry of wealthcreation and their participation in the democratic government of civil society. It goes on to suggest the effects of these interactionsgenerate dynamic spaces within cities where knowledge exploration can also be exploited to bootstrap the technology ofregional innovation systems (Cooke and Leydesdorff, 2006; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). Dynamic spaces, the papersuggests that are explored through the all-pervasive technologies of information-based communications (ICTs) and those currentlybeing exploited to generate the notion of "creative cities," as the knowledge base of intelligent cities and their augmentation intosmart(er) cities.The paper suggests that it is the ability of this dynamic to work as such a meta-stabilizing mechanism and reflexive layer in thereinvention of cities which lies behind the surge of academic interest currently being directed at communities as the "practical"instantiations of intellectual capital and knowledge they produce (Amin and Cohendet, 2004; Amin and Brown, 2008). It alsosuggests the reinvention of cities currently taking place under the so-called "urban renaissance" cannot be defined as a toplevel"trans-disciplinary" issue without a considerable amount of bottom-up cultural reconstruction. Taking such a "bottom-line"approach to the reinvention of cities, the paper serves to kick-start this reconstruction by challenging the Mode-2 assumptionthat cultural development is the spontaneous product of market economies and by using the critical insights the Triple Helixmodel offers to represent the policies, academic leadership qualities and corporate strategies which provide critical sights intothe governance of this cultural reconstruction.This reveals that cultural development, however liberal and potentially free, is not a spontaneous product of market economies,but a product of the policies, academic leadership, and corporate strategies which need to be carefully constructed. Otherwise,cultural development of this kind remains merely a series of symbolic events, left without the analytical frameworks needed toexplain itself in terms of anything but the requirements of the market. This also serves to demonstrate that any such appeal tothe efficiency of the market as a means to explain cultural development can only be considered as analytical shortcuts holdingback any meaningful specification of the policies, leadership qualities, and corporate strategies which their governance standon.Drawing upon the "renaissance" experiences of "world class" cities like Montreal and Edinburgh, the paper provides evidence toshow how entrepreneurship-based and market dependent representation of knowledge production are now being replaced withjust such a community of policy makers, academic leaders, corporate strategies and alliances. Strategies and alliances that inturn have the potential to liberate cities from the stagnation which they have previously been locked into and offer communitiesthe freedom to develop polices, with the leadership and strategies, capable of reaching beyond the idea of "creative slack" as aresidual category. Beyond the idea of creative slack and towards a process of reinvention whereby cities become "smarter," inusing intellectual capital to not only meet the efficiency requirements of wealth creation, but to become centres of creativeslack, distinguished by virtue of their communities having political leadership capable of not only being economically innovative,or culturally creative, but enterprising in opening-up, reflexively absorbing, and discursively shaping the governmental dimensionsto such developments.Armed with these critical insights, the neo-evolutionary logic of the Triple Helix model is subsequently used as a means touncover the intellectual capital sustaining the development of this cultural reconstruction and reveal the corporate managementstrategies making it possible for this process of reinvention to function as meta-stabilizing mechanisms integrating cities intothe emerging innovation systems (Deakin and Allwinkle, 2007; Deakin, 2009 2009). This demonstrates the "creative reflexivity"of this meta-stabilisation to be far from "symbolic". Far from symbolic and in that sense real, insofar as it generates the criticalreinforcement which is needed for the democratic values of civil society to govern over any such "programmatic" integration ofcities into innovation systems, particularly those centred around the "creative destruction" of the global and "reflexivereconstruction" of the local (Deakin, 2009a and b).Madrid, October 20, 21 & 22 - 2010202