This article discusses the idea of city as a platform. The analysis focuses on the forms and implications of citizen involvement in publicly-supported participatory innovation platforms that facilitate urban economic development in the welfare society context. The discussion opens with a review of the smart city discourse, which in the context of economic development policy translates into cities’ need to support innovativeness by creating smart environments. Participatory innovation platform is a prime example of such an environment. The empirical section discusses three cases, those of the Finnish cities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Oulu. The analysis shows that platformization in the first half of the 2010s became a strategic focal area supported by national and EU programs. Platforms are used to support both urban revitalization and economic development, of which the former is based on representative and the latter on instrumental modes of participation. Platforms are well integrated with city governments, even though they vary greatly in terms of organizational forms and scopes. Democratic culture, welfarism, and redistributive policy provide contextual support for platformization by strengthening social inclusion, taming the growth machine, and easing the tensions between pro-growth and anti-growth coalitions.

Globalization affects urban communities in many ways. One of its manifestations is increased intercity competition, which compels cities to increase their attractiveness in terms of capital, entrepreneurship, information, expertise and consumption. This competition takes place in an asymmetric field, with cities trying to find the best possible ways of using their natural and created assets, the latter including a naturally evolving reputation or consciously developed competitive identity or brand. The Political Economy of City Branding discusses this phenomenon from the perspective of numerous post-industrial cities in North America, Europe, East Asia and Australasia. Special attention is given to local economic development policy and industrial profiling, and global city rankings are used to provide empirical evidence for cities’ characteristics and positions in the global urban hierarchy. On top of this, social and urban challenges such as creative class struggle are also discussed. The core message of the book is that cities should apply the tools of city branding in their industrial promotion and specialization, but at the same time take into account the special nature of their urban communities and be open and inclusive in their brand policies in order to ensure optimal results. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in the areas of local economic development, urban planning, public management, and branding.

This article discusses national and local strategies for confronting COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis sheds light on how societal context, institutional arrangements, knowledge culture, and technology deployment manifest in national responses to the pandemic. Discussion describes country cases from East and South East Asia, on the one hand, and from Europe and Asia-Pacific, on the other. The overall impression is that Asian cases reflect proactivity and diligence, while Western responses are reactive and more often than not slightly delayed. Both country groups include successes, while the overwhelming majority of global benchmarks are Asian. As the management of COVID-19 crisis is essentially a multi-level governance issue, discussion about national strategies is supplemented with a glance at the role of cities. The COVID-19-related urban challenges revolve around increased interest in urban safety, creative approaches to and the uses of urban space, the rise of digital urban platforms, and deeper insights on citizen engagement.

This article addresses the challenges to urban planning, which is a social activity that affects the development of urban communities and helps them to cope with the challenges posed by the global-local and real-virtual dialectic. The approach to planning is influenced by an emerging creativity and knowledge-sharing culture that has an inherent connection to global and digital transformations. Such a transformation is giving urban planning a new look, which is depicted in the concept of Urban Planning 2.0. In this article this paradigm shift is explained and illustrated with a special view to identifying the ways Web 2.0 tools can be utilised in urban planning. The fundamental question emerging in the critical evaluation of Urban Planning 2.0 is how citizen-oriented practices of Planning 2.0 relate to formal decision-making within the representative system of government and professionally and technocratically oriented planning practices of city governments. There is some evidence to suggest that the new Web 2.0 tools make the difference in open, inclusive and creative contexts, where their optimal deployment requires a paradigm shift in urban governance and planning.