City 2.0 as a Platform for Global E-Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Urban Response To Globalisation

One of the manifestations of globalisation is that the number of countries promulgating favourable policies towards foreign direct investment (FDI) has skyrocketed since the early 1980s; hence the number of candidate locations for businesses has increased exponentially (Douglas, 2002, p. 56). Another sign of this trend is that the relocations of factories from Western and Northern Europe and the USA to low-cost countries have become daily news (e.g., Collins & Brainard, 2006; Markusen, 2005).

There are two fundamentally different ways of responding to this challenge: to increase the competitiveness of a local community or to affect the very condition within which these intercity relations are determined and regulated. In other words, local response to globalisation has two paradigmatic forms and arenas: (a) competitive development-oriented responses in a dynamic environment of economic competition by which cities attract values of global flows and local businesses produce products and services for global markets, and (b) collaborative welfare-oriented responses in an institutionalised environment, which are needed to promote solidarity and sustainability from the local to the global level as a joint effort of local governments and other public agencies. It goes without saying that it is more difficult to realise transnational solidarity than to pursue local development policies that aim at benefitting an individual urban community (Anttiroiko, 2009c).