By entrepreneurial combinations of voluntary resources, project means from public and private sources, commissions on contracts and other ways of financing, the youth house Fryshuset, with a great number of social activities for primarily young people in Stockholm, Sweden, has been able to allocate resources for establishing and expanding its activities. This development would not have been possible without struggle against established norms, values, traditions and institutions, not least the 'close to monopoly' that the public sector in practice was having on the fields in which Fryshuset emerged. Step by step, Fryshuset has built partnerships and alliances with public, private as well as civil actors. Expressed in a general way, Fryshuset has built a new social capital and created new norms and values. The aim of the paper is to investigate how Fryshuset has managed to build social capital through, and for entrepreneurial efforts aiming to facilitate young peoples' development.
The complexities of contemporary global urban, political, economic, and environmental issues are evident. It is not hyperbole to say that human beings are now confronted with the greatest challenge that we have ever faced; in fact, it is a matter of life and death. The planet has recently been experiencing a convergence of natural and man-made crises that are unprecedented in our lifetime. We are also facing the consequences of accelerating and rapid urbanization, the scarcity of natural resources and their mismanagement, the impact of major errors in our responses to disasters, and the increasing demand for and complexity of greatly expanding transportation flows (Haas, 2012). Our societies have also undergone rapid and radical shifts in terms of age and class, increasing inequities between the rich and poor and intense demand for affordable and high-quality housing. All of these major challenges require immediate solutions from architects, urban planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and urbanists; actually, we need the combined efforts of all good people who are concerned with the physical condition and future of our cities. We need these professionals and experts to contribute their most imaginative, pragmatic, resilient, innovative, and just solutions.
Start-ups and local entrepreneurial social capital in the municipalities of Sweden, Regional Studies. This paper contains one of the first empirical attempts to investigate the influence of local entrepreneurial social capital (ESC) on start-up propensity. A unique database, including not only total start-ups but also data on start-ups divided into six sectors, is used to study the impact of ESC on start-ups per capita. The results support the hypothesis that social capital, measured both as (1) firm perception of local public attitudes to entrepreneurship and (2) the share of small businesses influences start-up propensity in Swedish municipalities. The findings also support previous results suggesting that social capital has a somewhat stronger influence in rural areas than in urban areas.
This chapter deals with social capital from a certain perspective, that is, local social capital. However, before we start the analysis of what it is that characterizes local social capital and how it is being studied, it is necessary to relate to some of the contentious issues of social capital in general – as these are sometimes also reflected in local social capital.
Against the background of global urban knowledge economy, this paper discusses some of the challenges that sustainable urban life is facing in the global knowledge economy of the 21st century. The paper makes an overview of the fundamental change in urban-rural relations, urban and rural demographics, the concepts of place surplus and place attractiveness, agglomeration and the new economic geography, global threats to long-term urban sustainability and finally the needs of policy visions and strategies for sustainable urban life across the world.
The purpose of this paper is to address the hypotheses of complete urbanization and the post urban world with an emphasis on the agricultural sector. The paper studies spatial and temporal changes in land-use and agricultural activities in one rapidly growing metropolitan region, the Stockholm region. We explore the number and size of agricultural firms, changes in their main activity and trends of diversification and land prices for various types of land and location, all in a disaggregated spatial dimension. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of agriculture's function in metropolitan regions and shed new light on the possibilities of the agricultural sector to transform in a world where the traditional urban-rural relations are ceasing to exist.
This chapter aims to contribute to the research on innovation, entrepreneurship and their determinants by investigating these issues in two Swedish regions - Jonkoping County and Jamtland. Jonkoping County is representative for a rural and peri-urban area, with a central location in Sweden. Firm innovativeness is an important dimension of entrepreneurship and is regarded as playing a vital role for firm growth, including for firms located in rural areas. The ability of firms to renew themselves is becoming increasingly important from the perspective of firm survival and growth. The county has a strong entrepreneurial and small firm tradition in the manufacturing sector. The town of Gnosjo is famous for its “entrepreneurial spirit” and flexible small firms that both compete and cooperate. The county has a strong entrepreneurial and small firm tradition in manufacturing. Interesting regional differences emerge when looking at the factors that can facilitate innovation, i.e. firm size and human capital characteristics.
As in other countries, urbanization and industrialization in Sweden was two sides of the same coin. To a large extent, the Swedish urbanization took place at a low level with the emergence of many small towns. In the last decades, a redistribution of the urban population to bigger cities has happened. This neo-urbanization is interpreted as a consequence of the breakthrough of the knowledge economy. This paper focuses on the ‘backside of the coin’ of this neo-urbanization, namely, how the rural areas have been affected. Westlund found that the countryside's population growth 1990–1997 primarily could be explained by income and the size of the local labour market. In this paper, we examine the current trends of population development in different age groups and extend the possible explanatory variables to among others, some variables measuring local social capital. Our main result is that it does not seem to be rural amenities per se that explain rural population growth in certain areas, but the rural areas' relative accessibility to urban amenities. This rural dependency on urban services and goods is a major challenge for rural policy in the neo-urban knowledge economy.
The current empirical entrepreneurship literature mainly shows a positive correlation between entrepreneurship (measured as the number of startups) and economic growth. However, the mechanisms by which entrepreneurship exerts its positive influence are not obvious. This paper studies the connections between startups and local development at the municipal level in Sweden 2000-2008. We use a unique database including not only total startups, but data on startups divided in six branches to study the impact of entrepreneurship on population and employment growth. Analyses are performed on all municipalities as well as by municipality type and by growth rate. In contrast to previous research, our results indicate that for several branch groups startup effects on growth may be more pronounced in low density areas than in urban agglomerations. This paper also contains one of the first empirical attempts to investigate the influence of local norms, values, networks and other spacebound assets on entrepreneurship propensity. We find that this “local Entrepreneurial Social Capital” (ESC) is highly correlated with startup frequency in Swedish municipalities.
The ability of firms and regions to renew themselves is becoming increasingly important from the perspective of survival and competitiveness. Renewal, technological change, or innovation is also commonly perceived as the main driver of economic growth, which implies that innovation is important from both a micro- and a macro perspective. Following Schumpeter, innovation should be regarded as a broad concept that incorporates not only new products, but also e.g. new production processes and new ways of doing business. This chapter focuses on the determinants of entrepreneurship and innovation in rural regions. The specific determinants for innovation and entrepreneurship can be broadly defined in three groups; knowledge, diversity and amenities. External knowledge in terms of collaboration with other firms and access to a diverse, but related, knowledge base provides potential determinants for innovation, as well as entrepreneurship.
This paper applies unique survey data on innovation and external interaction of small food producers in Sweden.The overall purpose is to test if firms that are more engaged in external interaction are more innovative. To disentangle innovativeness beyond new goods and services, innovation is measured as new processes, new markets, new suppliers, new ways of organization, and new distributors. Findings point to a positive relationship between firm innovation and external interaction, both in terms of collaboration, external knowledge and support from regional actors. In particular, collaboration regarding transports and sales is shown to enhance most types of innovation. Product and process innovation benefit from external knowledge from extra-regional firms as well as regional support from the largest firm. Findings suggest that current innovation policies can improve their efficiency by increasing their flexibility to enable tailor-made innovation policies at the local level.
In this study, we use unique purpose-built survey data to show that small food firms are more innovative when externally engaged. To capture this, we apply a broad classification of innovative activities, including new products, processes, markets, organization, and distribution channels, and examine them against types of external interactions. The analysis, an ordered logit estimation, controls for heterogeneity across firms as well as geographic conditions. The results demonstrate a positive relationship between external interaction and firm innovation, though there are differences across types of external engagement and innovation activities. Product innovation benefits from knowledge from extra-regional firms, while several of the other forms of innovation show a positive relationship with support from regional and municipality boards. Additionally, firm collaboration regarding transports and sales enhances most types of innovation, but there are few relationships of benefit with research-intensive organizations. We conclude that, to be effective, innovation strategies of both the firms themselves and policymakers need to consider local context, access to intra- and extra-regional knowledge sources, and what types of innovation activities the firms are engaged in.
This article aims to investigate the evidence of spatio-temporal disparity in rural household income at the provincial level in China during the 1978-2007 period. A research framework is developed to study the transitional processes of decentralisation, marketisation, urbanisation and globalisation. By computing the Moran's I index and using the spatial regression model, the findings indicate a highly clustered, spatio-temporal disparity in rural household income across the eastern, central and western regions in China during the post-reform era. Rural household income tends to be higher in the eastern provinces in comparison to inland provinces. This disparity is attributed to the impacts from the institutional, economic, social and external transitions that become increasingly significant in the recent decades in China.
With the economic transition and changes in the urban–rural relationships, rural revitalization has become a great political concern in China. Reforming the rural land system is considered an important prerequisite for the revitalization of the countryside as the homestead transfer can provide new land utilization space for industries. This case study of the “hollow village” (villages with abandoned houses) reconstruction of Wantang in Yiwu city, which is a homestead system reforming pilot, aims at making a detailed analysis of the specific practice of homestead transfer. It analyzes the roles and functions of the local village collective organization in the reform of homestead transfer. From the capitalization on homestead value, the effect of densification of housing, and the effect of labor resource diversification of homestead transfer, this paper analyzes how the village collective uses the policy of the “hollow village reconstruction” to realize rural revitalization and farmers’ welfare. A conclusion is that the village collective’s leadership and mobilization played an indispensable role in the process of homestead system reform. Building up industry is the key factor for the village’s revitalization. It is significant not only for the use of the homestead resource but also for creating off-farm employment. Our findings also emphasize the need for bottom-up village collective initiatives to align with top-down government policy, regional resource endowments and enterprises, to achieve rural revitalization.