ABSTRACT
As was demonstrated in Chapter 1 , the decline of cities was closely tied to economic decline and therefore strategies for economic growth and competitiveness underpin urban regeneration in the UK as elsewhere globally. Evidence can be drawn from a major UK project on cities, competitiveness and cohesion undertaken in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and from other macro-studies such as the State of English Cities and Competitive European Cities. Case studies from UK cities illustrate these approaches, which have also been followed in cities internationally such as Chicago, Paris, Barcelona, Bilbao, Rotterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt and Melbourne (see for example, Bianchini and Parkinson 1993; Kearns and Philo 1993; Couch et al. 2003). A key question for all cities in the early twenty- rst century is how competitive advantage can be gauged and what cities can do to enhance it (Deas and Giordano 2002).
