ABSTRACT
There is widespread interest among policymakers and observers alike in the entrepreneurial city. It is less obvious what exactly being an entrepreneurial city involves. To help resolve this conundrum, our paper first provides a Schumpeterian analysis of the entrepreneurial city and then illustrates it with the Hong Kong case (see Figure 20.1). We first offer a three-part definition of the entrepreneurial city in capitalist societies. This relates urban entrepreneurship to changing forms of competitiveness, changing strategies to promote inter-urban competitiveness in both the economic and in the extra-economic fields and entrepreneurial discourses, narratives and self-images. Schumpeter (1934) identified five ways in which entrepreneurs innovate in normal economic activities; our analysis identifies parallels in urban entrepreneurialism. We then critically consider how far such an analysis is valid given the differences between the types of actor involved and the objects of their innovation—answering affirmatively in both respects and suggesting the conditions in which cities can be described as strategic actors with entrepreneurial ambitions. This theoretical analysis is further refined and justified from recent developments in Hong Kong and east Asia. Conventionally regarded as a paradigm case of laissez-faire and officially described in the decades before 1997 as practicing ‘positive non-intervention’, Hong Kong actually has a long history of urban entrepreneurship based on public–private partnerships. But its strategies have been modified as the economic and political environments have changed.
