Introduction

This book is about generative leadership in knowledge city development. It is rooted in a conviction, albeit not proven, that the leadership in a city is crucial in order for it to adjust strategically to major transformations and thus secure a good future for its inhabitants. Generative leadership is central in these efforts, as it focuses on those processes that are geared to giving birth to something new and constructing local conditions for knowledge creation, circulation and valorisation. This is important, as the future is not something waiting somewhere around the corner only to be anticipated and planned for, but something that is with us today, that is emerging in front of us, in spite of us, or contributed to by us. All this calls for leadership, as the future needs to be discovered, created, made sense of and shaped. The more complex economic development and associated governance systems are becoming, the more city development is dependent on the capacity for leadership emerging from those cities. The main premise here is that successful efforts to boost city development depend both on the ability to exploit existing resources, and on creating and attracting new resources, and this calls for mobilisation of collective action and pooling existing and new knowledge, power and resources, to serve more or less collective purposes. This again calls for better understanding of how actors influence each other in the construction of shared strategic intentions and agreement on that which needs to be done and how.