This theme looks at the economic performance of cities, including skills, labour market performance and their relationship to the European and global systems of cities.
Cities can be excellent laboratories for innovating and developing new ideas. When Foresight asked cities about the challenges they were facing, retaining a high skilled labour pool emerged as an important issue.
Cities could increasingly take the lead on solving societal problems. Ed Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, famously said that cities are our greatest invention.
On 6 November, the Centre for Cities and the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office hosted the Northern Futures Summit in Leeds.
Writing some 30 years ago, in her classic study on 'Cities and the wealth of nations', the celebrated North American urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that nations are not the basic economic units, rather cities are.
At a recent supper party I was besieged by NHS professionals. An interesting experience as it means you end up putting the world to rights. After all, everyone’s got an opinion on health, right?
Does London’s growth occur at the expense of other UK cities, as it can sometimes seem when the capital’s economy surges ahead?
One important trend in the investigation into the future of cities is the rapidly evolving relationship between cities and business.
As part of the Foresight Future of Cities project, a number of evidence papers have been written to provide an in depth analysis of some of the key issues that UK cities will face in 2040 and 2065.
