Innovation Archives

Rethinking Urban Entrepreneurialism

China’s urban governance demonstrates perplexing and contradictory features. Despite market-oriented reform, the role of the state remains salient. What is the logic behind governing urban China? Chinese scholars provide a grounded view.

Rethinking Urban Entrepreneurialism challenges the conventional understanding of urban entrepreneurialism and argues that Chinese urban governance comprises two interrelated aspects: entrepreneurial governance and innovative statecraft. The first refers to the deployment of market-based approaches to urban development, and the second refers to versatile techniques. Urban entrepreneurialism encompasses both market-oriented approaches and administrative innovations. The state upholds its strategic and extra-economic objectives by deploying and mobilising the market and society. Urban entrepreneurialism also demonstrates a strong state intentionality rather than following the market logic. The book reveals the challenges to urban entrepreneurialism, the limits of entrepreneurial governance, and multiple managerial practices in China.

By examining entrepreneurial urban development and governance experiments, it paints a comprehensive picture of contemporary urban governance in China. It transcends the binary view of authoritarianism versus urban entrepreneurialism, showcasing a wide spectrum of entrepreneurial and managerial governance features. To rethink urban entrepreneurialism, the book suggests that it extends public-private partnerships into a broader form of statecraft known as ‘state entrepreneurialism’.

Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education

Through examples of literary and audiovisual translation teaching practices, Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education places a novel emphasis on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) synergising the latest research advancements in EDI and translation curricula.

The contributors revisit how languages and translation are currently taught and explore the relevance of EDI values from an interdisciplinary perspective. The chapters contain proposals of best teaching practices and teacher training guidance alongside examples of research-led teaching scenarios. There is a twofold rationale behind this volume: firstly, identifying links between literary and audiovisual translation teaching practices, which often demand great creativity inside and outside the classroom; and, secondly, placing greater emphasis on EDI-focused methods and themes. Following this approach, readers are invited to consider pressing societal issues such as (media) accessibility, intersectionality, LGBTQI+ and race, among others, and to embed them in their language and translation teaching practices.

The Venice Variations

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time.

Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ enduring a 1000 years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

Creativity in Education

Creativity has become a buzzword across all disciplines in education and across all phases, from early years through to tertiary education. Although the meaning of creativity can change vastly depending on the global educational setting, it is impossible to ignore the applicability and relevance of creativity as an educational tool, philosophical framework and pedagogical approach.

Through case studies of creativity in varying settings and diverse contexts, this collection explores the ground-breaking work undertaken internationally to support, develop and future-proof learners with, and for, creativity. The chapters are centred around a practice based enquiry or other forms of empirical research. This provides the scholarly basis upon which creativity is continuously reconceptualised and redefined in the educational and country-specific context of each study. Contributors from different countries then provide critical, reflective and analytical responses to each chapter. These conversational responses focus further on international education perspectives and provide a dialogue for educators into how methods and approaches can be transferred, translated and contextually mediated for different environments. Through the case studies and responses, Creativity in Education provides practical insights for application in a wide range of educational settings and contexts, such as the use of art exhibitions and object-work, as well as more philosophical approaches to teacher education, leadership for learning and creativity as a universal phenomenon.