Marina Giltman (p), Viktor Pit, Maria Batyreva, Elena Sumik

Attracting talented employees to the cities leads to the concentration of high-quality human capital, and thus to their successful economic and social development. Employees are the main taxpayers and stakeholders of social and economic policies pursued in cities, so it is necessary to understand which characteristics of a city are important for attracting and/or retaining talented employees. So far we do not have enough knowledge about what kind of city amenities contribute to a positive attitude among employees towards the city where they live and/or work. Exploring this could be important for the empirical research into the frameworks of the theories of local labor markets and compensating differentials, as well as in the designing of social policies in cities. In our research we applied three theoretical frameworks: Local Labour Market Model (Rosen, 1979; Roback 1982; Moretti, 2011), Concept of Compensating Differentials (Coelho, Ghali, 1971; Greenwood et al., 1991) and the Branding of Places approach (Kavaratzis, 2005; Virgo, de Chernatony, 2006; Baker, Cameron, 2008; Merrilees et al., 2009; Zenker, 2011; etc.). The study presented is based on unique microdata collected by the authors using surveys of the employed population of 20-64 years in the administrative centers of the Ural Federal District (Russia), with a total of 2,520 respondents. We applied ordered logit regression to estimate how the city amenities, the individual characteristics of the employee and the size of individual wages affect employees’ attitudes to the cities. The results showed that both wages and city amenities have a significant impact on the employees’ attitudes to the cities. From the city amenities the most significant were those from the group “Urbanity and diversity”, such as institutions of art, culture and leisure; effective system of municipal governance; transport infrastructure; health care system; kindergartens and schools. The group “Nature and recreation” (in our case landscapes and climate) had a lower impact but were also significant. Individual wages have a strong and significant impact on employees’ attitudes to the cities. Thus it could be assumed that lower satisfaction with the city amenities of an employee could be compensated by higher wages. The obtained results can be explained based on the economic theories approach as well as on the concept of city branding. The results of the empirical research can also be used in the designing and implementation of social policies in cities.

Lily Kiminami (p), Shinichi Furuzawa , Akira Kiminami

Although, most of people agree that a sustainable city should meet the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, there remains no completely agreed upon definition for what a sustainable city should be or completely agreed upon paradigm for what components should be included. Furthermore, it is thought to be important to form a community that people can enjoy the various functions produced by urban agriculture and people called creative classes (CCs) especially those who are thinking creatively (TC) with high productivity are attracted in such high amenity areas that can bring a further development for the city.
The purpose of this paper is to build a model of sustainable development of city focusing on the impacts of multi-functionality of urban agriculture (MFUA) on the creative classes (CCs) through examining Niigata City in Japan. Multi-method approach will be introduced in the research for verifying our three hypotheses. These are “The CCs prefer multi-functionality of agriculture (MFA) than non-CCs as well as the TC more than non-TC”(H1), “The CCs have a high level of social capital”(H2) and “The CCs prefer diversified lifestyles” (H3). Specifically, econometrics analysis by using published statistical data, structural equation modeling (SEM) by using authors’ original questionnaire survey data targeting at the residents, and case studies from the good practices improving the amenity of urban agriculture in Niigata City will be undertaken for hypothesis verification.
Based on the results of analysis, the conditions for urban creativity and sustainable development through improving the amenity of urban agriculture will be clarified and the challenges for social implementation will be derived as well.

Laura Resmini (p), Luca Bettarelli

Recent theoretical and empirical works have demonstrated that regions’ connectivity positively impacts on regional economic performance (Boshma, 2005; Frenken et al, 2007; Asheim et al., 2012; Bathelt et al., 2014 Bettarelli and Resmini, forthcoming). In fact, networks produce a number of positive externalities that either complement or strengthen the set of assets available at the local level (Capello, 2009; Ascani et al., forthcoming). However, if the above works have mainly concentrated on benefits accruing to well-connected locations in terms of economic performance (productivity, employment, etc.), in this paper we investigate the elements facilitating economic relationships between regions. In so doing, we consider all the possible interactions between Italian and German NUTS-2 regions, thus giving shape to a matrix including 798 possible combinations. We make use of data at firm level and direct ownership ties between firms in order to quantify the intensity of interactions. We estimate a gravitational model where the intensity of interactions is function of regional characteristics and a vector of proximity indices, which measure the distance between pairs of regions in a number of domains. Beyond spatial proximity, we account for technological proximity, production structure proximity, cultural proximity and institutional proximity in order to understand how those indices affect inter-regions connections and how they mutually affect each other. In fact, if spatial proximity has been traditionally identified as the main factor either hampering or facilitating economic interactions, other types of proximity may extensively contribute to forge such interactions. Our findings suggest that: i) the importance of the spatial distance drastically decreases when we introduce the other proximity indicators; ii) the main determinant of economic interactions is the technological proximity; iii) the intensity of interactions is affected by the overall economic performance of regions, with German regions that tend to not interact with low-performance Italian regions, but not viceversa. Finally, we account for a potential reverse causality between technological proximity and intensity of interactions by making use of the instrumental variable strategy.