The Canadian Journal of Regional Science Special Issue on Territorial Development and Social innovation/Revue Canadienne Des Sciences Regionales Numero Special Sur l'Innovation Sociale et le Developpement Territorial

Introduction: Territorial Development and Social Innovation The objective of this special issue is to relate local development to social innovation. These two phenomena, while of increasing interest for some years now (Klein and Fontan 2004; Moulaert et al 2005) rarely converge in the works- of researchers and experts. Thus, the need to innovate in the field of development is becoming more and more urgent. Both the traditional development models that praise unlimited growth (Rostow 1960) as well as their adaptations to regional and urban development (Friedmann and Alonso 1964) have proven inappropriate for confronting the diverse emerging problems in urban spaces and rural communities in the context of globalization. The territorial hierarchies in the context of the nation state, based on models favouring centrality (Christaller 1933) or polarity (Perroux 1986) to establish a balance between and to allow the poorest territories to catch up with the richest territories, are questioned in a context where the specificity of the locations is an asset and not a constraint. The crisis of the Fordist mode of production of the late 1970s (Agglietta 1976), the redeployment of economic activities begun in the early 1980s (Boisvert and Hamel 1985), and the subsequent changes made to the governance of societies (Brenner 1999) are some of the main factors of a crisis of regulation (Boyer and Saillard 2002). Such a crisis led to a new mode of organization of economic space, namely one in which post-Fordism flexibility replaced Fordist rigidity (Moulaert and Swyngedouw 1989) and in which global and local scale networks (Castells 2004) replaced the integrated management of social and economic entities as advocated by Keynes (Johnston 1986). Far from promoting social equality, this new context created new inequalities between the winning regions (Benko and Lipietz 1992) and the losing regions (Cote et al 1996) and provoked the devitalization of urban neighbourhoods and towns. These latter were deserted by private capital and neglected by public bodies for the benefit of territories that are more profitable on the economic and policy levels (Fontan et al 2003). The world space structured by these changes, as with the restructurings of the governance of territories, are, however, far from homogeneous. The differences between the countries (Boyer and Souyri 2001) is compounded by a diversity of situations within those same countries--a diversity accentuated by the loss of interterritorial solidarity (Klein 2008) and the loss of effectiveness of institutions which generate social cohesion at the scale of the nation state (Jenson 1998; Beauvais and Jenson 2002). This leads to an atomization of national spaces in favour of the most performing spaces. This trend, already fairly widespread at the global scale (Viard 1994; Veltz 1996; Scott 2001; Castells 2004; De Mattos et al 2005), is even stronger in the so-called underdeveloped countries, whose regulatory capacity is weaker (La Serna 2007). However, this same global space is also the scene of another process; a process which put in action local communities on the economic and on the social levels (Arocena 2001; Laville 2007; Nussbaumer and Moulaert 200.7). In those communities, private (businesses, capital), public (national agencies, regional or municipal governments), and social (cooperatives, third sector, community organizations) stakeholders establish partnership and collaboration relationships prompted by the recognition of a shared territorial identity (Klein 1992; 1997; Nyssens 1997). Socio-economic arrangements thus take shape with the purpose of ensuring a development oriented toward the local collectivity. Socially innovative initiatives take place, be it from the impetus of state programs that create development opportunities or asa result of the action of the local communities themselves (Fontan et al 2005; Drewe et al 2008). …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.