Sustainable Future Cities, Towns and Communities (I)
There is this nice symbolic story by Paul Watzlawick, the Austrian-American psychologist and communication theorist, which goes as follows:
“A drunk man is standing under a streetlight one night, searching frantically for something. A policeman comes along and asks him what he has lost. The man replies, „My key.“ They then both start searching. Finally, the policeman asks whether the man is sure that he lost the key where they were looking, and the latter replies, „No, not here, back there – but it’s much too dark to look there.“

This is somewhat reminiscent of the traditional focus of local economic development. Was the focus on businesses and promotional approaches to increase competitiveness and innovation perhaps too narrow? Were significant additional forces for change overlooked (see Figure 1)? „Picking the winners!“ (focusing on companies and clusters with growth and value creation potential) was the slogan for a long time. The sustainability issue was not much in focus, and civil society forces and their social innovation potential were hardly on the radar. „Awakening civil society’s self-development forces and potential and putting people at the centre of economic activity and action“ is the focus of the Economic Development 4.0 approach (referred to hereafter as ED 4.0) With this approach, the Wuppertal Institute is renewing awareness of old familiar approaches bundling them in such a way that they are developing new transformational power.
„Economic development 4.0 – Looking beyond the traditional perspective of economic development“ weiterlesen