Basing urban policies on the findings of several years of academic literature makes intuitive sense. But, in practice, too often it is easy for policymakers at a national, regional and local level either to ignore academic findings, because they can be inaccessible, or at the opposite extreme to take academic findings too literally without recognising the caveats. This paper seeks to review what policymakers can and cannot take from three key areas of urban economics.
Our concern is that a group of well-publicised ‘superstars’ such as Silicon Valley dominate discussions of economic growth and cities. But while these are important examples, it is not clear how much it is possible to generalise policies from them to support economic growth in other cities.