There are plenty of comparative studies of the innovativeness of metropolises. However, I made another one examining innovativeness in the sphere of social media. In Futura journal, I represented a comparison between the Nordic metropolises, which are usually performing well in different innovation rankings.
Examining where there is the most Twitter activity related to the exact term of innovation, Swedish cities are the top performers. When examining Twitter activity proportional to city size, Stockholm is the leading innovation hub in Northern Europe with Malmö following second. What comes to themes related to innovativeness, Helsinki is the most important concentration of startups and technology in the Nordic countries. Stockholm and Malmö are the second and the third largest concentrations of both, startups and technology. Related to innovativeness and economic growth, also the tolerance of the citizens was considered. Interestingly, perhaps the most famous city in the Nordics facing problems related to immigration, Malmö is welcoming refugees most generously. In fact, Malmö is the only metropolitan area, where there is significant movement related to hashtag #refugeeswelcome. Different themes related to innovativeness combined, the same cities appear high in ranking. Overall, Stockholm (in the picture below) is the most innovative metropolis in the Nordic countries. Helsinki has the second most Twitter activity related to innovativeness and Malmö the third most. From the results, it is obvious that metropolitan areas should be compared to metropolises approximately the same size - even if measured proportional to city size. The capitals and the largest metropolises of the Nordic countries are competing with each other, while the secondary cities of Nordics are competing in their own race (empirics of them later on).
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I have done the collection of Twitter data from European metropolises. Currently I'm mining data from US metropolitan areas over 500,000. Theoretical framework of the paper considering twitter activity in Europe focuses on digital social capital, thus electronic capital, or e-capital. Article from US cities lean to idea of the creative cities, which have been in fact conceptualized already way earlier than Florida's Creative class (e.g. Landry & Bianchini (1995). I believe there is still some shortage of mapping exercises for the geography of the creative cities. Especially researched from the angle of creativity in social media. That should be the most up to date space where the creativity is present. Not forgetting the geographical space of the creativity, i. e. creative cities. The first data collected were tweets containing word research. I believed research would represent creativity, i.e. by examining relations of the tweets in hashtagify.me. There's number of other key words coming, so we can rank US cities regarding different key words related to creativity in social media. The final outcome will be re conceptualizing the economic geography related concept of "The creative cities". Regression analyses will tell whether the creativity present in social media affects metropolises economy. Heat maps of different key words related to creativity will give us a series of maps dealing with larger clusters formed from the creative cities. This one table presenting twitter activity in the field of research tells us that Washington D.C. is also the research capital of the United States. The other well-known research clusters seems to lay in Bay Area, The Triangle and East coast. I would also like to share the data of tweets containing word research. The next step for me is to make a heat map of it and find spatial clusters of digitally creative cities. In addition, I collect the rest of the data and do the same kind of rankings and heat maps for other key words as well. I hope you find the data beneficial, too :)
Antwerp is the Innovation Capital of Europe, Utrecht both the Startup Capital and the Tech Capital14/10/2016 Everybody likes rankings. So I ranked European metropolises using twitter data I blogged about last time. I ranked cities regarding to Twitter activity related to innovations, start ups and tech. It seems like the innovation capital of Europe is Antwerp followed by Utrecht, which in turn is both the start up capital and the tech capital of Europe. Top tens consist of cities from Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Austria. All from the core areas of Europe or from the so called Blue Banana, or near it. This is despite the fact that the rankings were made of relative amount of tweets per inhabitants. This is another finding suggesting agglomeration economies benefit the most urbanized areas. In addition to innovation ranking, start up ranking and tech ranking, I will include whole data set which contains absolute number of tweets as well as tweets per 1000 inhabitants of every European metropolitan area. Feel free to do your own rankings or analyses of the data!
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Photo by Rob Hurson
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AuthorJuho Kiuru, geographer living in Helsinki, Finland. |