- Economic Development and Smart Cities
- Global Cities and Urban Society
- Regional Economic Development
- Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy
- Urban Economics
Jennifer Clark, Ph.D.
School of Public Policy
Director of the Center for Urban Innovation; Associate Professor of Public Policy
Contact & Information
- DM Smith 218
- Phone: 404.385.7224
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Email -
Website -
Curriculum
Vitae
- PhD, Cornell University
- MPlan, University of Minnesota
- BA, Wesleyan University
Awards & Distinctions
- AAG Fellow, American Association of Geographers
- Fellow, Regional Studies Association
- Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Regional Studies
- Chair, Economic Geography Specialty Group, American Association of Geographers (2017-2019)
- Chair, Nominating Committee, American Association of Geographers (2017-2018)
- Regional Studies Association Best Book Award, 2009 - Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy. London: Routledge.
- Honorary Senior Research Fellow, 2013-2016, University of Birmingham, UK
Selected Publications
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Open Government Data in the Smart City: Interoperability, Urban Knowledge, and Linking Legacy Systems
Journal Article – December 2018
Open government data (OGD) promise to reveal new insights and inform governance decisions related to changing populations, departmental operations, and economic drivers. Yet, where OGD figure prominently in the vision of a smart city, OGD are, in fact, scarce. From production and distribution practices to file types, organizational structure, and repositories, large quantities of potential OGD remain as legacy data trapped in incumbent systems. This article confronts the challenges of legacy data through a constructivist analysis of data wrangling (i.e. converting data into useful formats). The analysis illustrates that wrangling legacy data is more than a rote technical activity. Our findings suggest that smart governance in practice depends on the ways that social, organizational, and institutional strategies cope with technical change. Further, our research demonstrates that wrangling legacy data is not a discrete problem to overcome, but an operating condition defining the rapidly changing landscape of smart governance.
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Connecting cities, revitalizing regions: the centrality of cities to regional development
Journal Article – July 2018
This editorial and accompanying themed issue reflect on the centrality of cities to regional development. Focusing on the role and function of cities in processes of innovation, production, distribution and consumption as both individual sites and networks of sites of production, the papers examine classic questions in economic geography about concentration, diffusion, and flows of labour and capital and the policy regimes that govern that movement. They also contribute empirically and theoretically to opening up broader conversations from a global perspective regarding how cities serve as nodes in global networks both anchoring and ultimately locating global and regional flows of capital and labour. Finally, they identify what is at stake in debates over cities and regional development.
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Working Regions: Reconnecting Innovation and Production in the Knowledge Economy
Book – July 2013
Working Regions focuses on policy aimed at building sustainable and resilient regional economies in the wake of the global recession. Using examples of four ‘working regions’ — regions where research and design functions and manufacturing still coexist in the same cities — the book argues for a new approach to regional economic development. It does this by highlighting policies that foster innovation and manufacturing in small firms, focus research centers on pushing innovation down the supply chain, and support dynamic, design-driven firm networks.
The book traces several key themes underlying the core proposition that for a region to work, it has to link research and manufacturing activities — namely, innovation and production — in the same place. Among the topics discussed in this volume are the issues of how the location of research and development infrastructure produces a clear role of the state in innovation and production systems, and how policy emphasis on pre-production processes in the 1990s has obscured the financialization of intellectual property. Throughout the book, Clark draws on examples from diverse industries, including the medical devices industry and the US photonics industry, in order to illustrate the different themes of working regions and the various institutional models operating in various countries and regions.
Clark, Jennifer (2013) Working Regions: Reconnecting Innovation and Production in the Knowledge Economy, London: Routledge.
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Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy
Book – December 2007
Since the early 1980s, the region has been central to thinking about the emerging character of the global economy. In fields as diverse as business management, industrial relations, economic geography, sociology, and planning, the regional scale has emerged as an organizing concept for interpretations of economic change. This book is both a critique of the "new regionalism" and a return to the "regional question," including all of its concerns with equity and uneven development. It will challenge researchers and students to consider the region as a central scale of action in the global economy, and at the core of the book are case studies of two industries that rely on skilled, innovative, and flexible workers - the optics and imaging industry and the film and television industry. Combined with this is a discussion of the regions that constitute their production centers. The authors’ intensive research on photonics and entertainment media firms, both large and small, leads them to question some basic assumptions behind the new regionalism and to develop an alternative framework for understanding regional economic development policy. Finally, there is a re-examination of what the regional question means for the concept of the learning region. This book draws on the rich contemporary literature on the region but also addresses theoretical questions that preceded "the new regionalism." It contributes to teaching and research in a range of social science disciplines and this new paperback edition will also make the book more accessible to students and researchers in those disciplines, those individuals who will influence the re-structuring economies of the 21st century.
Christopherson, Susan and Jennifer Clark (2007) Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy. London: Routledge.
Recent Publications
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Devolution, Disinvestment and Uneven Development: US Industrial Policy and Evolution of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation
Journal Article – 2019
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Regeneration economies: a research agenda: governance, policy and regional development
Chapter – December 2018
The relationship between governance, policy and regional development is explored in this chapter through a discussion of the processes and actors implicated in regeneration economies and their respective, observed roles in contributing to regional growth and decline. It draws upon examples primarily from the US, to highlights how empirical research on regional growth and change is indeed contributing to a research agenda that is informing policy development that is capable of supporting economic regeneration. A key question that is considered is: “what then can regional studies say about what we know about what works (and what does not) in building a set of policies that promote regeneration economies—supported at the national scale and implemented at the regional scale?” It is noted that ultimately the answer to this question is both retrospective in cataloguing what can be gleaned from the preponderance of existing evidence and it is prospective in setting the agenda for future research. This chapter highlights key aspects of that future research agenda.
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Connecting cities, revitalizing regions: the centrality of cities to regional development
Journal Article – July 2018
This editorial and accompanying themed issue reflect on the centrality of cities to regional development. Focusing on the role and function of cities in processes of innovation, production, distribution and consumption as both individual sites and networks of sites of production, the papers examine classic questions in economic geography about concentration, diffusion, and flows of labour and capital and the policy regimes that govern that movement. They also contribute empirically and theoretically to opening up broader conversations from a global perspective regarding how cities serve as nodes in global networks both anchoring and ultimately locating global and regional flows of capital and labour. Finally, they identify what is at stake in debates over cities and regional development.
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Labour, work and regional resilience
Journal Article – April 2018
Recent political and economic events have thrown into question several assumptions about how regional economies work and for whom. For Regional Studies, the result is a wave of policy-relevant empirical research on fundamental issues in our field. The papers in this issue cover topics including the creative class, skills, inequality, embeddedness, innovation and immigration, across a range of industries. This kind of analysis of labour, work and skills is essential for developing new models capable of reintegrating innovation and production into economic development strategies that work for the labour market as a whole, reducing inequality, increasing productivity, and building resilient regional economies.
Clark, Jennifer and David Bailey. (2018). Labor, Work, and Regional Resilience. Regional Studies. 52 (6) 741-743
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Policy through Practice: Local Communities, Self-Organization, and Policy
Chapter – February 2018
Clark, Jennifer (2017) Policy through Practice: Local Communities, Self-Organization, and Policy. In Gordon Clark, Maryann Feldman, Meric Gertler, and Dariusz Wójcik, eds. The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 810-825.
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Transitions in Regional Economic Development
Book - Editor – January 2018
At a time of extraordinary challenges confronting the world, this book analyses some of the profound changes occurring in the development of cities and regions. It discusses the uncertainties associated with the stalling of hyper-globalization and asks whether this creates opportunities for resurgent regional economies driven by local capabilities, resource efficiencies and domestic production. Theory and evidence on socio-economic and environmental transitions underway in many regions are brought together. Implications of the shifting balance of global power towards emerging economies in the East are explored, along with the consequences of urbanization in the global South for politics and democracy. Dilemmas surrounding migration are also discussed, including whether incomers displace local workers and depress wages, or bring benefits in the form of know-how, new technology and investment. More integrative concepts of the region and theories of regional development are analysed, recognising the role of human capital, knowledge, innovation, finance, infrastructure and institutions.
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The Construction of Work, Privilege and Power in Economic Geography: The View from Inside the Project
Journal Article – October 2017
Clark, Jennifer (2017) The Construction of Work, Privilege and Power in Economic Geography: The View from Inside the Project. On Being Outside “the Project”: A Symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson. Antipode. The Antipode Foundation. online: http://wp.me/p16RPC-1EF
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Atlanta’s Food Truck Triumph: Rethinking Policy in an Age of Temporary Urbanism
Chapter – September 2017
Wood, Mackenzie, Emma French, and Jennifer Clark (2017) Chapter 14: Atlanta’s Food Truck Triumph: Rethinking Policy in an Age of Temporary Urbanism, Julian Agyeman, Caitlin Matthews and Hannah Sobel, Eds. Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love. Cambridge, MIT Press. p. 263-284.