City-Regions as Intelligent Territories: Inclusion, Competitiveness and Learning (CRITICAL)

CRITICAL

City-Regions as Intelligent Territories: Inclusion, Competitiveness And Learning

CRITICAL is an international research project funded by the European Commission's 5th Framework Programme for Research and Development. The research covers a three year period and work began in February 2003.

CRITICAL aims to understand the learning processes which take place within cities by examining a range of formal and informal networks within which learning and knowledge development take place. The project will focus on four city-regions, Dortmund in Germany, Dublin in Ireland, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK and Tampere in Finland. The project will contribute to progress in understanding the changing role of large cities in their national and regional territories and to the understanding of territorial learning processes, knowledge dissemination and transfer, and social networks in a number of different urban environments. The project has been designed to ensure relevance to, and involvement with, a number of city-based agencies. Indeed one of the outcomes of the project is a set of tools to help cities apply learning as part of a more holistic development strategy.

There are five detailed objectives within the CRITICAL project.