Ottawa: The Knowledge City and a Labyrinth of Obstacles
Nick Novakowski
Sir Wilfred Grenfell College
Memorial University of Newfoundland
One University Drive
Corner Brook, NL Canada A2H 6P9
Keywords: Knowledge Cities, Urban Economics
Abstract
This provides a comparative examination of Ottawa as an archetype of a knowledge city. Among Canada’s four largest cities, Ottawa is unique in terms of the characteristics of its labor force, the nature of its employment mix, and its infrastructure. Since the high-tech downturn of 2001, some of Ottawa’s options as a knowledge city seem to be contracting, despite some simultaneously encouraging signs (like recovering employment levels in the high-tech sector). This raises a question about Ottawa’s potential longevity as a knowledge center. The challenge is to understand the inventory of obstacles faced by the city, and address the sort of alchemy required to maintain and improve its competitiveness as a knowledge city.
Introduction
The global economy’s three key factors—talent, creativity and innovation—are not distributed evenly across the world, overtly favoring some locations (Florida 2008). Ottawa is one of those locations, representing a knowledge city—a type of city able to provide and consolidate learning, education, invention and innovation, the factors that drive wealth-creation now and in the future. Knowledge cities are the lucky beneficiaries of historical trends that have supported the emergence of learning centers and business clustering, alongside significant investment and planning for telecommunications and transportation infrastructure.
Ottawa has evolved dramatically from its origins as a lumber town and later a national capital and government city. It is no longer a one-horse town, nor is the federal government’s presence simply overlain on top of the vernacular city. Ottawa operates as a reasonably integrated whole, with government functionality interacting endosymbiotically with private industry. Ottawa’s five dominant economic sectors are: the federal government (the top employer), telecommunications, information technology, life sciences, and tourism (Ottawa Business Journal 2008). As such, the knowledge economy is Ottawa’s second largest employer and Ottawa can legitimately be considered an advanced technology center. Consequent to the articulation of Ottawa as a knowledge city when compared to Canada’s other large cities, this article highlights obstacles hindering the consolidation of the capital as a technology nexus.
Evolving Organizing Concepts in Urban Planning and Urban Geography: The World City and The Knowledge City
World and knowledge cities are organizing concepts used in urban planning and geography to circumscribe some of the dramatic changes being experienced in large cities during the first decade of the new millennium. According to Hall (1966) in his book entitled The World Cities, these places are centers of political power and finance, entrepôts for their country, and loci of the arts, culture and entertainment. More than that, there is a question of scale and dominance to world cities that demonstrates that they are, in fact, where decisions are made. Unfortunately, this sort of definition misses the concept of globalization and the international division of labor, and ignores the informationalization of the economy (i.e., the shift from goods production to information and knowledge generation and management). Later authors like Friedmann (1986), Sassen (1991), and Taylor (2004) elaborated on the world or global city concept, but made no effort to improve its usefulness to planners and geographers. In fact, the idea of the world city is anti-paradigmatic to planning as it has misappropriated attention from some of the discipline’s primary concerns: environmental quality, equity, homelessness, and food bank proliferation. And, it finds as its research foundation a series of questions that were framed to fit available data (Short et al. 1996). More specifically, as cities gear up to compete on the basis of a world city trumpet call, part of the process seems to be to require that they communicate with multinational corporations that they are open for business and will do what they can to ensure that firms run efficiently and effectively within their realm (Thornley 1999). Seen in this light, the concept of world cities seems to have more than outlived its usefulness. More pertinent concepts were needed.
At the moment, three mega-trends continue to converge: on-going mass urbanization (particularly in China and other developing nations), globalization, and the growing importance of knowledge industries. The United Nations, OECD and World Bank have targeted the importance of the knowledge economy in contributing to economic success (Carillo 2005). Newer concepts like the knowledge city that could handle these three trends and put the subservience of world cities to multinational corporations in its place are proving to be more useful to urban planners.
Knowledge cities are “cities that possess an economy driven by high value-added exports created through research, technology, and brainpower” (Carillo 2005). They are economically focused on innovation and pushed forward by science and engineering employment. Knowledge cities represent a new concept and “the field still lacks a consensus regarding appropriate conceptual and methodological frameworks” (Carrillo 2005, p. xiii). Not surprisingly, there is no unified methodology for either the articulation or implementation of knowledge cities. Nevertheless, there are certain characteristics of the knowledge city that seem to resonate in the literature. Succinctly, the knowledge city is a complex constellation of cultural and economic factors that combine to facilitate innovation. In the knowledge era, the new unit of analysis and measurement is innovation. The knowledge city, therefore, is a city that is intentionally planned and designed to nurture ideas or knowledge (Edvinsson et al. 2004).
A knowledge city is a city that aims at a knowledge-based development, by encouraging the continuous creation, sharing, evaluation, renewal and update of knowledge…The citizens’ knowledge-sharing culture as well as the city’s appropriate design, IT networks, and infrastructures [sic] support these interactions (Ergazakis, Metaxiotis and Psarras 2004, p. 7).
Cities within the global urban hierarchy need new ways in which to differentiate themselves and remain competitive. Currently, the strongest way to remain competitive is in terms of knowledge creation and innovation. Recognizing this, knowledge cities can be seen as a nexus of universities, international airports, cosmopolitan culture and museums, digital infrastructure, and research and development (Dvir and Pasher 2004). They are characterized by high per capita levels of scientists and engineers, venture capitalists, patent generation, and advanced technology jobs. True knowledge cities are the result of successive cycles of investment in human capital and infrastructure. They are new hybrids benefiting from the innovation of their universities and international connections as well as umbilici to learning, government, private funding, and banking services.
Introduction to Ottawa
The City of Ottawa is nested inside a statistical jurisdiction known as Ottawa-Gatineau, which is the only major metropolitan area in Canada to bridge two provinces. Ottawa-Gatineau is a bilingual region, with many commuters traveling daily between the French-speaking province of Québec and the English-speaking province of Ontario to live and work (Figure 1). Simultaneously, the federal planning agency known as the National Capital Commission (NCC) has jurisdiction for the National Capital Region, which roughly approximates the territory of the Ottawa-Gatineau Census Metropolitan Area or CMA (as defined by Statistics Canada).
Figure 1. The City of Ottawa Vis-à-Vis Ottawa-Gatineau. Source: John Tinholt.
Ottawa-Gatineau is Canada’s fourth largest CMA after Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. Calgary and Edmonton, ranked fifth and sixth respectively, are quickly catching up, but are outside the scope of this current research (Table 1). Using the 2001 Census boundaries, the population of Ottawa-Gatineau grew steadily between 2001 and 2007, although not as quickly as Toronto and Vancouver.
Year / Ottawa-Gatineau / Toronto / Montréal / Vancouver2001 / 1,102,900 / 4,883,800 / 3,507,400 / 2,076,100
2002 / 1,118,800 / 5,020,400 / 3,547,100 / 2,111,300
2003 / 1,131,800 / 5,116,700 / 3,578,800 / 2,142,100
2004 / 1,141,400 / 5,214,000 / 3,609,600 / 2,174,000
2005 / 1,148,800 / 5,304,100 / 3,635,700 / 2,208,300
2006 / 1,162,500 / 5,424,000 / 3,669,000 / 2,257,300
2007 / 1,168,800 / 5,509,900 / 3,695,800 / 2,285,900
Growth: 2001-07 / 5.9% / 12.8% / 5.3% / 10.1%
Table 1. Population Growth in Canada’s Four Largest Cities. Source: Statistics Canada 2008a, CANSIM Table 051-0034.
Strengths Related to Ottawa-Gatineau’s Economy
Ottawa-Gatineau benefits from a spectacular natural setting: Parliament Hill sits on an escarpment and the city’s tourist/nightclub area called the Market or Le Marché is nestled at its base, creating a modern interpretation of the agora-acropolis complex. Gatineau Park, a large federally administered park to which the cougar has recently returned, penetrates right into the downtown core on the Québec side. The entire metropolitan area is interwoven with a cycling network, and cultural and outdoor amenities abound (skating on the Rideau Canal—a UNESCO World Heritage Site, downhill and cross-country skiing at nearby resorts, white water rafting, etc.). These factors, in combination with a low relative crime rate, excellent health care, and the presence of a number of good universities, serve to demonstrate the city’s high quality of life. In a recent survey of cities in Canada, Ottawa ranked as the best place to live (Froats and McGugan, 2008). Ottawa-Gatineau demonstrates many characteristics that make it both unique in the country and globally competitive. For example, median per capita incomes in Ottawa-Gatineau are higher than in other major Canadian cities (Table 2).
Median Incomes for 2001 (in Cdn$) / Median Incomes for 2005 (in Cdn$)Toronto / 25,593 / 26,754
Montréal / 21,888 / 25,161
Vancouver / 23,237 / 25,032
Ottawa-Gatineau / 28,956 / 32,219
City of Ottawa / 29,978 / 32,988
Table 2. Median Incomes for Canada’s Major Cities (in Cdn$). Source: Statistics Canada 2006a.
Higher median income is correlated with higher levels of educational achievement demonstrated in Ottawa-Gatineau and to the dominant presence of the federal government, a particularly well-paying employer. In terms of levels of educational achievement, the City of Ottawa also outperforms Canada’s other largest cities by a margin of over 4% when compared to Toronto, the next best performer Table 3). Interestingly, the Ottawa area was found to have the second largest concentration of science and engineering employment in a study of 316 North American cities, and was surpassed only by Silicon Valley (OCRI 2007). Locally, “one in nine employees is a scientist or engineer” (OCRI 2007, p. 4).
Percentage of Population with a University Education / Toronto / Montréal / Vancouver / Ottawa-Gatineau / City of Ottawa20-34 cohort / 32.7 / 27.4 / 29.5 / 33.4 / 37.0
35-44 cohort / 32.5 / 27.2 / 29.7 / 33.8 / 37.9
45-64 cohort / 27.2 / 23.1 / 27.0 / 31.8 / 35.6
Table 3. Educational Achievement in Canada’s Largest Cities. Source: Statistics Canada, 2006b.
So, right at the outset, Ottawa has certain built-in advantages as a high-technology center (e.g., its levels of educational achievement, its quality of life). And, again, because Ottawa is Canada's capital, its economy is unique among other Canadian cities due to the presence of the federal government. Federal employment has grown by over 13% since 2001. Government employment is atypical in that it is stable over time (i.e., resistant to the business cycle), well remunerated, and knowledge-intensive.
Of the total federal government employees working across the country,30.9% or 119,316 were employed within the CMA of Ottawa–Gatineau. In 2007, federal employment represented18.0% of total employment in the Ottawa–Gatineau region (Statistics Canada 2007b). Furthermore, it is important to note that these employment figures do not include the substantial number of people that are hired either on contract or temporarily by the federal government (Table 4).
Year / Federal Government Employment in the Ottawa-Gatineau CMA2001 / 103,685
2002 / 108,050
2003 / 109,790
2004 / 109,900
2005 / 111,321
2006 / 115,215
2007 / 119,316
Table 4. Federal Employment in Ottawa-Gatineau: 2001-2007. Source: Statistics Canada, 2007a. CANSIM Table 183-0003.
Ottawa’s New Economy
Using part of a framework provided by the Progressive Policy Institute (Atkinson and Gottlieb 2001), the measurement of whether the New Economy is present in a city depends on a number of central characteristics: knowledge jobs, innovation capacity and the digital economy—among others. Knowledge jobs can be defined as managerial, professional and technical positions held by individuals with some university training. Across the globe, required skill levels for employability are increasing in all sectors. Two indirect measurements for knowledge jobs are levels of educational attainment of the labor force and office jobs (the percentage of the workforce in offices as opposed to on the farm, in manufacturing or in retail). As demonstrated in the data for these variables in Tables 3 and 5, the City of Ottawa has the highest presence of knowledge jobs among Canada’s largest cities. Again, the City of Ottawa figure is a distillation of the overall observation regarding Ottawa-Gatineau.
Office Jobs / Toronto / Montréal / Vancouver / Ottawa-Gatineau / City of OttawaFinance and Real Estate / 9.4 / 6.4 / 7.4 / 4.7 / 5.1
Health Care and Social Services / 8.0 / 10.8 / 9.3 / 9.9 / 9.7
Education / 6.3 / 7.1 / 7.2 / 7.0 / 6.9
Business Services / 23.9 / 21.3 / 23.6 / 20.7 / 22.4
Other Services / 15.7 / 17.2 / 19.3 / 34.3 / 33.1
Total % / 63.3% / 62.8% / 66.8% / 76.6% / 77.2%
Table 5. Office Jobs By Proportion of Labor Force in Canada’s Largest Cities in 2006. Source: Statistics Canada 2006a, Community Profiles For Each CMA.
Meanwhile, innovation capacity refers to the ability of a city to generate new ideas, new knowledge and new technologies, as well as to adopt them. Innovation capacity can be indirectly measured by looking at a variety of variables, including technology-related jobs (i.e., the share of jobs in advanced technology industries and services). The Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) maintains data on high-tech employment in Ottawa and reflects only those high-technology workers operating within private industry (Table 6).
Year / Number of High-tech Employees1996 / 40,000
1997 / 48,312
1998 / 51,000
1999 / 52,000
2000 / 65,000
2001 / 79,000
2002 / 69,500
2003 / 66,500
2004 / 63,700
2005 / 67,800
2006 / 76,126
2007 / 79,466
2008 / 81,910
Table 6. Number of High-tech Employees in Ottawa-Gatineau: 1996-2008. Source: OCRI 2005, OCRI 2007 (the OCRI Report), and OCRI 2008.
OCRI (2007) finds that Ottawa has one of the highest concentrations of knowledge workers in the world, and was ranked in the top seven cities globally on the basis of demonstrated excellence in its knowledge workers, broadband communications, innovation, digital democracy and global marketing. With high levels of scientists and engineers, it is not surprising that patents per capita are higher in Ottawa-Gatineau than elsewhere in the country. Patents per capita data are not available by CMA from Statistics Canada or the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). However, nearly 70% of Canadian manufacturing firms apply for a patent in both Canada and the United States, and the US does maintain patent information by metropolitan area. A methodology proposed by the Centre for Governance at the University of Ottawa suggests that Canadian patents per capita can be estimated by taking the US data and multiplying it by 1.3. Using this methodology, patents per capita are highest in Ottawa-Gatineau, followed by Vancouver, Montréal and then Toronto. Patents per capita levels in Ottawa-Gatineau are more than twice those generated in either Montréal or Toronto (Centre for Governance 2002).