John Farrow, President, The Canadian Urban Institute

The recently completed Canadian Urban Institute study of successful city-regions around the world offers some powerful lessons for what could be an internationally competitive bi-national region stretching around the western end of Lake Ontario from the Greater Toronto Area, through Hamilton, across the Niagara Peninsula to Buffalo, and beyond to Rochester.

This region is the fourth largest and second fastest-growing urban region in North America. Its component cities may already compete — more or less — on an international scale, but the untapped potential is enormous. What is missing is a competitive regional strategy, and specifically a strategy tailored for a bi-national region.

What is a competitive regional strategy? Nothing more than a systematic process for organizing and concentrating superior resources against competitors to ensure survival and long-term wealth creation. In the case of the region that spans the Niagara River, this means understanding our available resources in new ways.

But first, we need to understand the environment in which we might seek to compete. City-regions around the world are being redefined by changing economic realities and relationships.

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We already know that corporate competition has become global with the search for both capital and markets crossing all boundaries. A city-region’s chief competitors might be anywhere in the world. Such competition is increasingly demanding.

The search for strategic skills has become more critical. Workers with specialized knowledge and creative talents have become more important to processes of development, production and marketing. Such workers are highly mobile, but they can also afford to be highly choosy about where they go. Regions with the quality of life to attract such workers will prosper.

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