Teams of Teams, Railways not Sandwiches
Making 21st century cities by making 21st century city governments
Ed. This article was written during August 2019, after Bianca Wylie and Matthew Claudel kindly asked me for a contribution to ‘Some Thoughts’, a wonderful compendium of short pieces on cities. positioned initially from a Canadian perspective but ultimately providing a rich stew of ideas on the future of cities anywhere. This is the original version of the shorter edit I wrote for their collection.
In ‘Ill Fares the Land’, Tony Judt essentially, if not quite literally, wrote “Don’t privatise railways, don’t nationalise sandwiches”.
With one fell swoop, Judt gave us a tool for sorting decisions about many things, including cities. Railways versus sandwiches questions the ownership of meaningful assets, values, and decisions. It suggests where the dynamics of the market are best deployed – the sandwiches end of things – and where the idea of public value, shared ownership and civic governance is just too important, valuable and, frankly, complex to be left to the simplified heuristics of the private sector.
Yet the last thirty years clearly saw a very different ideology locked in place, to hugely damaging effect. Deregulation, and the outsourcing of capability, intelligence and responsibility…
