Place, power and pioneers
Our conception of cities must be broader, create a new account of power and learn from urban experiments
By Ed Cox
Globally, roughly 200,000 people move to a city every day, justifying predictions that the 21st century will be characterised as an urban age and that humanity will evolve to become what some are calling ‘homo urbanus’. For many, cities represent excitement, dynamism and opportunity; places where people encounter diversity of people, places and products, connections and culture, and apparently endless enterprise and innovation.
Although cities’ reputations are mostly built on past achievements, they are fuelled by being portents of the future. For example, Toronto-based Sidewalk Labs is using big data and technology to redesign congested streets and support ‘micromobility’. Meanwhile, Biobot Analytics is sampling the city’s sewers to help tackle public health issues. In January 2019, Madrid City Council passed a regulation establishing the City Observatory as a standing assembly of randomly selected citizens who — alongside the elected council — review city regulations and debate popular initiatives proposed through an online platform. Whether it is climate change, tech, ageing or democratic reform, cities worldwide are locked in friendly competition to solve today’s biggest challenges.
But even if the future is apparently urban, the urban path is by no means linear or straightforward. Dominant narratives about cities are increasingly contested and both evidence and practice suggest that homo urbanus has some way to evolve. There are three key ways in which this needs to happen: our current concept of the city needs to broaden; city leadership needs a new account of power; and our urban experiments need to spread.
Inclusive and sustainable city-systems
So often, we think of ‘the city’ as a single phenomenon, but the urban economy is far more variegated than many commentators or textbooks would care to acknowledge. A lot of attention has been given to some of the world’s biggest cities, where the rates of urbanisation were exceptionally high until the early 2000s and where economic productivity appeared to be shooting up as fast as the skyscrapers on their respective horizons. London, Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos, Rio; these global megacities have dominated nations and their economies as well as our narratives about our urban age.
Similarly, in the Anglosphere, the great American city has become something of an archetype for the urban imagination. Literature and film have evoked images of dense central business districts, the beating heart of the city, surrounded by sprawling suburbia then rolling savannah. Generations of geography students have been indoctrinated with the ideas of the Chicago School theory of urban planning and its concentric rings of development, and the subsequent persuasive accounts of urban living laid down by the likes of Richard Florida, Ed Glaeser and Bruce Katz.
Few could deny either the economic success of global megacities, or the attraction of the American archetype and the models that have been developed to explain these phenomena. Within these accounts, cities are defined as ‘functional urban areas’ or ‘functional economic areas’, measured in terms of the commuter flows to and from the urban centre. Huge store has been set in the idea of agglomeration, where the increasing concentration of people, ideas and firms acts as a key driver of economic dynamism and has beneficial spillover effects for those around the city core. The empirical evidence for many American cities was compelling, and it has been consistent for many global megacities too: the bigger and more concentrated the city, the greater its economic success.
Unfortunately, global megacities have seen a significant slowdown in terms of their economic growth since the turn of the century as increasing congestion has outweighed the advantages of agglomeration. In the UK, we are beginning to notice this. London has outperformed many other megacities, propped up by its unique status in the global financial system and by vast public expenditure on projects such as Crossrail and the Olympic Games. However, there are now signs that it has passed a tipping point, with public transport patronage falling and evidence of many young families and young professionals moving out. Cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham are all now experiencing faster rates of growth than the capital, albeit from lower baselines. One wonders how much faster they would be growing were they not constrained by the lack of investment in hard and soft infrastructure relative to London.
Major questions have emerged about how successful these big cities really are. Despite high rates of productivity, there is significant evidence that they are drivers of inequality. Consider the vast differences in income and wealth that exist between different workers in the city, the prevalence and visibility of homelessness, social segregation and violence. It is not to say that these problems do not exist elsewhere, but the bigger the city, the starker the inequality. In the UK, the impact of such dominant cities on the wider economy can be profound: Lord Kerslake’s UK2070 Commission recently reported that the scale of regional inequality is now greater than between East and West Germany before reunification.
The reality is — and always has been — that proportionately few urban dwellers live in global megacities, let alone the highly monocentric US archetypes that dominate the urban imagination. Two recent papers published by the OECD suggest that we need a more nuanced understanding of the shape of cities and urban economies if we are to address the inequalities many have generated.
The first is a 2019 working paper on the classification of metropolitan areas, by Milenko Fadic et al. Recognising that the methods used thus far to categorise urban areas are somewhat unsophisticated, the OECD has proposed a new approach. This distinguishes between larger and smaller cities as well as between different types of non-metropolitan areas and their connectedness to cities. Using this new classification, significant variations between urban systems in different countries become clear. In the UK, roughly one-third of the population lives in larger cities of more than 1.5 million, one-third in smaller cities of 250,000–1.5 million and one-third in non-metropolitan areas. This is markedly different from the US or Japan, where nearly 60% of the population live in large cities, but much more similar to Germany and the Netherlands. It would seem that our patterns of urban development in the UK have more in common with our continental European neighbours than they do with the US and other nations we typically look to as comparators.
Even if the future is apparently urban, the urban path is by no means linear or straightforward
A 2018 OECD paper written by Daniela Glocker explores the rise of the megaregion. Responding to the emerging evidence of burgeoning growth in smaller towns and cities in many parts of the world, Glocker outlines how high-speed rail, digital connectivity, spatial planning and other factors are bringing clear economic advantages to groups of towns and cities where politicians and policymakers learn to collaborate effectively over large, interconnected megaregions. She cites successful examples such as the Randstad in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague, together with the smaller places that lie between them) and the Rhein-Ruhr region of Germany (the cluster of smaller cities around Dortmund, Essen and Cologne, which, economically, is now even extending to Frankfurt).
City-systems are significantly different, in that although they still include important business districts for financial and professional services, they incorporate a much wider range of economic activity including critical assets such as advanced manufacture, energy generation and logistics centres that require more dispersed development. For growing numbers of people, regular access to a big city, and a more flexible working pattern while living in a smaller town, looks increasingly more attractive than a lengthy daily commute in and out of a busy city. Glocker acknowledges that the notion of the megaregion has yet to receive sufficient academic attention to evidence its long-term benefits. However, there is much to suggest that a city-system of this kind could be less resource-intensive, more economically inclusive and offer major enhancements to individual wellbeing than the megacity model.
Transforming power
In economic terms, at the very least, we need to adapt our thinking away from ideas of monocentric monoliths like London and New York and towards diverse city-systems linking smaller towns and cities. But this new geography also requires fresh thinking about the democratic infrastructure required to support the urban age.
American urbanist Benjamin Barber has perhaps been the greatest champion of the metro mayor, arguing that the nation-state has become too democratically dysfunctional to tackle some of the most divisive and interdependent problems we face, and that city mayors are more effective at addressing them. There is much to be said for this argument. Since Donald Trump announced that he would withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement in 2017, city mayors in America have accelerated their action on climate change.
Inspired by American urbanism, successive governments in the UK have sought to bring a mayoral model to UK cities. The Local Government Act 2000 allowed local authority areas in England to elect city mayors and, to date, 15 have adopted this approach. In a bid to boost the numbers, in 2011 the coalition government required 10 urban local authorities to hold referendums on switching to a city mayor system; only Bristol voted in favour. It is not surprising that the public were not impressed. England’s city mayors have been a pale shadow of their overseas counterparts: generally their jurisdictions cover small parts of wider city regions and they have no more powers than any other council leaders.
This changed with the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016, which made provision for metro mayors to oversee larger groupings of local authorities covering whole city regions. There are now metro mayors in Greater London, Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, the West Midlands and five other city regions, serving over 10 million people in total and gaining increasing public support. Most have powers over some aspects of economic development, planning and local transport as part of devolution deals. Metro mayors have similar geographical footprints to those of their American and European counterparts but very few direct powers and, with no ability to raise tax revenue, have few financial resources. Despite this, they can use their soft powers to great effect and there is a growing interest in place-based leadership and the role that mayors and other local leaders can play in shaping the city. Whether through planning powers and smart procurement or through convening groups of public, private and voluntary agencies, the art of city governance is an increasingly sophisticated and interesting one. As public-entrepreneur-in-chief, the city mayor can be the custodian and facilitator of a city’s knowledge, capability and assets if properly empowered to do so.
However, power in the city comes from multiple sources and, in what remains an over-centralised system, metro mayors in England are functioning with one hand tied behind their backs. Central government must learn to trust mayors with much greater powers over both economic and social policy: education, health and welfare are just as important as innovation, planning and transport in supporting inclusive and sustainable urban growth.
Power must also be granted from the bottom up. As Matthew Taylor argues elsewhere in this edition of RSA Journal, we need to “reform and renew the legitimacy of collective action and decision-making”. For city mayors, democratic innovation must start with more participatory approaches to public service reform and urban design, like those seen in Toronto. But for more contentious and intractable issues, mayors should be at the vanguard of deliberative democracy; this is already happening in Barcelona and cities across Canada and Australia. As we are seeing in Madrid, the time has come for the idea of a standing citizens’ assembly as a counterweight or second chamber to the traditional elected government.
And, if we are to see more inclusive city-systems flourish, power must also be exercised horizontally. In many nations, there are significant divides in political attitudes between big cities and other areas. In the UK, this was very visible in the EU referendum vote and in attitudes towards Brexit since: by and large, the bigger the city, the higher the vote to remain. There are different explanations for this pattern, but it is hard to deny the level of resentment found in so-called ‘left behind’ places over the attention lavished by many national governments on their biggest cities, including the introduction of metro mayors.
While mayors may be a good solution for our larger cities, they are not necessarily the answer in every place. Devolution in England is essential but it cannot be tied to a single model of governance, nor withheld from smaller towns and non-metropolitan areas. As with other city matters, American urbanism is not our only model. Regional assemblies and different types of combined authority may be necessary to transcend the parochialism that bedevils local government. Central government should use devolution as the lubricant to oil the wheels of reform.
The temptation to pit towns against cities or to placate left-behind places with ad hoc grants is to ignore the new geography of city-systems. In the UK, of the 32% of the population that live in non-metropolitan areas, the OECD calculates that about three-quarters live within an hour of the nearest big city. Although the governance and institutional arrangements of England currently mitigate against the effective interaction between towns and cities, political leaders — led by metro mayors — would be wise to ride the regional wave as it grows.
Urban pioneers
As we develop a broader understanding of the economy of wider city-systems and regions, and as we enhance and embed new forms of governance and power, the case for institutional reform becomes obvious. In England and the devolved nations, we have destroyed the kind of regional institutions that exist in almost every other developed economy and where they play a critical role in supporting city-systems. Currently, our local government is a messy patchwork of hollowed-out counties, unitary authorities, districts and parishes.
The good news is that, in the UK, regions are slowly being restored from the bottom-up through collaboration between local enterprise partnerships and strategic transport bodies. It is now high time for the government to properly ordain and support a new geography of four or five English regional powerhouses. The RSA has a long tradition of work in this vein. In the second half of the 18th century, it was instrumental in giving premiums to those producing high-quality county maps detailing the economic geography of England. Today, our One Powerhouse project has produced spatial economic blueprints for each of the four English megaregions: the North, the Midlands, the South East and the South West, with more detailed plans due later this year.
At the more local level, we must grasp the nettle of reform and rationalise local government into a coherent set of combined authorities with appropriate forms of leadership for each, with a clear expectation that they, in turn, will push power downwards to unlock the potential of neighbourhood action. Such a multi-tiered system of governance will require political courage, but — as we have seen with other institutional reforms — once established, the public soon comes to recognise and value the change. For example, trying to abolish the office of the Mayor of London or Greater Manchester now could not be done without a public outcry.
That said, very few city-dwellers have any interest in the systems of urban governance. Indeed, homo urbanus seems adept at working around and within whatever institutional systems prevail, and so to be preoccupied by institutional reform is perhaps to overlook the very lifeblood of cities. Almost in spite of our antiquated systems of urban governance and our over-centralised nation, our cities flourish as the petri dishes of social experimentation and economic innovation. At the RSA, we are championing such urban experiments. Our Cities of Making project explores the role of manufacturing in the cities of London, Rotterdam and Brussels. As traditional manufacturing has been slowly squeezed out of big cities, we are exploring how micro and small manufacturing businesses are innovating to support a more inclusive and sustainable economy. Rotterdam’s Roadmap Next Economy experiment, for example, combines digital technology and data-driven innovation in agro-food production, waste disposal and port-related businesses.
The RSA Cities of Learning project seeks to make the whole city a learning campus. Eschewing traditional top-down approaches to adult education, we are working in a number of cities to bring together diverse agencies to create an array of learning opportunities that are accredited through Digital Open Badges. Our partners include learning institutions as well as business and civil society organisations, including those from the cultural sector. In each place, they are coming together to design different learning pathways for people from a range of backgrounds.
Both of these pioneering projects are examples of what the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre might describe as heterotopias; spaces of possibility in the city where we begin to glimpse how the future might be different. In helping to reshape our city-systems, the RSA is helping to shape the societies in which we live. As homo urbanus evolves, broadening the urban imagination is perhaps our greatest task.
This article first appeared in the RSA Journal — Issue 2 2019
