The Arab world has played a very important role in the history of urbanization. It is the region where urban civilization was born and where urban matters have been addressed for centuries. The Arab urban civilization, as it has evolved over the past millennium, has generated some of the most beautiful cities in the world. This publication is the latest of a series of regional reports documenting the state of the world cities, and the first to comprehensively analyze urbanization processes in the Arab States through the review of its four sub-regions: the Maghreb, the Mashreq, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and the least-developed Arab countries of the Southern Tier.
Download Report]]>Download Report ]]>
Founded in 1548 by the Spaniards as a halfway post between the silver mines of Potosi and the port of Lima, La Paz has since expanded across the Choqueyapu Valley and up the mountainsides. This makes for an incredible setting for such a historic and modern metropolis, as well as a number of interesting environmental and urban planning challenges.
As La Paz grew, uses that needed larger flat spaces, such as the airport, industries and businesses, spread to El Alto, as did vast numbers of rural migrants, many of whom work in La Paz. El Alto, with a population just over a million, is now the fastest growing city in the western hemisphere. Distinct from many cities in the region, El Alto’s social movements and community associations are exceptionally strong. Their protests and roadblocks have been effective in forcing local governments to respond to their requests, including to lower tariffs and extend basic services. However, this development strategy poses a challenge to much needed longer-term planning, particularly given that the city will double in population by 2025, but will exceed its available water supply by 2018.
In this context, we are working with the Stockholm Environment Institute to research how strategic land use planning in El Alto can support more efficient and equitable use of water. On this trip, we organized a workshop with diverse stakeholders to introduce the project, and met with community associations, local planning and environment offices in La Paz and El Alto, and international stakeholders to begin understanding the situation in El Alto.
The project is funded by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy in Cambridge, MA. Learn more about this project here.
]]>- Executive Training for senior council officials, elected representatives and the private sector tailored help governments and the business community in shaping their local and regional development agendas.
- Technical Assistance to reinforce strategic directions and follow-up on action plans developed through training and applied research. An example is the drafting the precedent-setting Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the cross-border local governments of Newry and Mourne District Council and the Louth Local Authorities. The MOU has been recognized by senior officials working on European cross-border cooperation as a model of good practice. We have continued this type of support to local governments involved in the NW Gateway Initiative and the spatial planning initiative in the Irish Central Border Region.
- Applied research to tackle emerging topics on North/South cooperation such as shared services and the management of international river basins.
- Evidence-based Planning and Mapping research with the All-Island Research Observatory is filling in information gaps in three key areas of cooperation: housing, the index of deprivation and access to services. The data and mapping tools are available online to practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers.
- The Conferences and Technical Workshops provide a forum for policy-makers, practitioners and the academic community to engage on North/South and international practices.
- The publication of Borderlands, The Journal of Spatial Planning in Ireland and briefing papers provides a platform for high quality articles by experts on emerging issues impacting local and regional development on the island of Ireland.
A key element of the Civil Society Declaration that was the focus of the Forum was the UN’s Social Protection Floor Initiative (SPFI). Developed in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis, the SPFI urges that all countries institute an adequate social protection floor to provide income security and allow for individual and family access to basic services. The NGO Committee on Social Development developed an online campaign to build support and awareness for the SPFI, which has so far gathered 15,000 signatures worldwide. You can visit the campaign website here. The combination of economic development and social protection for reducing poverty was also a primary focus during the Commission
Discussion of the Commission’s theme of Poverty Eradication centered largely on employment (the provision of decent jobs) and the specific problems plaguing young people in developed and developing countries. In a special session on youth poverty and unemployment, delegates emphasized the impacts of the global recession on youth unemployment in their countries and called for empowering young people through skills training and support for entrepreneurship. IIUD prepared and submitted an oral statement to be read at the Commission. Because of shifts in the agenda there was not sufficient time for our statement, but it can be accessed here. ]]>
This year the Institute embarked on a new experiment, bringing together Members of the Board and Friends of the Institute, on a specially organized trip to Cuba which not only provided an exceptional programme, but which also served to raise additional funds to support the work of the Institute. Led by Frank Vigier, President of I2UD, and supported by Mary Shia, twelve intrepid individuals spent eight fascinating days in Havana, Trinidad and Cienfuego and in the countryside which links them.
The trip provided a unique opportunity to experience this country, at a pivotal moment in its history, as it moves through political and economic changes which will have a profound impact on the future of its cities. Guided by leading Cuban architect, academic and urbanist, Julio Cesar Peres Hernandez, we toured both historic and contemporary examples of significant town planning and architectural design which have shaped the physical appearance and the character of those cities.
We explored the historic quarters of all three places which have been recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites, and we enjoyed the opportunity to speak with specialists involved in their restoration. But in Havana, uniquely, we were able to trace the evolution of a major city over five centuries as it was transformed from what was initially a colonial outpost to the political and commercial hub of the Caribbean. We walked the esplanade, the Malécon, and the parks and plazas which give the city form, and viewed and toured many of the buildings which serve to define those spaces. The architecture of these structures ranges in style from Creole and Classical to Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but occasional examples of Modernist design emerge in sometimes unexpected places.
Within Havana, the names of the squares often gave clues as to their functions: Plaza Vieja, Plaza de San Francisco, Plaza de Armas and Plaza de la Catedral. But few hints were given as to their character – their scale, proportion and orientation. These were only revealed on closer inspection, which rewarded our efforts. As the city expanded in a westerly direction, new elements of urban design were added to the fabric of the city: the Paseo de Marti or Prado, as grand as its namesake in Spain, and the Parque Central, beside the national parliament building. Further westward, the Cementarlo Cristobal Colon, the City of the Dead within the City of the Living is without comparison in any other western city, save perhaps for Buenos Aires. Outside and to the south of Havana we visited Parque Lenin, an enormous new open space and joint Soviet/Cuban effort, at the heart of which we found the delightful “Las Ruinas”, an exquisite mixture of contemporary design and the remnants of an 18th c sugar mill.
Havana began its eastward expansion across the Canal de Entrada which separates it from La Habana Vieja, the historic heart of the city. We toured East Havana in order to examine examples of new residential districts – Soviet style housing estates which represent the bulk of residential projects created during the last fifty years. These were built after the 1959 Revolution, to accommodate the surge in population growth, brought about both by natural increase and unprecedented immigration from the provinces. While master planned and designed in line with similar projects elsewhere in the world, these housing estates were inevitably beset by problems related to social planning, finance, management and construction.
While East Havana stands in marked contrast to much of the rest of the city, this experiment with an alternative housing format is not without its merits. It has the potential to be renewed much like the housing stock in other areas, and this can be accomplished through a combination of structural changes and selective interventions. Whatever other benefits may be attributed to these housing projects, perhaps the most important is that they relieved established areas from the pressure of wide-scale urban renewal which could have cost Havana much of its character as well as its architectural heritage.
A range of social and cultural experiences rounded out our program in Cuba. Particularly memorable was an evening in Havana spent at the Gran Teatro where we attended a performance of the world-renowned, National Ballet of Cuba. No less impressive, however, was a choir performance in Cienfuegos, performed, perfectly, in an almost austere environment, in the otherwise ornate Palacio de Valle. Wonderful lunches and dinners featured in our program as well, affording us the opportunity to experience Cuban cuisine – both traditional and contemporary. Particularly memorable was dinner in a paladar in Centro Habana, the remarkable La Guarida. The restaurant is famous for the building in which it is situated – the setting for the notable Cuban film, “Fresa y Chocolate” – but it is also distinguished for the imaginative style of its progressive method of cooking.
Our visit to Cuba began and ended in the enigmatic city of Havana, but the knowledge we have acquired, and the impressions we have formed, reflect our experience gained throughout the country.
See photos.]]>
Modest proposals for fixing local government in America
by James Kostaras AIA, AICPOriginally Published by ArchitectureBoston
Local government in America is in trouble, and I have some modest proposals to fix it. I also have a few scars and bruises to show for a 20-year career in municipal government as an architect and urban planner with the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and later as executive director of the Somerville (Massachusetts) Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development. When government works efficiently to meet the aspirations of the citizens, it’s an inspiring enterprise. But the coming fiscal crisis will break local government.
Writing in Forbes, Joel Kotkin says, “In the next two years, America’s large cities will face the greatest existential crisis in a generation.” Wall Street investors are in a panic. What happens when nervous investors in the $3 trillion municipal-bond market decide that lending to cash-strapped local government is a risky bet? Smaller cities in Massachusetts are in triage mode as they struggle mightily to provide services in the face of budget cuts, staff reductions, and cuts in state aid — reducing the core functions of municipal government to police, fire, schools, and streets. More daunting are the unfunded pension obligations of municipal workers, exploding health-insurance costs, and the diminishing property-tax revenue due to a battered real-estate market.
Local government faces another critical crisis: most Americans don’t trust government. “Politics have poisoned the well in terms of trust in government,” according to Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Americans trust politicians about as much as they esteem Goldman Sachs bankers. The pathetically low voter turnout in local elections reflects the sentiments of cynical, disillusioned citizens.
To improve local government, we must see it for what it really is and how it actually functions. I started my career in local government at the BRA not long after returning from Morocco, where I had served as a Peace Corps architect building rudimentary health clinics and community buildings. In the Peace Corps, I was a pragmatic idealist; after 20 years in municipal government, I turned into a somewhat idealistic pragmatist. Machiavelli, in The Prince, justified duplicity as a means to power; nevertheless, he told truth to power as he saw it, emphasizing realism — or realpolitik — over idealism. A realist sees local government as a collection of competing interests. Government, like other organizations, is made up of individuals striving to pursue their own conflicting self-interests.
Solving local government’s most critical fiscal problems is beyond my pay grade. What follows, however, are some modest “fixes” to local government.
Don’t trust government.
In my experience, local government runs better and is more efficient in delivering services when it’s not trusted — provided that politicians and their operatives understand and appreciate that they are not trusted. So don’t trust government, and let politicians and publicsector managers know this. Keep them on their toes. You will actually be empowering the best-intentioned people in government to do the right thing and putting less-than-well-intentioned people on notice that they are being scrutinized. I confess that, even when I was in government, I often didn’t trust government — or have full confidence that elected officials and political operatives would use the apparatus of government to serve the interests of average citizens rather than those of politically connected interests. I felt like an embedded insurgent waging guerrilla war to advance the public interest. I learned early in my career that you can’t serve the public interest unless you’re willing and prepared to be fired from your government job. A skeptical citizenry can give aid and comfort to the insurgents.
Reconfigure local government around a strategic mission.
Political geographer and urban planner Edward Soja argues that: “Of all the sectors of contemporary life, government and forms of governance have probably changed least. This has made it increasingly difficult to respond democratically and effectively to the many problems arising from the enormous concentration of population, wealth, and power in a small number of megacity regions.” Local government needs to be reconceptualized from time to time. The organizational chart of departments within municipal government should reflect a strategic mission. From my insider’s point of view, municipal government can become calcified with departments and staff organized to solve yesterday’s problems. A critical fix is to engender a bias for rethinking and rearranging the organizational structure of government around clear missions.
When I was the executive director of Somerville’s Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development, I believed our mission required a different kind of org chart. Somerville typifies, in microcosm, the problems and challenges of big cities: new gentrification resulting in displacement of low-income families, a large low-income population, a community of immigrants that constitutes almost half the city’s population, large swaths of environmentally degraded former industrial properties, and decades of economic disinvestment. With the support and encouragement of Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone, I organized a 65-person, multioperational development agency by merging several unlikely city departments — zoning, the building department, historic preservation, parks, economic development, and housing — into an integrated development agency and gave it a new name, the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development (with an emphasis on “strategic”). We structured the agency around the execution of a clear mission: to attract investment into the city and plan for the redevelopment of a large area of vacant and underused industrial land. Consolidating city functions into one department — not unlike the 1960s Boston Redevelopment Authority — has proven to be a good platform from which to revitalize Somerville’s economy.
Let people in local government be more entrepreneurial.
Create a culture in government that will attract creative, committed, and idealistic people. Value and encourage a bias for entrepreneurship and experimentation in government workers to counter the political pressures, entrenched parochial interests, and other disincentives.
Leadership sets the tone. My former boss, Mayor Curtatone, urged us to “be abnormal,” signaling that he valued people with provocative ideas that challenged convention. In 2005, Somerville was our laboratory for innovation and experimentation in urban policy.
I took a page from the cutting edge of the private sector and ran the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development like a design firm or an Internet start-up — a radical departure in ossified municipal government. I recruited talented, young professionals to join me in planning and launching a bold strategy to transform and “reinvent” the city. I gave them room to be creative and take initiative and the flexibility to make their own schedules — another departure from the 9-to-5 (and not a minute more) punch-the-clock culture in local government. We got results. In less than three years, my staff launched a major economic-development strategy, attracted more than $900 million in anticipated public and private investment, and secured the state’s commitment to build the Green Line transit extension and transit-oriented development (TOD) corridor through Somerville. In the process, we positioned Somerville in metropolitan Boston’s globalizing economy as a place for innovation and creative industries by advancing provocative architecture and urban design. My staff re-envisioned Somerville and advanced the idea that architecture and urban design could be leveraged as a means of attracting new investment and dynamic development.
Architects should be mayors.
This is not ego-stroking for design professionals. It is a clarion call. Architects (as well as landscape architects, urban designers, and planners) should be mayors of cities, elected members of city councils and boards of aldermen, and chairs of elected planning boards. In light of the coming crisis, local government will require the precise competencies that architects offer. The electorate, worn down by the current nasty, divisive political gamesmanship, is yearning for positive inspiration and will demand it in the future. Architects know how to inspire people. There are precedents for architects serving as successful and transformative mayors. Jaime Lerner, an architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, launched a revolution in city building. Today, Curitiba is a model of sustainable 21st-century urban planning recognized by UN-HABITAT and UNESCO.
Imagine if members of the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) were mayors of cities in Massachusetts. With the resources and the political power afforded by government, BSA architects could advance the impressive civic-minded BSA initiatives over the years, such as The Civic Initiative for Smart Growth. My recommendation to architects and associated professionals: fundraise, form PACs, press the flesh on a campaign trail, and run for local office.
Cancel public meetings.
In the recent Architect magazine article, “You Dream of a Dictator,” architect and urban planner Andrés Duany FAIA laments that “we can’t get anything done” in the United States. He goes on to criticize community participation in planning as “an absolute orgy of public process” that privileges the interests of obstructionist neighbors over wider community interests.
Duany is right. We’re mired in endless, contentious public participation processes. In my long experience, the “orgy of public process” doesn’t always lead to satisfying or durable results. For all the effort, often we get mediocre urban design. Let’s be honest: Long and frequent community meetings where project opponents or proponents drone on in front of the microphone are not especially efficient in producing creative thinking and collective problem solving. The public meeting becomes a stage to vent frustrations and a crusade for causes that often have no bearing on the project or proposal under consideration. People who don’t enjoy unpleasant, rancorous meetings choose to spend their evenings elsewhere. Who can blame them? Does the audience at public meetings accurately represent the sentiments of the broader community? It’s unlikely. Public meetings are faux democracy.
Duany argues for much less community participation (unless it’s a Congress for New Urbanism–sponsored charrette). I would argue for more public engagement—but engagement that better represents the sentiments of the entire community. My recommendation: Use new technologies including collaboration software and digital visualization tools to engage the public more constructively and efficiently. Promote community-scale decision making using new tools that allow citizens to “vote” online and enable municipalities to track the distribution and rate of responses.
For example, Michael Kwartler, founding executive director and president of the Environmental Simulation Center, recently launched CommunityViz, the first geographic information system–based planning and design decision support software to fully integrate virtual reality with scenario design, impact analysis, and policy simulation. INgage Networks, formerly called Neighborhood America, uses innovative web applications to support collaboration to gain the real-time answers. Smartocracy is a social software system for collective decision making. Locally, there’s Northeastern University School of Architecture’s Urban Gauge, a web-based visualization tool that evaluates alternative scenarios in real time during public meetings.
The goal is to capture more accurate, broadly inclusive public opinion. In many cases, financing for major real estate projects in Massachusetts collapses before communities reach a consensus and an acceptable design. The long time frame for public processes isn’t always in sync with the up-and-down cycles in the real estate market. Local government needs a more efficient and expertly managed process of public deliberation that generates high-quality public review and input in a shorter amount of time.
Think like a real estate developer.
Cities and towns own real estate—town halls, school buildings, police stations, tax-foreclosed properties, and vacant land parcels. My recommendation: Leverage real estate owned by local government in creative ways to generate revenue. The fiscal crisis demands an entrepreneurial mindset in government.
In Somerville, after decades of disinvestment, we considered a real estate strategy to transform Somerville’s Union Square into a vibrant center for the city’s emerging creative economy. Our plan combined and rezoned city-owned vacant properties. In our strategy, we considered consolidating various municipal departments dispersed around the city into a new “City Hall Annex” in Union Square, including a new public-library branch. The consolidated municipal offices and the library would bring a new population of consumers to support the stores and restaurants in Union Square. Our development concept involved an unusual public-private plan to finance a new arts center and the public library with a below-grade municipal parking garage. We also explored an innovative public-private financing strategy to pay for the relocation of an obsolete police station, freeing up four acres of city-owned land for new development. Though this plan has not yet been implemented, in 2009, the City of Somerville re-zoned Union Square to set the stage for new development clustered around the visual and performing arts. The city is currently exploring the best real estate strategies to make these ideas a reality as the economy rebounds.
In my experience, you spark redevelopment in marginal areas with a synergistic package of incentives to attract investment by minimizing risk to prospective developers. A city can leverage its “buying power” as a consumer of rentable space; the City of Somerville explored the idea of leasing space in the new development for the City Hall Annex and library. We based our strategy on the creative use of “sales-leaseback financing” to take advantage of the equity that the city had in its real estate holdings—essentially a sale or leaseback of new privately developed buildings on city-owned land parcels.
Thinking like a developer also means marketing like a developer. Our “gem in the rough” was the Inner Belt, an industrial area of more than 200 acres strategically situated in the Cambridge Metro area, which we envisioned as a future cluster of biotech companies and related emerging growth industries. Faced with stiff competition from the suburbs, we aimed to lure biotech companies to the Inner Belt as they expanded beyond Cambridge’s Kendall Square by planning the right infrastructure investments, such as new roads and the Green Line extension.
Cities, like developers, must know their target markets to create a competitive advantage. We talked (sometimes off the record) with biotech and life-sciences companies and asked them to list their top 10 criteria for site selection. At the top of the list? Not highway access, public transit, proximity to talent, or commercial property tax rates. Their answer: on-site steam and the “power quality” of electricity—absolutely critical for the mega-precision required in the production of biotech’s genetic products. Two people on our staff, experienced with the political perils of locating power plants within communities, developed an idea for an experimental “green tech” cogeneration plant that would generate electricity and produce steam as a byproduct for future companies in the Inner Belt. Senator Ted Kennedy and his staff lobbied Congress to grant us $ 1 million for an Inner Belt strategic plan that included market-driven ideas like the cogeneration plant. The City of Somerville will be launching the Inner Belt planning study this year.
Compete by collaborating.
In Massachusetts, local government is stuck in a zero-sum game. Historic political parochialism privileges the autonomy of local governments while requiring them to compete for investment and new tax revenues. Suburban towns find themselves in no-win situations when one town attracts a major real estate development to a site adjacent to a neighboring town. The neighboring town feels the impact of traffic congestion from the project on its border without enjoying any of the property-tax benefits—and often blocks the project by filing lawsuits against its neighbor. A collaborative approach might open the door to an arrangement in which the towns share the tax revenues the project generates. Towns and cities can compete more effectively for investment in a global economy if they compete as a region, rather than as individual municipalities.
Though challenging, cities and towns can profitably join together to advance projects that extend across city borders. The cities of Everett, Malden, and Medford had historically been locked in fierce competition for new investment. In 1995, the mayors of the three cities tried a different approach: They joined to redevelop 200 acres of blighted industrial land as a large-scale office and research campus for the telecommunications field, along with open space and public river access. It is doubtful whether these cities, acting independently, would have had the capacity to leverage the resources and state political support to make this project a success. This is “ad hoc regionalism,” an informal system of negotiated arrangements and joint decision making between municipalities in the absence of serious comprehensive regional planning.
Identify internal turf battles.
Far from being an efficient unified machine, local government is made up of independent departments battling over resources and staking claim to “turf.” Turf fighting will get worse as budget cuts threaten jobs. For example, firefighters have paradoxically been victims of their own success. Across the nation, the incidence of fires has actually declined. With fewer fires to fight, fire departments are assuming new responsibilities. Fire department code inspectors now go head to head with building departments and building inspectors in the review and approval of building-permit applications. These “turf battles” have the potential to slow the issuance of building permits to the frustration of building contractors and subcontractors. What’s the fix? My recommendation is to put the fire department inspectors and the building department inspectors in the same room. By sharing the same office, the inspectors have at least some incentive to work together. Familiarity and proximity can lead to common purpose.
Institute the “no asshole rule.”
Stanford University professor Robert Sutton wrote The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, a bestseller in corporate America based on his provocative 2004 Harvard Business Review essay “More Trouble Than They’re Worth.” Sutton argues that bullying behavior and other dysfunctional behavior such as malicious gossiping takes a toll on an organization’s morale, productivity, and profitability. Local government is fertile ground for dysfunctional behavior. In a vacuum, where good, enlightened leadership is missing, politically motivated, Machiavellian people thrive. Toxic behavior drives out the very people you want in government. This is where the “no asshole rule” comes in. Moreover, we should train good public servants how to survive the bad behavior of schemers, backstabbers, and nasty gossips. Think of urban planning as conflict resolution.
In their seminal book, Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury proposed a “mutual gains approach to negotiation” using tools of alternative dispute resolution to address complex, controversial public issues. Alternative dispute resolution practitioners have perfected techniques to resolve conflict to avert strikes, craft peace agreements, and settle environmental policy disputes.
My recommendation: Use the “mediation model” as a tool of urban planning and public project review. Train local government planners to be consensus builders who must reconcile conflicting visions about how the city should be designed and developed. In Somerville, I hired Jack Wofford and Pat Field, national pioneers in the mediation field, to resolve contentious neighborhood disputes about development. Doug Foy, former secretary of the Massachusetts Office for Commonwealth Development, and Anne Tate, an architect and Rhode Island School of Design professor, mediated the conflict between community activists and a national real estate developer over the mixed-use, transit-oriented Assembly Square development project, which had been stalled for several years by lawsuits. Incorporating the “mediation model” into urban planning and public project review proved to be particularly effective in combination with workshops that trained citizens how to analyze proposed projects in a way that dispassionately balanced the costs and benefits.
Consider Wikipedia and Facebook as metaphors for 21st-century local government.
Thinking of government as a social network can be a surprisingly useful way to think about some administrative and procedural fixes to local government that serve to regain the trust of a new (but cynical) generation of citizens.
Government, as defined by network theory (and in actual practice), is decision making as a group activity, within a self-organizing network comprising individuals (or organizations) called “nodes.” Social-network theorists argue that modern government is “not the cockpit from which society is governed” but a dynamic interplay among various actors that form a social network. The more robust the network, the more “nodes of opportunity” that allow direct citizen engagement and the more accurately government represents public consensus about decisions and priorities. So how do you translate this into the everyday functions of city hall? Here are two suggestions:
- Re-institute planning boards elected by citizens rather than planning boards appointed by elected officials—a very traditional idea in New England town government. In Boston, for example, the mayor appoints members to the planning board (called the Zoning Commission). Instead, imagine giving the voting public the power to elect people who represent their respective hopes and aspirations regarding planning and development.
- Create design review committees elected by the voters, with seats reserved for licensed design professionals. The Boston Civic Design Commission (BCDC) has served Boston citizens well and provided valuable guidance over the years. But imagine an elected BCDC: Architects would campaign for votes across the city.
Fundamentally, people are more vested in and consequently more trusting of any endeavor that gives them the power to make decisions collectively.
Limit the scope of local government.
Be realistic about what local government can do with available resources. Concentrate on such basics as improving schools, promoting entrepreneurial growth, and nurturing sustainable middle-class neighborhoods.
Of course, communities have critical needs beyond these core services, particularly in times of crisis, which a better-resourced government could have addressed in the past. In this new reality, local government might prove its effectiveness by facilitating and “brokering” the work of groups outside government to meet these needs. This is different from outsourcing. Here, the idea of local government as a facilitator is based on the premise that government no longer has the resources to meet all of a community’s needs but still has a responsibility for creating the right conditions so that those needs are addressed by other institutions or individuals.
Local government, as an enterprise, gets caught in a vicious cycle. An inadequately resourced government doesn’t have the capacity to reasonably perform to the public’s expectations; an angry and disillusioned public demands further cutbacks, thereby exacerbating government’s failure to perform and feeding the public’s lack of confidence. Planning and code administration offer a good example—core functions of local government. In economic crisis, the difficulties in meeting critical short-term needs with less staff and constrained budgets leave municipalities with limited capacity. And with public distrust and cynicism unabated, local government may no longer have the credibility or legitimacy to do objective, unbiased planning. Citizens sometimes perceive planning by local government as more of a rationalization of political decisions already made.
This failure of public confidence demands new radical approaches. For example, municipal governments might outsource planning and related regulatory responsibilities to the nonprofit “third sector,” the nongovernmental, nonpolitical organizations that have effectively done work for communities that government had historically assumed (the public and private-for-profit sectors being the “first” and “second” sectors, respectively). For example, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC)—a nonpolitical organization staffed by highly competent professionals—enjoys legitimacy in the public mind because it offers a more rational regional perspective. Other nonprofit organizations such as A Better City, MassINC, the Boston Foundation, or the Pioneer Institute have the expert professional capacity to do varying aspects of city and regional planning. Their agendas are clear and transparent and, as a result, they have credibility. The third sector can fill in where local government no longer has the resources and capacity. A more viable role for local government might be as an orchestrator of many parallel planning initiatives by nongovernmental organizations. In this role as network manager, local government earns a different kind of legitimacy by ensuring that everybody’s interests are represented in an open, transparent, and balanced manner. Imagine if nongovernmental organizations such as MAPC, with a regional perspective that transcends municipal boundaries, assumed responsibilities for the planning for each town and city.
Trust local government—but only if you can verify its performance.
Reconsider my first recommendation, “Don’t Trust Government.” Ronald Reagan quoted the Russian proverb, “trust but verify.” How do you “trust but verify” local government? Taking a page from private business, hold the staff accountable, and establish performance benchmarks that reflect the degree to which the public purpose has been met. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Here are a couple of ideas: Peg the salary of the planning or economic development director upward or downward to the annual increase or decrease in the city’s commercial tax base—a measure of a city’s or town’s success in attracting investment and, ultimately, revenues. The growth of the commercial property tax base in a city is a good indicator of a city’s capacity to generate tax revenue needed to pay for schools, safety, repair of potholes, crime prevention, and social services. Use the amount of weeks it takes a building department to process building-permit applications as an indicator of efficiency.
Benchmarking should not be punitive; rather, it should be the basis of a system of incentives. For example, I wish that I could have given raises to my staff at Somerville’s Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development based on how much grant funding they secured. Staff landscape architects received $4 million from the state through a competitive process to design and build new parks and playgrounds—a significant investment. Other staff secured more than $50 million in commitments from Massachusetts Department of Transportation through the competitive State Transportation Improvement Program to plan and build new transit, roads, and other infrastructure. Our senior planner was aggressive in getting the Environmental Protection Agency to fund a brownfield project in Somerville at a funding level far greater than that in other similar cities. A project manager won several million dollars from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to remove lead paint from affordable-housing units through a pilot program. In the private sector, this would have been rewarded. Why not government? The inside political culture of local government often conspires against true incentive-based compensation. In the worst cases, raises and promotions are based on patronage and how well staff serves narrow political interests.
Local government will only be as good as the people who work in it. Incentives to encourage good performance are cornerstones of any effort to make government more efficient. Committed and motivated workers will make government run in times of crisis.
In Conclusion
Even in crisis, local government is where democracy is most direct and tangible in the average person’s everyday life: educating kids, making the streets safe and clean, approving new zoning, issuing building permits. Doing these things well gives local government the greatest potential to win back the public’s trust. Crisis brings out creativity and builds resilience—provided creative government workers are not stymied by narrow political interests. Therein lies the problem—but also the opportunity—in local government.
]]>This year the I2UD Board of Directors explored 1000 km of the diverse Hungarian and Romanian country side travelling from Budapest, Hungary to Bucharest, Romania.
Starting in the historic Hungarian city of Budapest, perched on both sides of the beautiful Danube River, the city came alive when Dr. Katalin Pallai (an expert on Local Governance) guided us through a walking tour of the old neighborhoods. We were awed by the historic Parliament buildings, the unique Turkish baths, the cathedrals and synagogues and the elegant private villas, so rich in history and unique in their geographic setting. Dr. Pallai explained the challenges encountered in the transition from communism to democracy over the past 25 years and what that meant in redefining government and private housing and redesigning the urban landscape. After learning about this beautiful city we finished our stay in Budapest with much Goulash, wine and Hungarian music as we were privileged to celebrate professor Vigier’s 80th birthday with him.
On our way to Romania the next day we visited historic wine cellars in the Tokay wine region of Hungary where the viticulture tradition has existed for at least 1,000 years and where we tasted what King Louis XIV called the “King of all Wines”. Then we crossed the Hungarian border into the Romanian town of Oradea where we were met by an old friend, Dr. Andrei Luncan, the former Chief Architect of Oradea, who had worked with John Driscoll and the I2UD on many Romanian projects in the past. Dr. Luncan accompanied us for the rest of our trip in Romania and his knowledge, experience, and history with various villages and towns proved invaluable.
We were privileged to meet with the Deputy Mayor of Oradea and the new General Manager of the Oradea Metropolitan Area who thanked John Driscoll and Dr. Luncan for their early efforts in creating the framework for Metropolitan Oradea. The success of the program developed in Oradea has begun to spread to other municipalities in Romania and it was very encouraging for the Board Members to see how the efforts of the I2UD live on in a country even after the initial projects have been completed.
Continuing our tour we visited Sighisoara, Transylvania, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, infamous as the birthplace of Dracula. Then we travelled a short drive down the road to Viscri, an ancient Saxon village, at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains where we explored the famous fortified church of Viscri, built in the 12th century. The local farm houses surrounding the village have been the recent recipients of funding from many organizations who have aided in their restoration and preservation. Some are now used as lodging for hikers and other tourists and are an example of how Romanians are thinking of new ideas to sustain their existence in these rural areas. Our next stop was the city of Sibiu, Romania which was awarded the European City of Culture in 2007. This designation is the design and urban planning equivalent of winning the bid for the Olympics and the resultant face lift that the city underwent for the events in 2007 helped to emphasize the uniquely European flare in its architecture and culture. What a varied and beautiful country Romania is.
Leaving Sibiu we embarked on a spectacularly scenic drive through the Carpathian Mountains, finally entering the resort town of Sinaia. This is the home of the overwhelmingly ornate Peles Royal Castle, summer home of the Romanian Royal Family for decades, and other beautiful historic buildings. Unfortunately, during the Communist Era large and unattractive egalitarian hotels were built that remain to this day, giving the town the feeling of a poorly planned tourist destination.
It was in Sinai, a town which seemed to represent both the best and worst of architectural design and planning in Romania, where we participated in the I2UD Seminar on Urban and Regional Challenges and Opportunities in Romania. Presentations were made by various members of the Romanian Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism, the President of the Romanian Register of Urban Planners and our own Professor Frank Vigier. Many of our Board Members shared their own experiences of developing land and doing business in Canada and the United States. A stimulating discussion of life in the new urban Romania, with its goal to be a vital player on the eastern European and world markets led to further analysis of the effect of post Communism politics on the urban landscape and expansion throughout Romania.
After the Seminar we headed for Bucharest, the largest and most prosperous city in Romania. The city’s elegant architecture, so reminiscent of Paris, had long ago earned it the nick name of “Little Paris”. Today the city is the centre of Romanian mass media, culture and arts. In addition, Bucharest is one of the main industrial centers and transportation hubs of Eastern Europe. Here the Board held its final meeting and goodbye dinner in the company of Professor Liviu Inasi, Secretary, Romanian Professional Association of Urban Planners, who gave us first hand accounts of the tumultuous transitions that have occurred in Romanian cities and society over the past 30 years. Once again the Board Members were pleased to hear how the I2UD had participated in the transitions the country and its cities have made. We also came to understand that the unending dedication of citizens like Dr. Katalin Pallai, Andrei Lucan and Liviu Inasi has helped Romania reach its full potential as a player in the world markets.
Thank you to Professor Frank Vigier, John Driscoll, and Mary Shia for all the hours of planning and preparing for this exceptional trip from Budapest to Bucharest!
]]>In early October, I gave the keynote speech at a Forum hosted by the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, commonly referred to as the “TEC”. The Forum was a fascinating discussion on how to turn around a city that’s plagued with violence and crime fomented by the drug cartels (read more here). For me, though, the most inspiring part of the trip was a tour of a new house the TEC and its students had helped build in a nearby barrio for the school’s cleaning woman whom the union had voted to be in the most need of a new home. The social, environmental, and economic potential of such projects have the ability to transform Monterrey’s urban development as much as any government or private initiative.
The TEC is committed to engaging marginalized communities and operates a national network of centers, called Social Incubators, that cater to communities near the TEC’s 33 campuses across Mexico and allow students to serve as local consultants under their professors’ guidance. The School of Architecture, Art and Design Technology (EAAD) students to conduct community service as part of earning their degree in architecture. By raising students’ awareness about Monterrey’s urban problems, EAAD challenges them to consider the power of education and design to offer alternative solutions to the ‘wicked’ social problems confronting Monterrey and other cities.
The School’s Impulso Urbano (Urban Impulse) project is an innovative example of the TEC’s social incubators. It involves graduate and under graduate students from different disciplines in promoting social development and improvements that benefit low-income residents in poor neighborhoods – typically informal communities.
The 10×10 Casa Rosenda project is an inspiring outcome of this project. EAAD architecture and industrial design students under the guidance of Prof. Pedro Pacheco helped the family of Rosenda Flores to design and build an innovative house in one of the poor informal high crime neighborhoods in the Guadalupe municipality. Rosenda and her family previously lived in a 250 square foot (sf.) shack built from thin metal scrap without running water – characteristic of informal houses in her neighborhood.
Creatively using discarded materials from landfills and abandoned construction sites, the students built a 640 sf., two-level, environmentally sustainable house with a full kitchen, one bathroom and a 10,000-liter rainwater collection tank.
At the October 2011 Design Like You Give a Damn: LIVE! Conference in New York, Architecture for Humanity recognized Impulso Urbano’s Casa Rosenda project for its innovation and creativity, and has included the project in the second edition of Design Like You Give a Damn, a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that “demonstrate the power of design to improve lives” (to be released in Spring, 2012.) Architecture for Humanity is a nonprofit design services organization devoted to “building a more sustainable future through the power of professional design,” and a leading voice of the humanitarian architecture movement. The next edition of Design Like You Give a Damn, edited by Architecture for Humanity, will showcase innovative projects, like Casa Rosenda, that provide basic shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation and solutions to other urgent needs. As the book’s editors note, many of the featured projects were often built and designed “against great odds” in cities and rural areas challenged by pervasive poverty — similar to Rosenda’s neighborhood in the Guadalupe.
Mr. James Mayeux, AIA, Dean, School of Architecture, Art and Design Technology and Prof. Pedro Pacheco are continuing discussions with I2UD about a partnership in support of Urban Impulso as a ‘social incubator’.
Photos by James Kostaras
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