Urban Planning and Governance

This is one of the flyers of the book Urban Governance in Post-apartheid Cities: Modes of Engagement in South Africa's Metropoles, edited by Christoph Haferburg and Marie Huchzermeyer. It was published in Germany by Schweizerbart (Gebrueder Borntraeger, Stuttgart) in 2014 and co-published by UKZN Press in South Africa in 2015. For readers outside of South Africa, the Schweizerbart version should be more easily accessible.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

The paper reports on both methodological and substantive findings. It presents a method for generating simplified representations for regional urban populations, their geographical sub-populations and communities. the method generates greatly simplified high-resolution socio-economic profiles of populated geographical areas from complex large census data sets.

The cultural heritage of capital cities is a local capital in the global competition for tourism income as well as a public good of urban societies and a symbol of national identities. When developing cultural heritage as an asset for tourism, city marketing turns these complex urban meanings into rather simplistic commercial images. Such symbolic manipulations of culture intervene in deeply affective, institutionalised structures and thus risk political conflict and public contention. The strongly controversial planning for the cultural flagship district of the Museumsquartier Vienna highlighted diversity as characteristic of urban culture that remains often underweighted in urban political economy's focus on corporate dominance or local community. Enquiring into the discursive-institutional interactions which turned the political economic repositioning of urban culture into a plural political process, what lessons can we draw for tourism planning? As democratic societies meet diverse contemporary challenges in addition to tourism, managing the cultural heritage of cities is indeed a highly sensitive and controversial political task. But what initially appeared a planning failure and even deadlock of democratic government has since emerged as an urban space that is rather well accepted by local and international visitors. In the context of Vienna's international opening as a European capital, the controversial political emergence has contributed to constructing this cultural district as new interpretation of the historic city. Despite many shortcomings, unsolved conflicts and exclusionary decisions, the new landmark offers a specific combination of external images with internal visions, old paths with contemporary needs. Thus, instead of a rigid top-down plan, tourism planning needs to continuously consider diverse social, economic and political claims in an inclusive, differentiated and open-ended approach to urban development.

Europe has come to recognize that its regions have a major role to play in achieving its cohesion and competitiveness objectives. EU policies and Structural Fund principles are therefore increasingly geared towards enhancing regional capacities. Regions across Europe are responding, with varying results so far. The Randstad, in the Netherlands, presents itself as a ‘far from best’ example. Despite continued and serious attempts to strengthen capacities and institutions, the region still lacks effective governance. This paper explores the question why it is next to impossible to establish a framework for effective governance in the Randstad and distils some lessons for other regions in Europe.

India's urban floods are a result of dysfunctional municipal planning and governance. The fundamental issue behind recurrent urban flooding can be traced to the lack of a comprehensive masterplan that is properly implemented and enforced. Urban flooding events are followed by finger-pointing between authorities, highlighting the issues caused by fragmentation of governance and services. India's municipal planning and governance system also needs to include effective methods for disaster preparedness, including early warning systems, on a war footing.  The approach to developing solutions needs to be systemic rather than reactionary. If not, urban flooding and all the suffering that comes with it will continue to haunt Indian cities.

Local Enterprise Partnerships in England were intended as organic entities in which coalitions of local actors, led by business interests, would determine locally relevant policy for self-defined spatial units. Informed by ideas around localism and the desire to extend sub-national economic development policy making beyond the local state, central government envisaged an increased unevenness in local governance arrangements and policy approaches. The article assesses the experiences of four Local Enterprise Partnerships, employing social network analysis in an attempt to systematise the comparison of actor relationships and urban governance arrangements. The article considers the degree to which the discursive emphasis on liberating local policy actors from central government control has any empirical basis in the variable shape and structure of local elite actor networks. It argues that although Local Enterprise Partnerships operate within an environment characterised by lighter touch regulation, there is a dissonance between local discretion and the political imperative for central government to exercise oversight. Equally, variability in the web of actor interactions across the sample of Local Enterprise Partnerships suggests that asymmetrical urban governance and competitive localism are intrinsic features of post-regional local economic development, reflecting a wider national framework for spatial policy in which diversity in sub-national institutional form is viewed as a source of policy innovation and dynamism.