The City as the Platform

I have just spent 3 days at the Metropolis08 Congress in Sydney (actually I'm about to head off to the third day and chair a workshop on technology and the city).  Lots of fascinating discussions and stories from over 80 cities from all around the world.

A couple of things have struck me.  Firstly, given the predictions that within then next 30 years or so, over 70% of the world's population will be living in urban areas, the whole concept of the public sector and public management is increasingly becoming synonymous with urban government.  In that sense, the city is becoming the platform for many of the discussions about the role of government and the quality of public governance as well as for the more mundane but equally important challanges of service provision.

Secondly, the rapid growth of cities and the impact on city governance of massive shifts in technology and the dramatic evolution of the problems that need to be confronted - climate change, poverty, literacy, traffic, housing - bring into stark relief the huge instututional challenges facing cities.

I'll add some more comments on this later as my thoughts becoming a little less scattered. But essentially my argument is that the speed and scale of what is happening in and to cities, driven by massive technology and policy shifts, is exposing a dangerous mismatch between the decisions which the governance institutions of cities need to make and their ability to make them.  In a crude way, the problem is how the instututions of governance can keep up.  Things are happening so fast and new tools of information and knowledge are speeding up the information cycle so rapidly that the essentially 19th century tools of governance on which we largely rely to process all of that and take sensible, sustainable decisions seem increasingly inadequate to the task.

Picking up on the 'competitive government' posting elsewhere in this forum, I think the time has come for a process to emerge where we contemplate new models of governance which might offer alternative approaches more 'fit for purpose'. 

The Congress has reinforced my view that we need to enter into a period of sustained experimentation, of massive institutional innovation, to search for better ways to design, manage and sustain our cities.  In the process, we will be addressing a much larger challenge of public instiututional reform, because the challenge for the cities is actually the same as it is for the public sector more broadly.