CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Urban governance in the Realm of Complexity
Jurian Edelenbos and Meine Pieter van Dijk
Abstract
The introductory chapter reflects on the development of the urban governance concept and analyses the factors influencing urban governance at the national and local level. The essentials and issues of urban governance are explained before an overview is given of the chapters of the book. At the end of the chapter, the conclusions of the book are presented.
Keywords: urban governance, globalization, global cities, governance modes, new forms of governance, participation, self-organization
Introduction: from urban management to urban governance
Nowadays, climate change, urbanization and industrialization, population growth, urban sprawl, and rural-urban migration put pressure on cities. These forces lead to a shift in the existing urban governance structures. Reactions have focused on activities like energy saving, waste management, and closing the urban water cycle, but these require new governance structures and approaches that go beyond traditional management approaches and governmental top-down steering models. In recent years we have therefore seen an interesting shift in focus from urban management (Van Dijk, 2006) towards urban governance (Edelenbos, 2005). The emphasis on urban governance can be explained by the fact that urban development takes place in complex environments, in which different stakeholders from different organizations and domains, such as government actors, private actors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and citizens, are engaged. Kearns and Paddison (2000) argue that the traditional meaning of management as 'taking control, taking charge, directing' (c.f. Williams, 1983: 190) has lost meaning in today's urban context. City governments are no longer in control, and have lost the ability to direct events in the urban context. Urban management can no longer be characterized as top-down urban planning in a command and control management mode (Healy et al., 1995).
Different contextual developments and changes have helped to give rise to urban governance perspectives. In this introductory chapter we will briefly describe developments influencing urban governance at the national and local level and list the implications of these developments for urban governance.
Developments influencing urban governance at the national level are:
• a shift towards economic globalization;
• competition and cooperation between global cities.
Developments influencing urban governance at the local level are:
• growing complexity of projects;
• more powerful and vocal actors functioning in self-organized networks.
The implications of these developments for urban governance are:
• attention now has to be paid to the role of participation and, in particular, self-organizing networks;
• the emergence of new forms of urban governance through collective action, such as community-based organizations, NGOs, public-private partnerships, etc.;
• attention now has to be paid to sustainable urban governance, and to the importance of different levels of governance and their coordination at national, regional, municipal, neighbourhood, and ward levels.
A shift towards economic globalization
First, there is a shift towards economic globalization representing the emergence of worldwide economic sectors, international companies and institutions, and interurban competition. Cities are trying hard to 'sell themselves for a number of investments' and to transform themselves 'from the welfare-state model towards the economic development model' (Kearns and Paddison, 2000: 845). The rise of urban governance is concurrent with the shift from an industry-based local economy toward a postindustrial economy. It has also coincided with a decline in national urban policy and a growing emphasis on urban competition, competitiveness, and economic growth (Hall and Hubbard, 1996).
In this increasingly competitive world, city governments have the ambition to become entrepreneurial agents discovering the world and attracting economic flows and business investments. In achieving this aspiration cities sometimes delink themselves from national economies, as they no longer believe that national governments can help them realize their ambitions and fortunes. National governments also recognize this, and this explains trends of decentralization and devolution. This again reflects the changing urban-regional-national relationships in a globalizing world (Ohmae, 1995).
Competition and cooperation between global cities
Today cities collaborate and compete with other cities across the globe, leading to the emergence of city networks. Being or becoming a smart city depends on whether cities have brokering capacities in the context of such networks (Allen, 2010). City networks consist of nodes (actors) and linkages (information flows) between the nodes. They are characterized by horizontal relationships (ties) between actors who aim to produce outputs and outcomes cooperatively, based on decentralized, nonhierarchical decision-making (Pierre and Peters, 2000).
It is often announced that cities have to become smarter. For instance, the European Commission defines smart cities as: 'systems of people interacting with and using flows of energy, materials, services, and financing to catalyze sustainable economic development, resilience, and high quality of life; these flows and interactions become smart through making strategic use of information and communication infrastructure and services in a process of transparent urban planning and management that is responsive to the social and economic needs of society' (EIPSCC, 2013: 5). Cities need to develop smart governance in order to become smart. Smart governance, as a concept, forces city governments to rethink, change, and improve their governing routines, procedures, and processes. Smart governance can be distinguished from 'the governance of smart cities', which highlights broader issues of how to govern and coordinate smart-city initiatives and well-informed citizen initiatives. Meijer and Rodriguez Bolivar (2015) show that smart-city publications with a governance focus underscore the interactions between various stakeholders in the city. In this view, smart cities are seen from a user-centred perspective, with more emphasis on citizens and other stakeholders. The idea of collaboration then turns out to be central, with a specific focus on developing productive interactions between networks of urban actors (Kourtit et al., 2012).
Growing complexity of urban projects
Urban governance has emerged as governing cities has become more difficult, due to the growing complexity of social life; the connection between people and places has become more diffuse (Healy, 1997). Healy et al., (1995: 4) argue that cities can be seen as a 'locus of overlapping webs or relations on diverse spatial scales'. Cities display examples of social differentiation, and different lifestyles and cultural backgrounds (Madanipour et al., 2000). 'Governing the shared space of the city when old conformities and certainties about lifestyles are gone is challenging.' (Kearns and Paddison, 2000: 846) On the one hand this diversity leads to flourishing cities, as open and multiplex cities provide more opportunities for creative economic activities (Amin and Graham, 1997). But on the other hand it can also lead to problems of socio-spatial polarization and exclusion. Processes of social exclusion have led to concentrations of excluded people in particular city neighbourhoods (Madanipour et al., 2000). Cities have changed during recent decades from cohesive urban economies and societies into disorderly places characterized by fragmenting relations (Healey et al., 1995). In other words, cities have become unruly (Kearns and Paddison, 2000) and have disintegrated into 'bits and pieces' (Amin and Thrift, 1995).
More powerful and vocal actors functioning in self-organized networks
The urban governance response to these complexities is not an attempt to regain control and restore traditional structures, thus emphasizing hierarchies and bureaucracies, but to change into self-organizing networks and heterarchy (Jessop, 1998). Diversity and disorder are valued from a governance perspective, as these can stimulate innovation and promote the use of local experiments and tailor-made processes. In an urban governance approach, aspects such as self-organization, participation, and cooperation become important; they serve as organizing principles according to which the city's governance is shaped and managed. Governance is a pragmatic response to increasing city complexity, adopted in order to get things done. On the basis of these principles, city governments empower themselves by activating and combining resources, skills, and objectives of other (private, societal) actors in the urban system. Urban governance means that the capacity to get things done no longer lies with government power and management authority, in one place and institution. It is a multilevel activity (Healey et al., 1995; Edelenbos and Teisman, 2013), in which higher levels of authority (regional and national governments) are related to and combined with lower levels of governance at the local and neighbourhood levels. At these local levels urban governance seeks to build strong cooperative relationships, to access and utilize local resources, to build local institutional capacity, and to develop social capital through which local problems can be solved.
The goal of this book
The goal of this book is to examine how urban governance is dealing with the often recurring societal, environmental, and economic issues faced by cities nowadays. The challenge is to understand these issues, and the research presented brings out certain factors contributing to the success of improved urban governance:
• the role of clear objectives and leadership;
• the need for a legal framework which defines the roles of the different actors;
• clear decision-making and appeal mechanisms;
• incentives and appropriate funding mechanisms;
• cooperation between actors and the gradual development of trust;
• a clear division of responsibilities.
In 2002, the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) of Erasmus University in Rotterdam (EUR) published Governing Cities, New Institutional Forms in Developing Countries and Transitional Economies (Van Dijk, Noordhoek and Wegelin, eds). Reading that book now, more than a decade later, it seems to have been a first attempt to deal with some of the issues we are tackling in this volume, but in a world where globalization, increased complexity, and sustainability hardly played a role. Instead there is a lot of attention paid to sectoral governance issues, such as dealing with urban land, slums, helping poor people, and organizing housing finance. Some chapters of that book anticipate developments which will also be discussed in this book: the role of urban information systems, public-private and community partnerships, and cooperation between governmental organizations, NGOs and community-based organizations. Both books share a concern for participation and self-organization of stakeholders in the urban development process, and examine emerging institutional forms for urban management in developing countries (or what we would now call the role of emerging governance structures).
Urban governance: essentials and issues
In the first section we have broadly introduced the concept of urban governance as a pragmatic response to dealing with complexities faced nowadays by cities across the globe. It is a reaction to the urban management paradigm that represents control and hierarchy, and stresses core aspects such as cooperation, partnership, participation, self-organization, and multilevel governance.
Our emerging 'network society' is facing an increasingly important need to manage inter-organizational relationships. This development is also discussed as the shift from 'government' to 'governance' (Kooiman, 1993). A government is an organization with formal goals and tasks, and clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and is therefore necessarily hierarchical. Governments as organizations have well-institutionalized structures. In contrast, governance refers much more to a process of working together and the joint efforts of different organizations. Because of the complex relationships between these organizations, governance is a less formal approach to managing the public domain. Governmental authority has made way for a more dynamic interaction, based on interdependence (Castells, 2000).
Urban governance can be defined as 'a concern with governing, achieving collective action in the realm of public affairs, in conditions where it is not possible to rest on recourse to the authority of the state' (Stoker, 2000: 93). Urban governance theory stresses that the main role of city governments is to coordinate agency across the local territory towards collective goals. In urban governance literature, the constraints on political control and the importance of collective and cooperative action are emphasized. Cities are depicted as entangled in complex contingencies, in that they are in vertical relationships with regions, central governments, and transnational institutions, as well as in horizontal relationships with private business and organized local and societal interests (Pierre and Peters, 2000; Kearns and Paddison, 2000). In this view there is a recognition of the formal authority vested in elective office and institutions, but also an understanding that this alone does not suffice to govern the city; therefore, city authorities team up with different partners depending on the issue, sector, or aspect of public service delivery concerned (Ansell and Gash, 2007). Different actors control different types of resources (authority, knowledge, financial resources, networks, etc.) that can be brought in to support the pursuit of collective action and goals.
In urban governance literature, different modes of governance are discussed: clientelistic, corporatist, managerial, pluralist, and populist.Table 1.1 provides an overview.
In each mode the focus on the actors is different. In the clientelistic model, particular clients get attention in return for political support, whereas in the corporatist model they answer to the private sector elites. In the managerial mode of governance, the focus is on formal/contractual relationships between government officials and private-sector interests. In the pluralist mode, the high degree of complexity among contending interests is emphasized. Governments then serve as brokers or provide an arena for negotiation between rival private interests. In the populist model, politicians focus on grassroots mobilization as a way of setting and implementing policy agendas. The governing logic is democratic inclusion, expanding the participation of individuals and groups.
Nowadays, the last two categories of urban governance get the most attention. These modes recognize the resurgence of local levels (Jessop, 1998). Their approach is to promote the notion/concept/idea that problems should be resolved at the lowest level possible, but with support from the national administration. There is a key role for cities in governing the interfaces: between local issues and global flows; between the potentially conflicting demands of local sustainability and well-being, and those of international competitiveness; and between challenges of social exclusion and global polarization, and the continuing demands for liberalization, privatization, deregulation, etc. (Jessop, 1998). This places a strong emphasis on partnerships and networks rather than top-down urban management. The pluralist and populist modes call for partnerships between the public and private sectors and between government and civil society. Partnerships don't only involve actors from the private sector, but also NGOs, religious groups, community-action groups, or networks of individuals.
The implications of these developments for urban governance
The developments discussed above have some specific implications. First, there will be growing attention paid to the role of participation and, in particular, self-organizing networks. Moreover, growing urban complexity will lead to the emergence of new forms of urban governance through collective action and co-production, urban governance networks, public-private partnerships, and new forms of multilevel governance. The final implication is that more attention will be paid to sustainable governance in urban development: how to cope with the numerous ambitions, interests, and values at play in developing sustainable futures.
The remaining chapters in this book are organized under three thematic headings. For each of the three parts, a theoretical introduction to the theme is given below, followed by a summary of the relevant chapters.
