Planning and Innovation for City Success

World Cities Summit Issue, June 2008

What makes a city successful?

The first step toward answering this question must be to specify what we mean by success for a city. My own starting point is that cities are for their residents, and consequently that a successful city is one in which the great majority of residents feel very fortunate to live, and in which they would happily think of their descendants continuing to live for generations to come.

In comparing cities with reference to this definition of success, I find it most useful to focus on seven criteria. In no particular order, these are Prosperity, Personal Security, Sustainability, Equity, Liveability, Liberty and Democracy (see box story for elaboration).

Cities vary in the challenges that they find particularly hard. Singapore is notable for the rationality and long-term vision that has guided its policy- making since its independence, enabling it to make remarkable gains in terms of prosperity, health, safety, liveability and sustainability. Cities in the United States (US), by contrast, tend to be plagued by short-term perspectives and policies driven by narrow interest groups. On the other hand, US cities are remarkable for the liberty and democracy they afford their citizens, their overall prosperity-although with wide variations-and their liveability.

Master planning of land use and public investment has played a large role in Singapore's development. You have commented elsewhere on tensions that may exist between key attributes of Planning, Democracy and Capitalism. Can you elaborate on this?

First, let me emphasise that Singapore's planning has been truly exemplary in terms of its comprehensive, well-conceived vision, its integration of the parts, its analytic rationality, and its actual impact on the ground. Nonetheless, intrinsic tensions exist between the imperatives of planning, democracy and capitalism. Planning, for example, is most centrally about rational analysis and long-term, integrated perspectives. Democracy is about responsiveness to constituencies and tends toward a multiplicity of discrete, short-term perspectives. Capitalism is about private property rights, business competition and consumer sovereignty. Quite a few countries have reconciled two of these three themes at a very high level, but very few indeed have managed to do so for all three.

Singapore, for example, has been highly successful in reconciling the tension between planning and capitalism, primarily by making the attraction of international capital the highest priority-along with national security-of its planning. The US has been highly successful in reconciling capitalism with democracy, mainly because Americans are so committed to private property rights and business is so influential in US politics.

Singapore's planning success has been significantly attributable, on the other hand, to its political continuity and unitary structure (just a single level of government), which has enabled a highly stable leadership to develop and pursue its long-term vision without interruption for nearly half a century. In the US, by contrast, broad governmental planning is generally impossible because electoral competition is so intense, leadership turnover is so frequent, and public authority is distributed among a vast array of governments-not just federal, state, and local, but also within each metropolitan area.

It is similarly interesting to compare the nature of business power in the US versus Singapore. In the US, business has traditionally had enormous direct influence on the political process-via its financing of political campaigns, its lobbying prowess, and its great public communications resources. In Singapore, by contrast, business seems to have little direct capacity to influence policy decisions, but since the central thrust of government policy is to attract and retain capital, the effect is similar. And indeed we see the same trend in the US. The great majority of local businesses that used to influence city politics have now been absorbed into national and international corporations. These corporations have little interest in the details of local politics, but they make clear that their investments will go where they deem conditions most favourable for their pursuit of profit. So, while they are far less visible than before in day-to-day local politics, they are in some respects more influential than ever.

Are there countries that are terrific in all three?

There are a few, I believe, most notably small countries in north-western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland. Of these, I am most familiar with the history of planning in the Netherlands. Like Singapore, it is a small trading country without natural resources, mainly capitalist in its economic organisation, and very open to the world. It has a tradition of strong, very thoughtful planning, though, which goes back hundreds of years, primarily because it is a land reclaimed from and constantly threatened by the sea. So its people have always understood the imperatives of collective action and have never become imbued with the extreme reverence for private property and individualism that developed in the wide open spaces of early America.

What do you consider as innovations in urban policy?

Some of those that have struck me here are Singapore’s policies for balancing car ownership and usage with road capacity, for achieving a high level of self-sufficiency in water supply, and for both liquid and solid waste disposal. In each of these domains, Singapore is either the world leader or one of two or three. Each of these policies is not just innovative but highly conducive to sustainability and environmental quality.

As an American, I am struck by the fact that many of the ideas and technologies underlying Singapore's innovations originated in the west, and often indeed in the US. But they have, in general, been far more difficult to implement in the west, and particularly in the US. The idea of congestion pricing, for example, was originated by an American, William Vickrey, who won the Nobel Prize largely for having done so. For political reasons, though, it has proven impossible to implement congestion pricing (except on a few stretches of privately managed expressway) anywhere in the US. My key point is that a fresh idea or invention becomes an innovation only when it is put into practice, and in this regard, Singapore is truly a world leader.

The US is terrific at generating ideas and private sector innovations, but generally a bit of a laggard among highly developed countries in public sector adoption. Where the US has innovated in public policy, on the other hand, it has most typically been as a result of bottom-up pressure. During the 1960s and 1970s, the US pioneered in the area of citizen participation and environmental protection. Mass motorisation was also a US (and partly urban) innovation, but like many other innovations of great importance for American cities, it was driven mainly by private business and consumer decisions. The government participated, but reactively: by investing in roads and urban renewal schemes to accommodate motorisation, and helping to finance new private housing attractive to the new auto-owning public. If we look back further, the US led the way in developing mass public education, likewise in response to strong grassroots pressures.

A fresh idea or invention becomes an innovation only when it is put into practice.

Some other important innovations in the US, not purely urban but of great urban significance, have involved a mix of public and private sector initiatives. Think, for example, of America's great non-profit universities, hospitals and cultural institutions, encouraged by the tax system and specific public grants but overwhelmingly the products of private initiative. Similarly, America led the way in the development of air transportation, with a mix of private entrepreneurship, public subsidies and infrastructure investments. More recently, it pioneered the Internet, which started as a public sector project but was later developed mainly by the private sector. We don't normally think of these as urban innovations, but they have had, and still have enormous impacts on urban development.

Does the Internet threaten the existence of cities?

Human interactions have moved into a different space where physical boundaries no longer exist. Everybody has been predicting for decades that cities would decline with the progress of telecommunications. In practice, however, cities are growing everywhere. In countries with lots of space relative to the population size, like the US, Canada and Australia, modern cities can be more spread out than those of yesteryear, but they are no less cities for that. Urbanisation is about opportunities for face-to-face interaction rather than specific spatial patterns, so as travel and communication speeds increase, land use densities can decrease significantly with little or no loss of agglomeration benefits.

As for communications specifically, the late Ithiel de Sola Pool, who was my colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered in the wake of the 1973 oil shock that when travel was curtailed, the volume of telecommunications fell as well. His conclusion: a great deal of telecommunications is about planning for trips and following up on them. It seems that communications and face-to-face interaction are complementary activities far more than alternatives. And this seems to be true of email as well. We phone and email most frequently those whom we also see a lot. With a falloff in face-to-face interaction, electronic communications tend to fall off as well. So there is no indication that the age of the city is passing.

WHAT MAKES A CITY SUCCESSFUL?

Prosperity: All cities with a serious claim to world-class success seek to provide their residents with full employment and continuous improvement in their material circumstances. Since cities are very small units in a global economy, this means that they must be highly competitive for international capital and that their enterprises must be highly competitive in trade.

Personal Security: Material wealth does not mean a great deal if one's family is highly vulnerable to crime, disease or corrupt, self-serving government officials. So the cities that people with a choice find most attractive are notable for their safety, the overall good health and longevity of their residents, the relative incorruptibility of their governments, and a general sense that their laws are just, humane and binding on government officials as well as the public at large.

Sustainability: There has been a revolution in consciousness over the past several decades about the importance of leaving our descendants a natural world providing at least a comparable set of opportunities to those that we enjoy. There are many dimensions to sustainability and it has global as well as local components. It seems to me, however, that no city can be counted truly successful today if it is despoiling its own environment or acting heedlessly with respect to the effects of its activities on the global environment.

Equity: In order to achieve prosperity, every city must provide strong incentives for investment, hard work and entrepreneurship, and it must be open to the world economy. So a significant degree of inequality is inevitable. Extreme inequality is a social cancer that devastates the lives of those at the bottom and eventually threatens those higher up the economic scale as well-due to its effects on health, crime and community spirit (or lack thereof), and the justifications it may provide for repressive government measures to combat these social ills. So the successful modern city, in my view, is one with a genuine safety net for the victims of misfortune and other effective programmes to mitigate extreme inequality while maintaining strong work incentives. Getting the balance right is far from easy, but one can certainly compare cities, and nations, in terms of how well they do it.

Liveability: I don't really like this term because it is so amorphous. It usefully conveys, however, that the localities in which people most want to live are notable for the excellence of their public services (which are typically supplemented by superb private opportunities in such domains as education and the arts), the range and quality of the recreational opportunities they offer, and the sheer pleasure that people take in the environments that they provide. Taken together, these elements of the good city seem reasonably captured by the term "liveability".

Liberty: People yearn to make their own life choices, formulate and express their own views, and explore the world. Really successful cities today are those that can attract and retain their fair share of the most talented, highly trained and freest thinking people in the world. So a high degree of personal liberty is today not just essential for the good life of people in cities, but also for achievement of the highest levels of economic competitiveness.

Democracy: Finally, the successful modern city is one in which the government is highly responsive to citizen views. Viewed internationally, this appears to be most likely where citizens can formulate their views in a system of free public speech, reasonable opportunities for interest group and electoral mobilisation, and genuinely free and fair elections. The most important element, of course, is responsiveness, whatever the mechanisms by which it is achieved. Can this occur without a high degree of electoral democracy? Clearly the answer is yes, at least in some circumstances and for substantial periods of time. It is also true that the world's indisputable democracies vary widely in their specific arrangements, and that electoral competition may in some circumstances intensify social conflict and/or seriously impede rational decision making. So I do not take a doctrinaire position about the forms of democracy that may be suitable for countries with various cultural traditions and at different stages of economic development. Other things being reasonably equal, however, as they often are in comparing the world's most successful cities, I believe that highly trained and talented people, those with the widest choices in today's global economy, will gravitate toward cities that breathe both free and democratic. - Alan Altshuler

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alan Altshuler is the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Harvard University with a joint appointment in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has taught at Harvard since 1988 and was most recently Dean of the Graduate School of Design from July 2004 through December 2007. His research and teaching focus on the politics of decision-making about the built environment and transportation. His most recent book, co-authored with David Luberoff, is entitled Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

This is an excerpt of an interview conducted on 18 February 2008 by June Gwee, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Governance and Leadership, Civil Service College Singapore, when Professor Altshuler was visiting the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

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