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NATIONS AND THE WEALTH OF CITIES: A NEW PHASE IN PUBLIC POLICY Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, Minister for Cities and Constitution, HM Government, UK, and Greg Clark, Global Fellow, Brookings Institution /JPMorgan Chase Global Cities Initiative. Published by Centre for London, March 2014 Open Access. Some rights reserved. JPMorgan Chase, Brookings Institution and Centre for As the publisher of this work, Centre for London wants to encourage the London hosted the Global Cities Initiative European circulation of our work as widely as possible while retaining the copyright. conference in London on October 29th 2013. This We therefore have an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content online without charge. Anyone can download, save, perform conference brought together city and civic leaders from or distribute this work in any format, including translation, without written London, uk, Europe, and many emerging economies, permission. This is subject to the terms of the Centre for London licence. together with experts from Brookings Institution and Its main conditions are: JPMorgan Chase. The major themes explored were the links between metropolitanisation and economic · Centre for London and the author(s) are credited development through trade and global engagement, · This summary and the address www.centreforlondon.co.uk are displayed · The text is not altered and is used in full and the need to actively manage the challenges of · The work is not resold globalising cities at the local and national levels. · A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to Centre for London. Two of the speakers at the conference were You are welcome to ask for permission to use this work for purposes other the Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, Minister for Cities and than those covered by the licence. Centre for London gratefully acknowledges Constitution in Her Majesty’s uk Government, and the work of Creative Commons in inspiring our approach to copyright. Greg Clark, a Global Fellow at Brookings and advisor To find out more go to www.creativecommons.org. on city development internationally. Given their shared interests and the opportunity that the gci conference offered them to share a platform, this paper brings together their two contributions as jointly authored by the two Greg Clarks. This is the first paper they have collaborated upon. The intention of this paper is specific. It aims to address the challenges for national governments that result from globalising cities. It uses the example of the uk as a locus for a new suite of city oriented national policies and initiatives that seek to marry local leadership with national frameworks in a global system. Sincere thanks from the two authors to JPMorgan Chase, Brookings Institution, Centre for London, Published by: and the Global Cities Initiative for this opportunity Centre for London 2014 to share thinking at an international level. © Centre for London. Some rights reserved. The Exchange 28 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9SG T: 020 3102 3767 [email protected] www.centreforlondon.co.uk Company Number: 8414909 Charity Number: 1151435 Series design by Studio Aparte About Centre for London AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Centre for London is a new politically independent not- for-profit think tank focused on the big challenges facing Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, Minister for Cities London. Through its research and events, the Centre acts and Constitution as a critical friend to London’s leaders and policymakers, Rt Hon Greg Clark has been the Conservative promotes a wider understanding of the challenges facing mp for Royal Tunbridge Wells since 2005. Born London, and develops long-term, rigorous and radical in Middlesbrough, Greg studied economics at policy solutions for the capital. It looks for support from Cambridge before earning his phd from the a mixture of private, voluntary and public sector funders London School of Economics. Greg was Director and works collaboratively with its supporters, drawing of Policy for the Conservative Party from March on their experience and expertise. Launched three years 2001 for three successive Leaders: William Hague, ago, the Centre is quickly developing relationships with Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. Greg sister organisations across the globe. was appointed Minister for Cities in July 2011 www.centreforlondon.org and Financial Secretary to the Treasury in September 2012. About The Global Cities Initiative The Global Cities Initiative aims to equip metropolitan Greg Clark, global cities advisor leaders with the information, policy ideas and global Greg Clark is an international mentor and connections they need to bolster their position advocate for cities. Greg is also the Chairman within the global economy. Combining the Brookings of the oecd leed Forum on Local Development Institution’s deep expertise in fact-based, metropolitan- Agencies and Investment Strategies in Paris. focused research and JPMorgan Chase's longstanding Greg was trained as an Economist, Social and commitment to investing in cities, this initiative aims to: Political Scientist, and City and Regional Planner at Cambridge University, Columbia University • Help city and metropolitan leaders leverage and the London School of Economics. He is a their global assets by unveiling their economic Harkness Fellow and author of six books and starting points on such key indicators as advanced numerous reports and papers on cities and manufacturing, exports, foreign direct investment, business development issues. freight flow and immigration. • Provide metropolitan area leaders with proven, actionable ideas on how to expand the global reach of their economies, building on best practices and policy innovations from across the nation and around the world. • Create a network of leaders from global cities intent upon deepening global trade relationships. www.jpmorganchase.com/globalcities 4 5 PREFACE There are broadly three positions a national government can take towards its cities. The first is to overlook them. The second is to see them as a source of problems that need fixing. The third is to view them as full of potential that needs realising. The history of post-war urban policy can, with only a bid of simplification, be described as a progress from the first of these to the second. Post-war economists and governments had little sense of the economic importance of cities and city regions, while economic pressures and public policy tended to work in tandem to weaken them. Industries and businesses were encouraged to move from city-centre locations to edge-of-city ones. The spread of the car and continuing development of rail networks fuelled the growth of suburbs. Influential architects and planners extolled the virtues of demolishing old inner city ‘slums’, and moving their residents to edge of the city or beyond, and the construction of urban motorways, towers in parks and garden cities – which were in fact in reality more often or not, garden suburbs. The uk and other Western European nations characteristically adopted a more interventionist approach than did the us to planning in these years. The uk established ‘green belts’ to limit suburban development and promoted New Towns around London and other large cities. But there was a widespread assumption on both sides of the Atlantic in favour of policies and programmes that tackled the problems long associated with large cities – disease, pollution, congestion, poverty – by taking the city to the country and the country to the city and dissolving the difference between them. From the 1970s onwards however, we saw the beginning of a new phase in urban policy. A number of related developments – the collapse of old urban industries and ports, and the consequent rise in unemployment and poverty, dramatically increasing crime rates, and the obvious failures of experiments in modernist social housing programmes – forced 7 governments to rethink their approach to cities. Clark and Clark are careful to insist that there remains The last forty years have seen governments sponsoring an important role for national governments in urban programmes and initiatives aimed at rebuilding and policy. But that role, they argue, will increasingly rejuvenating rundown areas, and tackling the social be about supporting cites, not running them. In the problems that de-industrialisation and the decline meantime we need to ensure that cities have the powers, of urban economies left in their wake. resources and incentives to tailor policies to their own But as Greg Clark and Greg Clark help us see particular circumstances and make the most of their in this insightful paper, though efforts to tackle urban distinct advantages. dereliction and promote renewal were welcome, they As this paper clearly sets out, the uk economy were in some ways limited in scope and impact. They scores well on many measures and many of its cities tended to be top down, reactive and ‘unjoined-up’. in particular have adapted well to the latest wave of They often focused on the worst areas of decline rather globalisation. This is above all true of London, which than on the city as a whole, and on the tackling ‘hard’ has benefited from heavy investment in public transport problems of physical renewal at the expense of softer and the creation of a new level of strategic government issues of education, skills and social capital. Funding – the Greater London Authority, led by a new Mayor came and went, but even at its most generous it was only for London. The ‘knowledge economy’ cities of South ever a tiny proportion of overall government spend in East England, including Oxford and Cambridge, have an area, most of which was funnelled through the similarly undergone something of a renaissance. These traditional routes. cities can compete with any in the world in attracting It is against this background that the two Clarks highly skilled workers, innovative, global firms, and high argue that we can begin to see the emergence of a third levels of inward investment.