Innovations and Collaboration in global city-region governance INNOVATIONS AND COLLABORATION IN GLOBAL CITY-REGION GOVERNANCE Copyright © 2016 Future Cities Publications All rights reserved. Innovations and Collaboration in global city-region governance DEDICATION Regional Plan Association of New York the Next 100 Years Innovations and Collaboration in global city-region governance CONTENTS PREFACE ............................................................ 8 INTRODUCTION: MAKING THE CASE… ..................... 10 GLOBAL CHICAGO: A LAND OF PLENTY IN A SEA OF WANT ................................................................................... 21 LAGOS REACHES FOR THE STARS: A PROBLEMATIC CITY SEEKING GLOBAL STATUS …………………………………………………….…..33 AN OLYMPIC MOMENT: LONDON AS A GLOBAL CITY ON THE GLOBAL STAGE ................................................. 50 MELBOURNE: GETTING TO NUMBER ONE AND SUSTAINABLE .................................................................... 59 BAY AREA REGIONALISM: SAN FRANCISCO’S TORTUOUS JOURNEY TO REGIONALISM …………...714 WHY MAKE IT SIMPLE, WHEN IT CAN BE BRAZILIAN COMPLEX: SAO PAULO HOUSES THE URBAN POOR ………………………………………………………..102 THE DRAGON’S HEAD: GLOBAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN SHANGHAI ..................................... 998 A NATURAL REGION: GLOBAL-REGIONAL PLANNING IN TORONTO ……………………………………………1123 FINAL CHAPTER: TAKEAWAYS ……………………..1226 AFTERWORD BY ROBERT YARO FMR PRES RPA ...................................................................................... 158 Edward J Blakely and Laura Crommelin, Managing Editors iv Innovations and Collaboration in global city-region governance Innovations and Collaboration global city-region governance Edward J Blakely, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney; Extraordinary Professor of Economic Policy, North-West University; Vaal Campus, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa; and Member of the Board of the Regional Plan Association of New York; and Laura Crommelin, Univ. of New South Wales. Preface by Afterword by Robert Yaro, former president of New York Regional Plan. With collaborators: Chicago: Charles Hoch, University of Illinois at Chicago Lagos: Oyebanji Oyeyinka, UN-Habitat London: Vincent Goodstadt, University of Manchester Melbourne: Nathan Stribley, Committee for Melbourne San Francisco: Ezra Rapport, Association of Bay Area Governments São Paulo: Anacláudia Rossbach, Rede Internacional de Ação Comunitária Shanghai: Richard Hu, University of Canberra Toronto: Joe Berridge, Urban Strategies, Inc. 6 Innovations and Collaboration global city-region governance 7 Edward J Blakely and Laura Crommelin, Managing Editors PREFACE This monograph is a work of labor and love that took too long to see the light of day. The started as a project designed to support the regional planning process for New York’s Fourth Regional Plan being compiled by the world’s oldest and most unusual organization, New York Regional Plan Association (RPA) which was founded by civic groups in nearly a century ago in 1925 to guide a rationale planning process for the continuing dis-coordinated and frequently counterproductive process carried on by four state government, numerous regional authorities and nearly one hundred cities bordering on the great City of New York. The Fourth Regional Plan is being released in 2016. Needless to say each of the earlier reginal plans addressed issue salient to the era in which they were crafted. Even though RPA has no legislative mandate nor is it a tool of State or local government its PLANS are the cornerstone of government and private actors’ decisions and actions. In part, RPA is successful because its Board is composed of leading corporate and community actors. While government officials do not serve on the board, the large over 80-person board has a number of powerful ex-public agency heads and even one ex-governor of New Jersey as key member of the board and on key external committees. The Board is a who’s who of community leadership crossing ethnic, color and political lines. There is one solid pillar that holds the Board and the organization together-they are all PROGRESSIVES. This is the Board, Staff and participating collaborators have a share belief in the fundamental need to move to the future and embrace inclusive change. In this sense, they may seem narrow in a polarized “me-first” era. But this bedrock belief structure drives the organization so completely that no political regime in Greater New York States of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey nor big cities leaders have shaken their course. Since political systems and public leaders have a difficult time agreeing the RPA acts as a facilitator and compose for a heterogeneous polyglot of institutions that govern over 19 million people. Tus the scope of the task of finding common ground and shaping a clear course for such an unwieldy group has been undertaken by RPA with remarkable success. RPA’s influence and its guidance in good and bad times make it the glue that hold Greater New York together. Other metropolitan areas have undertaken similar mission but all with government organized or sponsored institutions as the base entity. In this respect Greater New York with RPA is an outlier with no peers. So, as RPA commenced the process of developing its Fourth Plan, the latest since 19--, the leadership of the organization, the Board and senior staff wanted to know who was doing what in regional governance around the world. As a Board member and international development specialist, I was keen to examine this issue personally. Without boring readers, we quickly dismissed the usual comparative analysis of similar agencies. First, there are no similar agencies and second, who cares? What we did need to know is how complex metropolitan 8 Innovations and Collaboration global city-region governance organizations solve complex problems in messy, confused, uncoordinated and non-governed globally relevant situations. This became my task to find such places and problems and divine some lessons useful for the Fourth Plan. Of course, I had to do this with almost no budget. We did get a bit of support from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy1. Initially, we proposed to do real global field work. That idea died in the first week. We looked at many alternatives and finally settled on the approach in this monograph which is a combination of locals providing data and information from which we wrote and re-wrote drafts until we crafted a coherent narrative. While this approach had financial advantages is lacked any ability to work within a time budget or develop uniform data sets which one does when there is a comparative analytical framework based on the ability to collect and refine field data. This is a compromise. We hesitated to have the usual edited book since the writers controlled the problem and output. We wanted certain information based on field problems that might inform the New York regional planning effort. So, we commandeered friends and colleagues to help us delve into the problems described here. Alas, since we had a number of issues and different means of attack, we were unable to create the clean template that we aspired to create. Moreover, it took more than two years post writing to gain the approvals to turn this work into a book-like monograph. We admit to the flaws and the lack of timeliness. What is worse as time marches on the setting in which these issues were attacked in the host nations have had dramatic and sometime cataclysmic transformation. For example, Brazil and Nigeria looked like they were on a solid path to enlightened futures when we were developing and writing this work. Both these nations have fallen into dark holes. No one knows if and how they will emerge. But, we thought all this work had to be put on the record. Where we can we provide updates but the past conditions forged the problems and the paths to solution. One can say is this too little and too late. We think not, the global problems are global in type and universal in application. We used some of this data in forging the New York Regional Fourth Plan. So, the approaches have currency. It is a record and an investigative set of tools we think stand the test of time. 9 Edward J Blakely and Laura Crommelin, Managing Editors Introduction: Making the Case The notion of regionalism is not new. “Region” may be a current buzzword in urban geography, planning, public administration, and public policy, but regions are scarcely new ideas. Well before cities were a dominant form of jurisdictional organization, regional states were common throughout the Western world. For example, the Roman Empire was subdivided into regions that were bounded by mountains or rivers or other physical barriers within which the people usually spoke a common idiom. Nation-states only emerged clearly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with several, like Italy in the twentieth century, as amalgams of regions led by a single head, king, or religious patriarch. So the longer-standing conceptual base of geopolitical organization is not the nation-state but the regional state. More recently, in the early twentieth century, the progressive political movement championed regionalism over small composites of fragmented localism in the United States. New York City was formed from smaller towns into boroughs that continue with their old names, for example, Brooklyn Heights, but are now solidly under one political aegis.2 Later, an entire literature grew on public sector agglomerative efficiencies based on the work