Seoul Metropolitan Government is motivated to share the city’s urban development experience with the global community.  SMG and the World Bank would like to invite you and your senior/technical staff members to participate in the C4D to discuss urban challenges of metropolitan cities and to seek solutions with global experts including the World Bank staff and experts from Seoul city.   The Global Lab on Metropolitan Strategic Planning: Seoul Global Exchange  will take place from April 28-May 1.

Click the link below to  acces to the webinar page and then please register on link on the right

Grant Financing of Metropolitan Areas: A Review of Principles and Worldwide Practices | e-Institute

DESCRIPTION

As part of the Global Lab on Metropolitan Strategic Planning
this webinar examines grant-financing regimes faced by metropolitan areas.
Specifically, it examines their role in facilitating or hindering improvements
in economic and social outcomes of residents of metropolitan areas. A review of
42 large metropolitan areas worldwide shows that, with a few notable exceptions,
metropolitan areas in general are hamstrung from playing their potential role in
economic advancement. Metro areas have large economic bases and therefore little
a priori needs for grant financing, yet they have strong dependence on central
transfers. This is because of the highly constrained fiscal autonomy given to
these areas, especially in developing countries, with the singular exception of
metro areas in China. Such a strong reliance on transfers undermines local
autonomy and local accountability.
The presentation proposes that results
based grant financing of social and transportation services and tournament based
approaches to encourage inter-jurisdictional competition need to be given
serious consideration to ensure metropolitan autonomy while strengthening
citizen based accountability.

About the
speaker:
Anwar Shah (Ph.D. economics) is Director of the Centre
for Public Economics,SWUFE, Chengdu/Wenjiang, China and non-resident senior
fellow at Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA. He also serves as an
advisor/consultant to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank . He has
previously served the World Bank, Ministry of Finance, Government of Canada, the
Government of Alberta, the US Agency for International Development and the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He has published more than two
dozen books and numerous articles in leading economics and public economics
journals on governance, federalism, local governance, fiscal reforms and global
climate change issues. His recent books include Fiscal Federalism (with Robin
Boadway), by the Cambridge University Press, The Practice of Fiscal Federalism:
Comparative Perspectives, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Local
Governance in Developing Countriesand Performance Accountability and Combating
Corruption by the World Bank.

I found the following article on innovative development financing at McKinsey & Company interesting given our discussions about metropolitan financing and governance:

Innovative development financing | McKinsey & Company

The article notes that "Four ideas rose to the top when we screened our list based on the size of the opportunity (for example, the ability to unlock a meaningful level of additional financing or to meaningfully engage multiple actors), the technical feasibility of implementation within a short- to medium-term time frame, the potential to gain significant political momentum, and the existence of a clear and compelling role for government: unlocking value from diaspora flows, stimulating private-capital flows, encouraging private voluntary contributions through matching funds, and tackling sector-specific inefficiencies."

What do you think about these ideas? Do you think they can be used for metropolitan planning?

Best, Nicolas

Colleages:

Over the years many of us have seen and even used  Alain Bertaud's iconic graphic comparing Atlanta and Barcelona. The graphic is a
powerful visual image exemplifying  the high cost  of inefficient urban  land use.

Technology is catching up to the genius urbanists such as  Richard Wurman (founder of TED talks) and Alain's mindset.  Indeed, Richard Wurman and a team from ESRI  and Radical Media have developed an exciting new application  http://www.urbanobservatory.org/compare/index.html 

Initially with data for 16 cities you can prepare your own side by side  spatial comparisons of key urban characteristics. Among the cities include

Abu Dhavi,  Auckland, Chicago, Delhi, Hamburg, Jo'burg, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam Singapore and Tokyo. 

For more details please see the article in http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682536/the-urban-observatory-a-new-way-to-compare-cities-from-the-creator-of-ted#5

Stay tuned for exciting news from the World Bank with respect to  mapping urban expansion and the implications to make a compelling case for resource efficient metropolitan urban growth.  Within the World Bank the East Asia Pacific infrastrucure group is working on graphic display of  urban expansion in 1,500 cities and South Asia is also undertaking exciting  spatial analysis of urban growth.

I wanted to share the draft Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney that sets out a new plan for the city's future over the next two decades.

You can find the main page for the plan here: Planning & Infrastructure NSW > Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney

I find the video in that page very interesting as it discusses key issues in metropolitan planning:

• Participation and plan making;
• Housing and population growth;
• Transport and infrastructure;
• Cities within a region;
• Parks and waterfronts;

What do you think about the plan? A PDF file of the draft plan summary is here:

http://strategies.planning.nsw.gov.au/Portals/0/Documents/MetroCommunityGuide.pdf

I wanted to share a book review I recently published on a book on international community development and neighborhood planning. The book review of "Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights and Responsibilities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 344 pages." is attached to this post. Here is a short summary:

Economic development projects seem to be inevitably stuck between project proponents and the communities displaced by them. Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights and Responsibilities lays out this impasse between pro- and anti-development positions, and works diligently to frame a common ground to overcome it. As a first step, the book defines what the opposing positions argue. The pro-development or managerial perspective tends to adopt an interventionist conception of development “aiming to improve living conditions and ameliorate harmful consequences of economic processes” (p. 15). The antidevelopment or movementist perspective is “inclined to regard development as an invasive and harmful process that calls for all-out resistance” (pp. 15–16). As experience confirms, these diverging conceptions of development result in an all-too-common polarization between proponents and detractors of projects.

I wonder what do others think about this issue of displacement and development and the "development ethics" framework it uses.

Kigali MetroLab 2016 (From 25th to 28th May 2016)