The Challenge Of Urban Government

Cities and towns are vital for the development of economic systems and social organisations. However, cities face tremendous challenges. They have to simultaneously attract business, provide a good livelihood for their inhabitants, generate enough resources to finance infrastructure and social needs, and take care of their poor. The Challenge of Urban Government: Policies and Practices looks at the consequences of globalisation on city management. This book focuses on the complex of issues generated in urban areas, such as the dynamics of metropolitan spaces, and the need to define strategic territory for operational and policy purposes. Some urgent challenges include how to handle spillovers across municipalities and the need to create a new city structure over an existing city to give the suburbs some elements of centrality. It examines the dynamics of governance and how to get stakeholders' participation in the government process.

Over the next 20 years, most low-income countries will, for the first time, become more urban than rural. Understanding demographic trends in the cities of the developing world is critical to those countries - their societies, economies, and environments. The benefits from urbanization cannot be overlooked, but the speed and sheer scale of this transformation presents many challenges. In this uniquely thorough and authoritative volume, 16 of the world's leading scholars on urban population and development have worked together to produce the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the changes taking place in cities and their implications and impacts. They focus on population dynamics, social and economic differentiation, fertility and reproductive health, mortality and morbidity, labor force, and urban governance. As many national governments decentralize and devolve their functions, the nature of urban management and governance is undergoing fundamental transformation, with programs in poverty alleviation, health, education, and public services increasingly being deposited in the hands of untested municipal and regional governments. Cities Transformed identifies a new class of policy maker emerging to take up the growing responsibilities. Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, this essential text will become the benchmark for all involved in city-level research, policy, planning, and investment decisions. The National Research Council is a private, non-profit institution based in Washington, DC, providing services to the US government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The editors are members of the Council's Panel on Urban Population Dynamics.

This book explores the process of urbanization and the profound challenges to China’s urban governance. Economic productivity continues to rise, with increasingly uneven distribution of prosperity and accumulation of wealth. The emergence of individual autonomy including demands for more freedom and participation in the governing process has asked for a change of the traditional top-down control system. The vertical devolution between the central and local states and horizontal competition among local governments produced an uneasy political dynamics in Chinese cities. Many existing publications analyze the urban transformation in China but few focuses on the governance challenges. It is critical to investigate China’s urbanization, paying special attention to its challenges to urban governance. This edited volume fills this gap by organizing ten chapters of distinctive urban development and governance issues.

This wide-ranging study of three European cities shows how hybrid forms of governance emerge from the tensions between new ideas and past legacies, and existing institutional arrangements and powerful decision makers. Using detailed studies of migration and neighborhood policy, as well as a novel Q methodology analysis of public administrators.

This book discusses the role of urban information systems, public private and community partnerships and co-operation between governmental, NGOs and CBOs, and a concern for participation and self-organization of stakeholders in the urban development process and attention for emerging institutional forms for urban governance in developing countries.

In 1911 one of every three Canadians lived in urban areas; today three out of four do. This growth has raised serious issues in urban government: How should power and authority be distributed among differing, often competing, urban interests? How can municipal governments obtain the funds they need to satisfy the increased demand for community and social services? How much should citizens participate? At a conference held in Banff on alternate forms of urban government, academics and practitioners considered these, and other pressing urban problems. Problems of change in urban government, presents the results of the conference, along with other, related essays. The contributors are Lloyd Axworthy, Meyer Brownstone, Stephen Clarkson, J.A. Johnson, James Lorimer, Allan O’Brien, T.J. Plunkett, Louise Quesnel-Ouellet, Paul Tennant, and the volume editors.

The book explores and discusses some of the changes, challenges and opportunities confronting local governance in the context of the new urban paradigm associated with the HABITAT III New Urban Agenda, a 20-year strategy for sustainable urbanization, adopted in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador. The chapters included in the book address public policy issues from different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, written by authors from different academic disciplines within the broad area of social sciences (Geography, Political Science, Public Administration, Spatial Planning, Law, Regional Science, among other fields), and offer an inter-disciplinary vision of these issues. The chapters are written by members of the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Geography of Governance.