Concentration and Mobility of Knowledge Workers: An Intercity Analysis of Sydney,Melbourne, and Brisbane

This study investigates the knowledge capacity and the competitive relationship between cities in contemporary globalization. Drawing upon the global city thesis regarding advanced producer services and the city network model, this study measures the concentration and mobility of knowledge workers between three Australian global cities: Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. It argues that knowledge workers are important agents in the making of urban knowledge space and intercity knowledge flow. It finds that Sydney's dominance in the Australian urban system has been strengthened despite challenges from Melbourne and Brisbane in certain knowledge sectors. The findings ascertain the linkage between the ranking of a global city and its knowledge capacity. They provide new insights into the current debates on Australian global cities and suggest possible new directions for global city aspirations, in the cases of Melbourne and Brisbane, in particular. Conceptually and methodologically, this study is an effort to bridge the global-city and the knowledge-city discourses, whose cross-fertilization suggests a potential need for new policy thinking.     

Is Bangkok becoming more resilient to flooding? A framing analysis of Bangkok's flood resilience policy combining insights from both insiders and outsiders

The rapidly urbanizing cities in Southeast Asia experience increasing flood impacts due to the consequences of climate change. In these cities, policy efforts to build flood resilience are gaining momentum. The aim of this paper is to understand and assess flood resilience policy development, particularly in cities in developing countries. Bangkok is one of the cities that participates in the 100 Resilient Cities Programme (100RC) - the international policy platform for building resilient cities. In 2017, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) launched the ‘Bangkok Resilience Strategy’ to translate the resilience concept to its urban context. A framing perspective is adopted to reconstruct the strategy, process and anticipated outcome of Bangkok's flood resilience policy. We studied data obtained from ‘insiders’ (involved policy makers, experts and consultants) and ‘outsiders’ (local communities, civil society organizations and news media). Findings indicate that the economic growth frame is prevailing in the development of Bangkok's flood resilience policy, prioritizing structural flood protection with little attention for flood adaptation measures and related social impacts among vulnerable communities. The role of local communities and civil society in the formulation of Bangkok's flood resilience policy is limited. This paper therefore recommends cities in developing countries and cities in the 100RC Programme to organize a more inclusive resilience building process for addressing social problems regarding urban poor communities along with increasing flood safety and protection.     

Capacities for urban transformations governance and the case of New York City

The narrative of urban sustainability transformations epitomises the hope that urban governance can create the conditions to plan and govern cities in a way that they contribute to local and global sustainability and resilience. So far, urban governance is not delivering: novel governance approaches are emerging in cities worldwide, yet are unable to transform conventional policymaking and planning to allow for innovative, co-beneficial and long-term solutions and actions to emerge and institutionalise. We present a capacities framework for urban transformations governance, starting from the need to fulfil distinct output functions (‘what needs to happen’) for mobilising and influencing urban transformation dynamics. The framework helps to diagnose and inform urban governance for responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path-dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in New York City exemplifies the framework's applicability and explanatory power to identify conditions and activities facilitating transformation (governance), and to reveal gaps and barriers of these vis-à-vis the existing governance regime. Our framework thereby functions as a tool to explore what new forms of urban transformation governance are emerging, how effective these are, and how to strengthen capacities.     

The use of urban climatology in local climate change strategies: a comparative perspective

This paper discusses the extent to which the science of urban climatology has informed local climate change strategies in four city case studies – Stuttgart, Tokyo, New York City, and Manchester. The paper draws on historical and contemporary policy documents along with 60 interviews with practitioners, city officials, politicians, and academics in order to understand the use or non-use of urban climatology science in local climate change strategies. It explores the historic successes and failures of urban climate management of the cities and how the impact of global climate change and perception of risk, local competency and capacity, national programmes, and the involvement of cities in networks influences the application, stabilization, and institutionalization of urban climatology into climate change strategies. It concludes by highlighting the high levels of variability present and potential reasons for local policy engagement or non-engagement in the use of urban climatology science.     

Building up resilience in cities worldwide – Rotterdam as participant in the 100 Resilient Cities Programme

Cities worldwide are challenged by a high complexity of acute and chronic problems, including challenges related to economic development, social polarisation and segregation as well as climate change and ecological degradation. While all of these problems are complex in themselves, they are also interrelated. Addressing them in a meaningful way requires governance systems with systemic capacities to deal with complexity. In order to create resilience in urban systems, cities need to be able to learn, adapt and transform across sectors and levels. One definition of urban resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow regardless of the kinds of chronic stress and acute shocks they experience. This is the definition the Rockefeller Foundation adopts in its mission to promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world by facilitating the building of resilience in cities worldwide through its 100 Resilient Cities Programme, launched in 2013. Rotterdam is one of the first cities to participate in this programme. The city has been a front-runner in preparing for climate change and striving for urban sustainability. This paper assesses the concept of urban resilience, introduces the Rockefeller Foundation's effort in building city resilience worldwide and illustrates this with the Rotterdam case.     

Smart green cities: from modernization to resilience?

It is possible to detect a shift in the way we think about environmental issues, in particular climate change, from what academics call ‘ecological modernization’ to what can be termed ‘resilient cities’. This is both a consequence and a cause of city regions emerging as the pragmatic scale of governance. This article will use a case study of Greater Manchester in the northwest of England to show how thinking on the environment was centred around ‘ecological modernization’ with an emphasis on business opportunities associated with a move to a low-carbon economy. It will argue that this approach has been enhanced by a new focus on resilience. The case study will use examples of the Ecocities project, green infrastructure and flood risk to show how a concern for resilience has emerged. It will then revisit the issue of energy to show how the new concerns have influenced the low-carbon strategy.     

Retrofitting cities: Local governance in Sydney,Australia

Transforming cities to a lower carbon future is one of the key challenges of contemporary urban governance. Retrofitting the city – or modifying existing urban infrastructures, buildings and daily life to suit different energy sources and different expectations of energy consumption – is essential to this transformation. In urban studies, little focus has yet been applied to the shape and character of urban governance frameworks and mechanisms required to successfully retrofit cities. In this paper we address this lacuna by exploring the logics, practices and dynamics of retrofitting governance in the Australian city. Using a governmentality perspective, the paper identifies the involvements of different scales of government in retrofitting policies and mechanisms and connections between them. Based on a unique survey of carbon reduction initiatives involving government, business and community actors across Australia’s capital cities, we outline the types of retrofitting solutions being proposed and enacted. Using a focus on local initiatives from Sydney, Australia’s largest city, the paper documents four key techniques through which retrofitting is being governed – self-governing, holistic, facilitative and educative. The findings suggest that governance gaps remain in attending to the daily life of technologies and the materiality of daily life.     

The emerging addition of resilience as a component of sustainability in urban policy

The concept of resilience is progressively capturing the interest of scholars and practitioners in the field of urban policy. This increase in interest is directed towards the need for a better understanding of the conditions for effective and legitimate governance in a complex, interconnected, and volatile world fraught with a new class of poorly understood systematic risk. We are progressively observing resilience as a component of sustainability as the dominant organising frame in the field of urban planning. The application of the adapted Wilkinson (2011) framework, which we situate within a broader framework for evaluating metropolitan plans (Nguyen, Davidson & Gleeson, 2018), reveals the extent to which newly released metropolitan plans are incorporating strategies for social-ecological resilience. Our point is to offer an early assessment of the framing of social-ecological resilience within the embedded understanding of metropolitan planning practice. Our research has revealed that social-ecological resilience thinking has been incorporated only to a limited extent into metropolitan planning strategies worldwide, as demonstrated through the evaluation of our two sites—OneNYC and Plan Melbourne. We have argued that OneNYC incorporates the strategies of social-ecological resilience to a greater extent than Plan Melbourne, possibly pointing to a strengthening governing system by incorporating processes of social learning and adaptation. We conclude by acknowledging the critical insights into the limitations of the reality of implementing these ideas of social-ecological resilience within policy settings (see Duit, 2016), and which requires urgent consideration within a fuller institutional study that must in any case await the fuller roll-out of social-ecological resilience in sustainability agendas within city strategic planning.     

Conceptualizing ‘the Urban’ Through the Lens of Durban,South Africa

Contemporary urban theory raises many questions about how ‘the urban’ is being conceptualized in a fast changing world that is approaching an urban epoch. Evolving debates about what it means to be urban, including the similarities and differences between so-called northern and southern cities, the future of cities, the way to manage and sustain cities, and cities’ relationships to the new Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, reveal the need for urban theory that can explain and provide insights into contemporary urban governance, processes, and outcomes. This special issue uses Durban as a lens to provide insight into the changing nature of cities in the Global South and Africa in particular, which encapsulate and reflect both formality and informality; tradition and modernity; uneven and unequal growth and social transformation; environmental crises and ‘resilience and sustainability’. This paper reflects on the dominant processes shaping the development of the city, revealing the challenges, tensions, and opportunities that emerge as the city assembles new ways of being urban, through the rationalities, knowledge, experiences, practices and actions of the state, citizens, and the private sector.     

Changing neighbourhood character in Melbourne: point Cook a case study

In the past two decades, Melbourne has been subjected to diverse pressures due to its changing scale and function within the global system of cities. Among many other features of the new phase in Melbourne’s urban transformation are its new suburbs which have proliferated in large numbers at the city’s urban fringe. Characteristic of these suburbs is a new urban character which has evolved as a by-product of a pre-defined and controlled mechanism in planning, design and implementation of housing developments. The objective of this paper is to investigate the process that determines the evolution of this new character; examining the role of local planning authorities and developers in shaping the built environment. Firstly, the paper discusses the definition of neighbourhood character and its interpretation among academics, policy makers, planners, urban designers, developers and real estate agents. Then in a three-step process the nature, quality and style of neighbourhood character in Point Cook are investigated through analysis of Council policies and through review of developer statements on character building and place-making. Lastly to understand how the idea of character is constructed and enacted by local residents of Point Cook, a survey was administered for the residents.     

Water governance and the quality of water services in the city of Melbourne

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) was reviewed in the city of Melbourne. Melbourne performs well and shows a good level of commitment to sustainable solutions. The city scores highly in areas such as water efficiency, wastewater efficiency, i.e., energy recovery, and climate change commitments related to heat and water scarcity. Nearly 30% of houses in Melbourne have installed rainwater tanks and plans to increase the use of stormwater have recently been published. Energy efficiency of buildings, nutrient recovery (especially phosphate) from wastewater, as well as sewage sludge recycling are topics for improvement. A transparent governance structure has been set up in a reaction to the ‘Millennium Drought’ and success has come from many organizations working together to a common goal. This is the secret of Melbourne’s success and can be used as an example for other cities in the world.     

SCALES,REGIMES, AND THE URBAN GOVERNANCE OF GLASGOW

ABSTRACT: Over the last two decades, urban regime theory has become one of the most dominant paradigms of thought in urban studies. In particular, regime theory offers a complex account of urban governance, or how local governments, the business communities, and community organizations gain the capacity to shape the policies that affect cities, that is, govern. Although regime theory is a dominant theory in urban studies, it does, nevertheless, have its share of detractors, and one criticism has been its failure to take into account geographical scale. While there is an acknowledgment in urban regime theory of wider economic processes, such as the broad transformations in international and national trade, investment, finance, etc., or the role played by federal or state governments, the bias has remained mostly local, particularly in regards to urban governance. In urban regime theory literature the policies and actions of international and national institutions either nicely conjoin with local interests or are nearly totally absent. Due to this oversight, urban regime theory tends to underemphasize how the capacity to govern a city effectively is sometimes the result of the interaction of actions of people at multiple scales. This article attempts to address this oversight in an analysis of Glasgow, Scotland, during the 1980s. By focusing on the role of the European City of Culture in the revitalization of the city, this article demonstrates how the capacity for a ruling coalition to transform the city and to govern effectively was the consequence of the policy and administrative actions undertaken at other geographical scales.     

Fukuoka: Adapting to climate change through urban green space and the built environment?

This paper profiles Fukuoka City in Kyushu, Japan. We focus on the city's local climate change adaptation policies, and in particular the role of urban and greenspace planning in facilitating adaptation actions within Fukuoka. Fukuoka is a humid subtropical city which is currently experiencing significant population and economic growth. It has also made comparatively rigorous advances in climate adaptation, in a country context where local governments have been criticised for focusing more on mitigation. Fukuoka hence may yield lessons for other rapidly urbanising subtropical Asian cities. We illustrate that Fukuoka has a long tradition of science-policy connection towards the creation of a liveable urban environment. This creates a favourable research and policy infrastructure for adaptation, in particular mitigation of heat risk. This is evidenced in consideration of climate issues within the city's greenspace plans since the 1990s, and in an extensive body of underpinning applied research from local institutions into urban thermal environments in particular. Fukuoka's green terraced ACROS building has come to symbolise adaptation via the built environment, and has been followed by the emergence of further green roofs and through citizen and private sector involvement in smaller-scale greening actions. We caution that challenges remain around connecting different sections of local governments, and in maintaining climate and environmental imperatives in the face of ongoing development and expansion pressures.     

Improving city-scale measures of livable sustainability: A study of urban measurement and assessment through application to the city of Birmingham,UK

Despite the attention sustainability-related urban measurement and assessment methods have received it is still not well understood how accurate (or not) the various methods are; their limitations in holistic city performance assessment; or, how they can be effectively used to better the design of the urban environment, city services and policies. Necessarily, urban measurement and assessment methods focus upon what is known. However, reflecting upon the unknowns and their impacts has the potential to deliver crucial insights into the assessment of city performance and governance. To this end, this study applies and critiques the city performance measurement and assessment method UK City LIFE₁ in order to explore the challenges of, and prospects for, filling these gaps. UK City LIFE₁ is designed to measure ‘livable sustainability’ at the city scale for the purpose of aiding UK policy makers and urban design decisionmakers. Results suggest that definitional uncertainties, the availability and viability of data, and the design of the method introduce inaccuracy, uncertainty and bias into data interpretation. This, combined with the complexity of city systems and the nascent ‘science of cities’, prevents causal effects from being fully described, potentially rendering decision-makers impotent. However, the language of ‘realizing the multiple benefits of interventions’ and ‘coupling and uncoupling relationships’ alongside making the unknown explicit has the potential to empower decisionmakers in the face of absent and disconnected data and interpretational challenges.     

The aesthetics of city‐scale preservation policy in Beijing

Chinese cities today represent a historically important case of the relation between city‐scale preservation policy and urban design, and the role they play in the rapid transformation of urban environments. This article reviews Beijing’s preservation and urban design policies as they existed in 1990, and as they evolved and responded over the following fifteen years of radical change. Beijing’s master plan in the 1990s ambitiously attempted to define the preservation‐worthy image of the entire old city, but did so in narrowly picturesque terms. The practice of ‘protecting’ designated historic structures by clearing the space around them, and the dependence on a totalizing view‐from‐on‐high to define Beijing’s overall characteristic form (as opposed to an experience of the city from its myriad public and private spaces), produced a city‐wide preservation policy that was particularly handicapped in its ability to accommodate change.     

西方城市网络研究进展和应用实践

1970年代以来的社会经济变革推动着西方城市网络思想的发展。由于城市地位的提升,"流动空间"对"地方空间"的取代以及网络社会的崛起与城市间关系的发展,在理论界产生了一系列的"网络范式"转型,推动着城市研究与规划政策的持续发展,包括城市区域空间组织方式从中心地范式向"城市网络"范式的转变,城市体系组织原则由等级原则向网络原则的演变,以及城市空间形态从单中心模型向多中心模型乃至网络城市模型的演进等,而这些城市发展实践与城市空间组织思想的变革带来了西方城市网络研究的蓬勃发展。作为一种重要的空间组织形式,"城市网络"在西方国家(尤其是欧洲国家)的空间规划中获得广泛的应用,主导着区域空间政策的发展。本文在详细剖析城市网络发展的现实和理论背景的基础上,重点介绍了城市网络的内涵、构成、特征及类型等内容,并对西方城市网络研究中的理论进展、规划应用和治理策略进行了评述,以资我国城市群体空间研究借鉴和探讨。     

The Smart City as Global Discourse: Storylines and Critical Junctures across 27 Cities

Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for “smart city.” Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, first, the presence of a strong globalizing narrative which emphasizes world cities as “best practice” models. Second, they reveal the smart city’s association—beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes—with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy, and practice.     

美国和欧盟高等级中心城市发展规律及其启示

对美国和欧盟的高等级中心城市的发展规律和经验开展了系统研究,发现美国和欧盟的高等级中心城市呈现显著的多中心分布格局,功能分工高度扁平化,面向全球、国际和国家各层级的城市体系完备等规律和特征。基于美国和欧盟经验,研究认为应从国家公共治理角度,对国家中心城市的政策内涵进行重新认识,突出国家中心城市的政策内涵和战略意图,将国家中心城市作为贯彻落实国家发展战略的重要平台和战略支点。应立足长远战略视野,循序渐进培育一大批扁平化功能分工的高等级国家中心城市,代表中国参与国际竞争、支撑国家整体长远发展。同时应深入明确和落实国家中心城市的战略职责和发展建设要求,确保国家战略意图、战略目标、战略任务得到有效贯彻和落实。     

基于边缘城市理论的产业园区规划策略研究——以中国-泰国崇左产业园为例

边缘城市是美国郊区化的产物,产业园区是我国拉动经济和拓展城市空间最重要的载体,两者都是新形势下城市发展演进过程中最引人注目的现象。通过对美国边缘城市的现象观察及其与我国产业园区的比较研究,从城市、区域、网络三视角,提出产城融合化、功能复合化、环境品质化、城镇体系化、数字智慧化等基于边缘城市理论的产业园区规划策略,并以中国-泰国崇左产业园规划进行了实证研究,将边缘城市理论运用于城乡规划实践。同时,立足"边缘城市=边缘+城市"解构,提出边缘城市的核心在于"城市"——立足职住平衡的城市功能中心化;活力在于"边缘"——立足网络协同的多中心城市区域形态格局建构,并指出边缘城市依托规模互借协同效应,促进城市形态沿单中心-多中心-城市群演替、空间结构沿等级化-(扁平化)网络化-一体化演化,已成为城市区域走向多中心网络一体化协同发展的新兴生长点或战略性支点。     

Uganda’s Emerging Urban Policy Environment: Implications for Urban Food Security and Urban Migrants

In recognition of the challenges posed by Uganda’s rapid urbanization, the national government is in the process of developing a Uganda national urban policy (UNUP). The government is also preparing a “stringent” new national migration policy. Up to now, Uganda’s policy environment has ignored the urban dimensions of poverty and the food insecurity that accompanies it. Migration, an important driver of both urban poverty and urban food insecurity, has been poorly understood, and only international migration has been addressed. This paper explores the urban policy environment and the multilevel governance policy process in Uganda, in order to understand not only how new policies are being shaped by the government’s political priorities in the face of its weakening popular legitimacy and growing signs of urban discontent but also what potential entry points exist to influence policy making in Uganda in ways that might better support the needs of the nation’s growing numbers of urban food insecure, among them are internally displaced Ugandans.