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How to capture public life in public spaces?

Urbanization and economic growth go hand in hand. Cities are turning into centers of attraction in developing countries and their population is rising constantly. In such cities, we often see in a city a mix of old and new, slow and fast: Street vendors hawking their wares by luxury shopping malls; highways segmentizing parks and walkways; high-rise crowding out traditional neighborhoods, etc. However, we do not often see a well-balanced mix that serves all urban dwellers with a wide array of needs, economically and socially.

As UN-Habitat’s Charter of Public Space states, public spaces are a key element of individual and social well-being, the places of a community’s collective life, particularly in situations of poverty and limited public resources, such as those in the developing countries. The Charter also highlights that participation of citizens and in particular of communities of residents is of crucial importance for the maintenance and management of public spaces. While there might be no objection to this statement, it is also true that it has been easily overlooked, especially in developing countries, for the sake of “economic efficiency.”

How to manage urban expansion in mega-metropolitan areas?

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, the number of megacities is growing rapidly.

Today there are 37 cities worldwide with populations of greater than 10 million, and 84 with populations greater than five million. More than three quarters of these cities are in developing countries. Together with their surrounding metropolitan areas, these cities produce a sizable portion of the world’s wealth and attract a large share of global talent.

These megacities face a series of common challenges associated with managing urban expansion, density, and livability—in a manner that takes advantage of the benefits of productive agglomerations, while mitigating the disadvantages of such high degrees of congestion and urban density.

Moreover, like other metropolitan areas, megacities face challenges of effectively coordinated planning, infrastructure development, and service delivery across multiple jurisdictions. Indeed, the New Urban Agenda issued at the Habitat III conference in 2016 identified metropolitan planning and management as one of the most critical needs to ensure sustainable urbanization.

Transforming urban waterfronts

HafenCity, Hamburg. Photo Credit: ELBE&FLUT / Thomas Hampel at http://www.hafencity.com — HafenCity, Hamburg.
*Photo Credit: ELBE&FLUT / Thomas Hampel at* *http://www.hafencity.com*

“The waterfront isn’t just something unto itself. It’s connected to everything else,” said Jane Jacobs, a prominent urbanist.

This connection is twofold; it refers to the relationship between cities and their waterfronts – as ever-changing as cities themselves.

Evolving from its past definition during the industrial era as a city’s service yard, the urban waterfront has, in recent decades, taken on new meanings.

On one hand, of a city or even reshaping a city’s identity.

On the other hand, successful urban waterfronts have also demonstrated how city resources – such as available land, cleaner water, historic preservation, and urban revitalization – can be unlocked and realized, and how these elements can be integrated into the city and public life.

[Read: Regenerating Urban Land: A Practitioner's Guide to Leveraging Private Investment]

How to effectively manage metropolitan areas?

Today, a quarter of the world’s population lives in urban “agglomerations”—supersized metropolitan areas that cut across jurisdictional boundaries and bring together one or more cities along with their surrounding areas.

These metropolitan areas face a common challenge: effectively coordinating planning, infrastructure development, and service delivery across multiple jurisdictions. This is particularly difficult in developing countries, which often lack the necessary legal, institutional, and governance apparatus to undertake such coordination. The New Urban Agenda issued by the Habitat III conference in 2016 identified

Fortunately, To help spread existing good practice and co-create new solutions, the World Bank has been supporting a community of practice (CoP) on metropolitan governance, or MetroLab, which brings together officials from metropolitan areas in both developing and developed countries for peer-peer knowledge and experience sharing. Since its launch in 2013, MetroLab has held eight meetings in various cities, including Bangkok, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Seoul.

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The most recent meeting took place in Tokyo from January 30 through February 2. Organized by the World Bank’s Tokyo Development Learning Center, the Tokyo MetroLab brought together mayors, city planners, and finance officials from nine developing cities. They were joined by experts from the World Bank, New York’s Regional Plan Association, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and Advancity—Paris’ Smart Metropolis Hub.

In this video, Lydia Sackey-Addy, one of the participating officials from Accra, Ghana, as well as the World Bank’s Senior Director Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez (@Ede_WBG) and Lead Urban Economist Maria Angelica Sotomayor (@masotomayor) tell us how they are working together to make the Accra metropolitan area more resilient and sustainable for its residents.

Postcards from Quito on the New Urban Agenda

Also available in: Español

Photos: World Bank

More than two months have passed since the whirlwind that was Habitat III, the UN’s once-every-20-year summit on cities and urban development. From big data to climate change, public spaces to municipal finance, the conference truly seemed to have something for everyone. Long queues to enter the conference aside, what was striking was also the sheer number of young participants at the event, many of whom were students, planners and architects from Quito.

We asked visitors to the World Bank’s booth at the Habitat III exhibition to tell us, by writing on postcards, what they thought was needed to create sustainable cities for all. Of the more than 200 postcards received, several recurring themes were clear:

Postcards from Quito on the New Urban Agenda (World Bank Group)

Postcards from Quito on the New Urban Agenda (World Bank Group)

The “human scale” in public urban areas

Slideshow: Reimagining a park, a river, and other public spaces in Seoul (Photos by Judy Zheng Jia / World Bank)

, Executive Director of the UN-HABITAT at the Habitat III Conference last month. But more than being "ugly," the lack of good public urban spaces, such as open spaces, parks, and public buildings, often contribute to low livability in many of the world's congested and polluted cities. In fact, the importance of the issue received recognition in SDG 11, Target 7, which calls for the provision of “universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green, and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons, and persons with disabilities,” by 2030.

Global experience shows that disconnected, social mixing, civic participation, recreation, safety, and a sense of belonging, ultimately contributing to urban prosperity. Well-designed and well-managed public spaces also offer benefits to environmental sustainability, transport efficiency, and public health improvements, and can equally serve women, the disabled, and people of all ages.

The importance of good urban spaces was the topic of an international workshop—“Vitalizing Cities with Public Space”—held in Seoul on November 14-17, 2016 and co-hosted by the Korea Research Institute of Human Settlements and the World Bank’s Urbanscapes Group. Eight cities from around the world—Seoul, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Chongqing, Kakamega, Zanzibar, Astana, and Tashkent—participated to discuss challenges and opportunities for better urban planning and design.

In Search of India’s Smart Cities

“Smart city” has become a buzzword in India ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined his vision for creating a series (a hundred, to be exact) of them. Since then, there have been many debates to unpack, understand and define the smart city. “Smart cities” joins the long list of many other often overused city descriptors such as “creative cities”, “sustainable cities”, “eco-cities”, “resilient cities” and “livable cities”.

Seoul Goes Local in Development

A recent EASIN Urban, Transport and DRM Community of Practice (CoP) meeting I attended in Seoul, South Korea was an eye opener in terms of the rapid urban development of the city of Seoul. Considered an East Asian tiger, manufacturing and an export-led economy have made Seoul a global city with neon skylines and the new focus of Asia’s technology boom. A presentation by Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG), the agency responsible for the city’s urban planning, describes the city as a ‘strategic space for people to reside in since ancient times’. Nevertheless, the city and its urban identity have gone through various transformations – through the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) to restoration after the Korean war (1950-53) to industrialization (1960s-1970s) to development and globalization. In SMG’s words, Seoul is witnessing the ‘environmental and historical awakening as a world city’. Evidence of this was seen in sites I visited to the restored Cheonggyecheon stream and a former landfill converted to Haneul Park.

Homework from the Seoul G-20: Measuring Skills

The Seoul G20 summit in November ended with some homework for the World Bank. We were asked to work with the ILO, OECD and UNESCO to develop internationally comparable indicators of skills that can help countries in their efforts to better match education and job training to market needs. The G20 was right to make this a priority.

In this post-financial crisis period, jobs play an important role in recovery. Making sure that people have the right skills to get these jobs is the other side. Developing countries, especially, know that skills development is necessary if they are going to attract investment that will create decent jobs and raise productivity.

Getting to the Seoul of the Matter: Moving beyond currency disputes

Photo: www.istockphoto.com

(Also available in Spanish)

Many observers predict that this week’s G-20 Summit in Seoul will be remembered mainly as a dance of high diplomacy aimed at persuading members to refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies and to reign in excessive current account imbalances.

If most headlines from Seoul are about spats over currencies and whose deficit or surplus is most harmful, then leaders will have missed the Seoul of the Matter.

Indeed, such an outcome would be a setback for developing countries and could potentially erode the legitimacy of the G-20 as an inclusive broker of financial and economic cooperation in the global economy.

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