To be successful, cities must attract
investment. To attract investment cities must attract talent. To attract
talent, cities must offer a desirable quality of life for a broad range of
needs. All this must be done while introducing resilience and ruggedness to
city systems in the face of environmental stresses, particularly climate
change.
This post explores the links between
competitiveness, liveability, resilience and design in the built environment.
Many urban analysts are focusing on
competitiveness as a defining characteristic of successful future cities....
Yet what makes a city competitive is a complex question - economic activity,
culture, infrastructure or natural assets?
While the considerations are wide and
varied, perhaps its ability to attract investment is a useful indicator, which
leads to an interesting quote from Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York:
“I’ve always believed that
talent attracts capital more
effectively and consistently than capital attracts talent.”
So if the ability to attract
investment is directly linked to the ability of a city to attract those
globally mobile knowledge workers, who represent Richard Florida's 'creative
class' elite, then framing cities in terms of securing talent provides a new
perspective on design and policy priorities.
It means that to be competitive, a
city must be attractive, desirable and liveable.
The issues become even more
challenging when considered in the context of climate change and resource scarcity
- summed up by urbanist Alex Steffen's tweet:
"The greater your community's structural
demands for energy and materials (off-site or off-shore), the greater its
vulnerability."
So future competitiveness expands to
include resilience and self-sufficiency to some degree. These social,
environmental and economic considerations make planning for competitiveness a
tricky task - identifying leverage points which achieve outcomes aligned with
all three must be a priority for cities with global aspirations.
One of the challenges in
conceptualising cities is their complexity. However cities are not the first
(and certainly not the last) complex system to attract the attention of
designers and analysts. Indeed, economists have built an entire field of study
around models for considering complexity. The Economist Intelligence Unit - the
consulting business associated with The Economist magazine - has developed a
number of indices for assessing cities:
- Hot Spots - The Competitive Cities
Index (for Citigroup)
- The Green Cities Index (for
Siemens)
- The Liveable Cities Index
The ranking of cities on these
indices has attracted a fair amount of press and tapped into the competition
for global recognition (itself a measure of competitiveness). However, more so
than the results, the metrics for these indices offer some insight into the
leverage points for cities to become more competitive.
And perhaps more importantly, it
provides some insight into the factors in the immediate control of city
authorities that could make it more competitive?
Looking at the index metrics more
closely, the majority relate to external or institutional factors or issues of
national policy - all of which are challenging to address with short-term
actions. Issues such as economic strength, global appeal, stability, culture
and health and education sector strength are critical, but often beyond the
capacity of city decision-makers to support directly.
However, beyond the broad
institutional criteria, the largest area of overlap between all three indices
is the built environment. Physical capital and resilience to natural hazards
contribute 25% of the competitive cities index, physical infrastructure
contributes 20% of the liveable cities index and six of the seven of the green
cities index criteria relate directly to the built environment (carbon
emissions, energy, buildings, transport, air quality, water and land use). The
physical fabric of the city is also directly within the sphere of influence of
metropolitan authorities and so should represent a cornerstone to city
strategy.
My experience of design in the built
environment is that often projects - even big projects - forge ahead with
little recognition to the broader city context. The thought process appears to
be:
"we'll focus on being a commercial success
first, and then use the money from that to make the spaces between buildings
somewhat better or make allowance from investment in some discrete piece of
public infrastructure".
We go forward as though the financial
performance gives us licence to invest in social infrastructure, not
understanding that the social (and by extent environmental) infrastructure is
what makes cities desirable in the first place.
Concluding this post, I urge city
authorities and precinct developers to consider the patterns of liveability,
competitiveness and sustainability when considering strategies for improving
investment in their city.
They may realise that they have more
agency to contribute to all three than they thought: next generation
infrastructure and a smart built environment have greater potential to address
these issues in an integrated fashion an any other area of policy or public
investment.