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Discussion Paper Series - No. 9
Research Director
CNRS - PIR Villes
Urban innovation : towards new regulation modes of local public actions
The procedures question should not be separated from those of the actions' objectives To reconcile the different scales of urban development : long and short temporalities ; local democracy and internationalization
Governance and partnership construction
Partnerships between local communities
Local authorities and companies : the market and politics Cities and citizens
Towards an innovation observatory : the Urban Observatory of Innovative Partnership Practices
After the "planet Earth" summit of Rio in June 1992, thanks to which questions such as durable development and relationships between local development and environment now come within the scope of world politics, after the social summit of Copenhagen in March 1995 which underlined the necessity of fighting against poverty and the risk of desintegration of the social fabric, after the women's summit in Beijing in September 1995, the "Cities' summit", which will take place in Istanbul in June 1996, puts the City at the centre of the debate on international cooperation.
The cities' policies and the role of local authorities are questions which arise at a time when new world geopolitics, including cities as new world players, is forming. Cities are places where the greatest wealth, but also the greatest poverty of the world concentrates. They are places of cultural and social integration, but also of social fractures, marginalization, exclusion and even - paradoxically - isolation. They are also the privileged field of social and political innovation and the field of a new reflection on the norms and practices of local public actions of tomorrow.
It is now an acknowledged fact that new urban governing modes are more and more characterized by the development of partnerships. These partnerships deserve to be better identified, particularly those working towards urban innovation, and it would be in the interest of the cities' representatives to benefit from the others' experiences. It is precisely the purpose of the meeting of Nantes-Ecopolis, which will contribute to implement, on a world scale, good networks where local, thematic or regional experiences can be exchanged, in the prospect of Habitat II at Istanbul.
In the 1980's, the development of "strategic town planning" (J. Borja. 1992) corresponded to the concern of implementing new principles of regulation for public actions in the field of urban development. This pragmatic step confirms the states' small capacity in leading a voluntary development and their will to mobilize less national public capital in the field of urban planning. Unlike normative and centralized town planning, strategic town planning is based on a plurality of players and proposes to create mediations, mobilize social players and allow compromises between diverging interests. It is a matter of creating favourable exchange situations according to an operating consensus, of creating a deliberation process between public and private sectors, of appreciating the economic potentialities of each situation. Strategic town planning aims at being iterative and based on interactions, as players continuously refine the problems. Pragmatic rationality is a dominant feature of the strategic approach. It relies on the finalization of negotiation procedures (G. Ascher. 1995).
Strategic town planning is an empirical way of piloting cities which is well adapted to the management of complex situations. But it cannot replace the continuing of reflection on urban innovation. Numerous questions are still unanswered. Two of them deserve to be particularly underlined.
Raising the question of innovation precisely implies not to separate the question of procedures from the question of objectives. It also demands that we question ourselves about the new compromises which have to be made between the different objectives of the public actions undertaken within the framework of partnerships : these objectives being economic efficiency, the demands of social justice and solidarity, the necessary ecological caution and the durable development, the expression of citizenship, and the well-being of city dwellers (I. Sachs. 1993). Raising the question of innovation therefore implies to rethink the place of politics, that is to say the place from where it is possible to arbitrate between public actions' objectives.
Social innovation can finally be defined by its capacity to introduce new types of regulation. This capacity can be evaluated in the following three fields :
Another problem is to be able to reconcile the following two different ways of thinking out collective actions : to manage the processes and to look towards the future (act of faith in the future which consists in not dealing only with management) or, in other words, "the immanence of daily action and the transcendence of the final objective" or strategic approaches following a logic of immediate negotiation and decision-making and approaches integrating the long-term dimension of urban development 1. In other terms, how to take into account the improbability of complex systems in developing process management and, at the same time, try to make the future more comprehensible by developing motivating utopias ?
Cities do not constitute local entities which would oppose to planetary ones : they constitute internationalized realities, that is to say that their development is touched by the big currents of world economy. It has often and rightly been put forward that they have an important role in the spatial organization of the factors producing and managing positive externalities. We must never forget that they constitute at the same time political places where the actions of players acting on different territorial scales - ranging from local to worldwide - combine. It is the reason why they are perhaps the political institutions the most able to create new scales of democratic spaces between the economical macroregulations (i.e. the "laws" of world economy, too often set up as the laws of nature) and the microregulations of an inward-looking community.
This new structurization of local political scenes is strongly linked to the decentralization processes concerning the countries which have a centralized administrative structure. In the countries where decentralization processes give to local corporate bodies new administrative prerogatives, these local bodies must negotiate these prerogatives with other partners than the state, as they are unable to exercise them on their own 2.
This concept therefore brings out some new structural evolutions in the governing of cities. But it is necessary to take into consideration the political structures of each country. Thus, according to the countries and their political structures, mayors occupy a more or less important place compared to other players. In some cases, like in the United States, they have a strong autonomy compared to central governments, but they undergo pressures from the private sector. A large number of countries slowly move towards this model with, of course, strong national variants. In other countries, like in Great-Britain, mayors depend on both central governments and private sectors. Elsewhere, the state leads the game. In some countries there have not been any local elections for decades, to the advantage of a central state or the customs of some local communities. Finally, sometimes township territories cover the whole country, sometimes, as in Lebanon, they cover only a part of the country.
This being established, we can distinguish three ways of organizing partnerships. These three modes prefigure our methodological grid (cf. infra. partie 3) and underline some elements of the problem.
Europe tends to follow the same trend, even if the state continues to play a more important role. The watershed took place between 1982 and 1985 with the search for big modernistic projects, the development of urban marketing operations (the strong increase of the communication budgets is revealing), the search for an improvement of the companies' setting and environment. High tech parks, cultural festivals, advanced communication networks, economic or sports events, construction of office buildings around major crossroads: everything happens as if a norm of the worldwide city was emerging according to the logic of the big urban modernistic project. It is a matter of promoting operations which have short-term symbolic effects. What becomes of the investments which pay off in the long run like training, education and basic equipments ?
Some countries like Great-Britain have raised competition between cities to the status of a doctrine. The state therefore conditions the amount of the subsidies it gives to local authorities to the implementation of partnerships where the private sector is taking on a co-responsibility according to the "leverage ratio" principle which calculates the amount of private money attracted and compares it to the amount of public money invested. In other countries like France, the state has been taking a series of legislative measures since the beginning of the 90's, aiming at boosting cooperation between territorial corporate bodies and ensuring equity between townships 3.
After the decentralization phase launched between 1982 and 1993, the 1994 laws concerning town and country planning reintroduced the principle of a better distribution of activities among regions on the one hand, and a stronger re-intervention of the state as a coordinator and a guarantor of national solidarity. On the other, after ten years, decentralization had not reduced inequalities, neither between metropolitan areas nor within them.
Intermunicipal cooperation within large metropolitan areas raises the question of the scales pertinent to management. The metropolitan area's territories and the townships' territories constitute two specific modes of social integration : the productive logic mode and the citizenship mode which implies the feeling of belonging to a community (Christian Offner. 1995). In the same way, one must admit that each institutional field of intermunicipal cooperations refers to a specific territory. To have them correspond to one another is a source of difficulties in every country, and shows that it is useless to try to do so at all costs. In fact the intermunicipal cooperation structures are in line with the logic of looking for dimensional optimums. It is a matter of gathering the necessary means to manage transport, networks and various services. The intermunicipal territory is variable and adapts better to the various territorial demands linked to the management of these different services than that of the townships. Intermunicipal cooperation can take on another function, as in France, with the organization of intermunicipal solidarities through a fair tax distribution. The supramunicipal territories then act either as functional entities, or as tax and social distribution entities, but not as territories regulating social cohesion. The territories involved by the partnerships between townships do not correspond to the territories of citizenship, i.e. of partnerships between townships and citizens. The township territories are places of history and memories, which metropolitan territories are not (or not yet !).
These remarks concern intermunicipal cooperation, but they can be generalized to other types of partnerships. An optimal scale, which would favour social innovation, does not exist. To a priori try and set the "right" scale is likely to lead us into a total impasse. It would be a matter for an abstract exercise which would not take into account the nature of the problems set. It would contribute to block a reflection which proves to be absolutely necessary. It would be likely to purely and simply exclude the players which would not be working at the scale set a priori. One often postulates that proximity is the preliminary condition for innovation. It certainly is a condition which favours an action against social exclusion, although we must not make a dogma out of this assertion. Is it the more adapted scale or the only one which stands out in a matter of intervening in the field of environment ? It is anything but sure.
Private players - local companies, banks, urban services companies, foundations - have become players which cannot be ignored as regards local urban policies. Numerous international meetings (OECD, 1994) have brought to the fore the intervention of certain companies in the realization of collective objectives, be it concerning the intervention in districts in difficulties, the processes of urban renovation, the implementation of training programs or the improvement of the cities' environment. The fact was that these companies could sometimes act without being directly motivated by market concerns, and that public action could therefore not be reduced to the only intervention of public players.
Political culture, which varies according to the countries, creates different balances between politics and the market (C. Martinand. 1993).If we want to understand innovation, we have to clarify the organizational architectures of the relationships between the public and private sector. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the contractualization of public policies is not very well developed and local partnerships bring together private partners on very selective operations, which are generally carried out on a short-term basis. In other countries as in France, the contractualization of public policies remains an important mainspring of the public policies' implementation.
Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the United States, have a long-standing tradition which sees big companies, financial institutions and foundations participate in local public interventions. They also have a tradition of local community interventions (BIPE-Conseil/Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. 1993). In the United States, where partnership combinations can take on multiple forms, private companies are strongly encouraged to intervene in the development of urban housing, and banks in the development of community actions 5. Local projects are piloted by the Community Development Corporations which intervene in very diversified fields and in the field of housing in particular (in this last case, all the CDC are financed by both local authorities and banks). Intermediate organisms - between the financers and community organizations - manage these partnerships. The creation of banking products adapted to the communities in difficulties or the community involvement become an image and reputation asset for the companies 6. Great-Britain follows a very similar model, but the state is more present in the launching of initiatives, and the intervention field is wider as it is open to local economic development.
In the case of urban services, other management models have been tried and tested. Thus, the World Bank speaks of a real French model of delegated management based on the concession scheme 7. It differs from the German model, based on local companies and local authorities' direct management. Its principle is that a local player (towns, intermunicipal unions, districts, communities) entrusts a private company with a service according to the delegated management formula, or concession (in this case the user pays a fee for the service). The architecture of the French model is based on the pre-eminence of local representatives. The Anglo-Saxon architecture is based on the market ; competition has to be introduced everywhere possible and control organisms implemented (agencies) which will make sure that contracts are respected by introducing a third party between the authorities and the private operators. In France, just as in Germany, the local asserts its vitality and the congruence between the political and the productive functions makes a global and political regulation possible : it rests on a balance between efficiency and city life. In France, technical assistance is ensured more by semi-public companies, and in Germany by municipal professionals. In Great-Britain, the organization of the urban technical networks has been transfered towards supramunicipal authorities ; it has contributed to the weakening of English local authorities, as "local agencies" have supplanted the local government. Two balance models of the relationships between the political and productive functions are then emerging : the market tempered by democracy and regulated by politics, or the market limited by law. But is the innovation's raison d'être in the field of partnerships to conclude deals or, as we think, to collectively redefine the objectives of the authorities' interventions between the public and private sectors.
Whatever the political culture has taken into consideration, we have perhaps insufficiently insisted on the fact that public players are more and more led by market logics. Partnership is then close to the non-separation of roles 8. Thus in France, the 1983 law bringing the status of semi-public companies closer to the status of trading companies has led to some drifts, denounced by the revenue court : public players were taking on the risks of operations whose management fell to private players. In the United States, the constitution of new hybrid organisms grouping together the players of both the public and private sector have led to the conclusion of numerous agreements to develop real estate operations. Certain studies (M.V. Levine. 1994) indicate that poor neighbourhoods have hardly benefited from these agreements, as they have focused on economically strong operations (for example the construction of office buildings) rather than on operations which were socially necessary, and that the financing procedures used (Lynne B. Sagalyn. 1991 9) have not allowed a public debate on the validity of public aid granted to these operations.
Therefore, at a moment when a new project culture emerges by integrating into local public policies, instruments of economical development, it is more than ever necessary to assert the specific role of the strictly political decision.
(a) In Curitiba (Brazil), associations have been associated by the municipality for the protection and the maintenance of nature reserves located in the urban environment. The same city has created two management programs of urban wastes 10. The first one is based on the separation of the types of wastes. It has mobilized a large majority of the population and has enabled the city to reinvest the savings made in social programs. The second has mobilized the favelas' inhabitants to collect the wastes in exchange for tangible advantages such as free bus tickets or consumables.
(b) In other cases, non-governmental organizations (the so-called third sector besides the state and the market) directly propose services. This is particularly noticeable since the end of the 70's. They mainly intervene in the fields of education and health, and more recently in the field of environment. Their originality consists in mobilizing national and often international financial supports for a local action. More and more often financed to realize finalized projects, they more often enter into short or medium-term pragmatic logics than into strategic actions concerning the long-term development of cities (Rubem César Fernandes. 1994). The question of linking their action to the action of local representatives is more than ever raised.
(c) Finally, in other cases populations directly take charge of the production of goods and services. It is what happens, for example, with the programs of collective self-construction of housing units. These processes have been analyzed, particularly in the South African case and above all in the Brazilian case with the mutirao practice (Céline Sachs. 1989). There again, as Céline Sachs underlines it, these popular initiatives have durable chances of success only if the authorities recognize them and bring them an institutional and financial support through the organization of solidarity at the level of the whole town.
Cooperation between local authorities and inhabitants raises two fundamental problems. The first one concerns the question of the citizens' representation. The second one concerns the development of civism and therefore of the culture of citizenship.
The setting up, here and there, of new mediation spaces (Maurice Blanc. 1995) reveals new ways of building up decisions by treating a specific problem and trying to conciliate the conflictual potential interests of players rather than treating a global question. In North America, this process takes various forms : cooperative processes, alternative dispute resolution, citizen advisory groups...
How is it possible to found an urban democracy when violence regulates relationships in the daily public space ? How can we advocate institutional partnerships when partnerships in civil society are themselves unconceivable ? The eradication of violence is a very long-term task, and political representatives are elected only for short periods of time. Municipalities like Bogota, aware of the fact that instituting local democracy means restoring civism, have however attacked this difficult problem without being afraid of long-term actions.
Incivism, as the refusal or the incapacity of measuring the effects of one's own behaviour on collective dynamics, is a more subtle way of denying the social link. From vehicle behaviour to the ways of settling small neighbourhood quarrels, from the attitude towards noise or hygiene to the relationships between generations or sexes, the list of all daily incivisms would be long.
The social contract consists also of the confidence bond which unites each individual to the cities' collective projects. It is clear that levying taxes presupposes a minimum of consensus. Cities are sometimes confronted with the illegal practices of certain well-off circles or with the "boycott culture" of poor people (R. Stren. 1995). A society where the confidence bond does not exist has difficulties in bearing collective projects.
A society with a weak civic consensus, expressed either through violence, incivism or a refusal to participate in the collective public effort, is also a society which has difficulties in preparing its future.
The new questions raised concerning representation or civism show us that the way local governments, "third sector" associations and self-organized populations meet is decisive for the elaboration of a discourse able to express the long-term common good, as well as for the capacity to mobilize all the human resources of a local community. Beyond the specific methods of the community (where the chief of the community is the people's delegate) or the classical methods of formal democracy, entirely organized around the election process (where the political representative is the people's delegate), we still have to invent a real culture of citizenship. We therefore have to explore new methods 11, from the creation of "debate forums" to that of "local development councils", including the development of mediation systems from various networks of players.
This observatory would have the following three main tasks :
| Types of partnerships | ||||
| Public/public | Public/private | Public/citizen | ||
| Objectives | Equity | |||
| Durability | ||||
| Citizenship | ||||
| Economic efficiency | ||||
| Well-being of citizens | ||||
The principle of the double entry, both by the partnership combinations and by the objectives, is the main aim of this grid. Obviously, excellency in the field of innovation consists in filling the grid. An experiment which would be identifiable only in one box, for example the box combining "public/private" with economic efficiency, would be poorly considered 14.
This observatory would allow the promotion of new forms of international cooperations. Based on the refusal to import standard models, it would enable cities to invent their own solutions from the confrontation of the various situations and common objectives encountered throughout the world. It would enable the mobilization of worldwide experts around concrete experiments. Finally, it would make known the emergence of new modes of citizenship.
2. The question of decentralization throughout the world would need to be more developed. In some cases like Brazil, with the 1988 constitution, or India with the 74 amendment of the 1992 constitution (R. Stren. 1995), the struggle for more autonomous local governments first corresponds to a democratic claim ; in other cases such as northern countries, it is perhaps a matter of, above all, rationalizing the welfare state and partially pulling out the state from its commitments. In fact, in all cases, it is a reorganization of the state system where the two processes meet.
3. For example the orientation law for the city of July 13, 1991, also called the "anti-ghetto law", which has been voted in a context of a suburban crisis : noting the increase of inequalities between townships of a same urban area and the concentration of disadvantaged families within a same district, it wants to boost cooperation between the various townships of the metropolitan area. It also advocates a better distribution of public housing among towns and a certain "mix" in the construction of housing projects by conceiving programs of local authority housing at the scale of the metropolitan area. It introduces the idea of a coordination between townships.
The housing law of July 21, 1994, tries to answer to the insolvent demand crisis and to think out a new model of public intervention at the departmental level. It wants (without really succeeding) to imply departments in the housing policies concerning disadvantaged persons. In a decentralization movement where abilities in the field of housing are strongly intermingled, it appears that in the field of intervention on major poverty each one tries to lay the
responsibilities at the others' door.
These two laws confirm the state's will to impose the necessary actions in the
field of solidarity and housing to the territorial corporate bodies.
4. The principle of "subsidiarity" raises new problems. It means that it is useless to resort to a higher corporate body if the closest territorial body is able to guarantee the services planned. But it leaves the question of the pertinent scales of public actions wide open.
5. With the 1986 Low Income Tax Credits, the part of the profits invested by the companies in social habitat enables them to obtain a tax credit (this credit would be approximately 20% higher than the initial investment). Since 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act" has been obliging banks to intervene in the community development.
6. It explains the companies' reluctance to work with other companies : they do not want to share the image profits.
7. The management of public services is entrusted to authorities' operators which are juridically distinct : it is the principle of delegated management. It has the advantage of introducing both legal and institutional supple solutions for the private/public relationship, the conceding authority keeping a large part in the management of the projects.
8. We could give other examples of non-separation of roles. One of the most worrying concerns the security fucntions. We think of certain cities of South America or Africa where the same persons occupy functions both in the police hierarchy and as employees or managers of private guardien companies. The function of legitimate exercise of public violence is in such a case transfered de facto to the private sector.
9. The constituting of semi-public societies,permits the incuriing of large investments without any direct budget control and without any public justification of one's choices (Lynne B. Sagalyn. 1991).
10. These experiments have been rewarded by the program on environment of the United Nations in 1990.
11. Certain initiatives follow this direction, such as the "Caracas declaration" which stemmed from the seminar organized in Caracas in 1991 by the Foundation of Human Progress, under the aegis of the Venezuelian government, or the action chart elaborated by this same Foundation (cf. Foundation for Human Progress. 1990).
12. There are already projects following this direction, in particular the "Mega-Cities Projects" founded by Janice Perlman and based in New York. "Mega-Cities" set itself the task of drawing the lessons of successful experiments in order to pass them on to the urban operators. The following experiments are for example in their inventory : in the field of environment, the waste recycling campaigns in Mexico (SIRDO system) or the campaigns made to clean the streets of Bangkok, in the field of the struggle against poverty, the food collects made with restaurants for the refuges of homeless people in New York, in the field of urban well-being, the mobile crèche systems in Delhi, etc.
13. The construction principles of this grid have been proposed in collaboration with Céline Sachs-Jeantet.
14. This grid obviously raises many problems. For example, how can the "public/private" heading be distinguished from the "public/citizen" one when, as it is the case most of the time, citizens are represented by organized groups ? Moreover, how is it possible to distinguish the different levels of public institutions (the local, regional or national level).
15. Many methodological precisions should be brought to this scheme. For example, it would be advisable to distinguish the finished operations from the operations in progress which necessitate a follow-up in real time of their evolution.
Francis Godard is a French social scientist with a Ph. D in Sociology. He is Deputy Director of PIR-VILLES, Research Director at the Centre national pour la recherche scientifique and Lecturer in the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. His latest publications include Familles Mobilisées: Accession à la propriété du logement et notion d'effort des ménages. Paris: Collection Texte Intégral, M.U.L. 1982 (in collaboration with P. Cuturello) ; D'une génération ouvrière à l'autre, Paris, Syros, Collection Alternatives sociales, Paris 1988 ; La famille, affaire de génération, Collection Economie et liberté, PUF, Paris 1992.
The facts and opinions expressed in this series are those of the authors and do not engage the responsibility of UNESCO.
© UNESCO 1996
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