The Little Book of Governing The City

How we organise and collectively steer our societies is shaped and influenced by the practice of governance. It is as simple and as big as how we navigate and choose where we go together. This raises questions about where to go, how to go about the journey or expedition, and what to do when we think we have arrived. This can be challenging for us all even at an individual or family level. At a collective level, as is the work of governance, it can also be difficult. At its best, it can be delightful and uplifting as we find unity and common purpose as results come to life. At its worst, it can be conflict-ridden, draining and divisive. Despite advances, how to govern a city today is a complex undertaking. There is much potential and many tantalising possibilities for improvement, alongside deep and enduring problems. If the practice of governing, at its simplest, is overseeing an issue and deciding what to do, we can do this in ways that are enabling, empowering and result in transformative improvements. Or we can drift sideways or go backwards, assuming we agree what is happening! Cities are underperforming T he way we govern places is influenced by our history, when rural and regional politics held sway. Today, the issues and politics of the urban increasingly holds our governing attention. There is an immediacy and intensity from the ground-up for the issues cities face, putting urban governance under pressure to deal with everything from micro-concerns to macro-dilemmas. T here are a wide variety of systems of governance operating in cities. These oversee and influence formal mechanisms, like legislation and taxation, alongside informal factors, such as individual attitudes and societal norms. Our challenge is to guide and ‘engineer’ these systems to align with, and support, improvements to liveability in cities. In so doing, new and revised systems of governance that are both transformative (sometimes radical) and incremental (not-so-radical) interventions may surface. As they currently exist, some of these systems of governance constrain what we do and at worst work against the beneficial changes that we need to make.

source :

https://blog.soton.ac.uk/serg/files/2017/12/The-little-book-of-governing-in-the-city.pdf