City-making: the great vocation
Today new professions exist that work with passion on the future of cities and attempt to build long-term strategies to guarantee their success
Greg Clark (Advisor on City and Regional Development. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, London)
Twenty-five years ago there were few people whose whole professional careers were consumed with the art and the science of city-making. The noble professions of architecture, town planning, quantity surveying and civil engineering all existed, but these ‘built environment’ roles were for specialists only and were consumed primarily with the way that land and property was developed and used.
At the same time leaders and managers of local governments were engaged principally in the provision of local services such as schools, waste management, roads, and leisure facilities. And, in the private sector, the role of chambers of commerce and other business associations was concerned with the regulation of the business environment, and with efforts to secure new markets for members.
Changing the way the city is seen and viewed is central to city success. This is not a philosophy of incrementalism, but rather an understanding of the dynamics of change, the homoeopathic nature of the city’s calculus
There was nobody whose overall job was to be concerned with the city as a whole, not even the elected Mayor.
But these days, things have changed. There are now many thousands of people who see themselves as city-makers and city managers, crossing the borders between service delivery, the built form, the urban economy, the city environment, investment intermediation, and metropolitan society. They also care passionately about the future of the city, and they seek to build longer-term strategies for the success of cities.
So, something important has happened. We now have a new generation of urbanists and metro-professionals, people, like myself, who will spend their whole working lives consumed with the performance of cities, in the same ways that some people are consumed with the performance of firms or the health of the human body.
There is more than one explanation for this change. Globalisation has set cities free from the rigid urban hierarchies of the nation state, and exposed them to an open international system in which competition, collaboration, progress, and decline are all both more possible, and more likely. Equally, our understanding of what makes a city succeed has begun to stress the connected nature of different aspects of city life: good public services, culture, public realm, connectivity, and strength of the business base, and good governance and leadership, all contribute to how well cities do, so it is much more important to get these things working together like an orchestra, or perhaps more like a jazz jam session.
We know too, that cities will not succeed without their regions succeeding, and that regions and nations that are failing are a constraint on city success. So, there is now a national interest in making cities work.
In London, where I live, there are many organisations engaged in making and re-making the city every day. They still employ planners, engineers, architects, economists, geographers, urban designers, and public administrators. But these days they also employ people who have very different backgrounds; branding and marketing experts, project managers, financiers, strategists, facilitators, writers, therapists, futurists, and visual artists. And it takes an unusual kind of person to lead and manage them all and to integrate their efforts to make something which is more than a sum of the parts.
We have come to accept that city-making is an art and a new discipline; a hybrid of many other things, but with a core that must be shared by all. Environmental psychology has shown us that people react to the overall effect of places, not the constituent parts. Promoting change in a city involves changing the way people see it and how they talk and think about it. Changing the way the city is seen and viewed is central to city success. This is not a philosophy of incrementalism, but rather an understanding of the dynamics of change, the homoeopathic nature of the city’s calculus.
Each city needs many leaders, but they need to play as a team. All the team has to play by the same rules and believe in the same goals. The new art of city making is about making these teams really play well. As we move steadily into the new urban age, where we will nearly all live in cities within 50 years, our city-making art, and its science, are both our major imperative and a new Enlightenment.
