Govnering Growing Cities: An International Perspective - Professor Duncan Maclennan

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Australia is famously one of the most urbanised countries in the world, with our cities producing the bulk of GDP and jobs. Today our cities are on the front line of responding to climate change, and are projected to significantly increase in size. How cities cope with the challenges we face over the next decades will be decisive, and effective governance arrangements will be a key characteristic of those which succeed.

Following the seminar he agreed to answer five questions we put to our seminar presenters.

How do you see the future of Australian cities – are you optimistic?

Over the last two decades, Australian metropolitan areas have had a striking ability to benefit from globalisation and to compete for mobile investment and labour; the cores of the main cities have an impressive quality, vitality and diversity. This could be sustained in the future but two related sets of problems would have to be addressed.

First, globalisation seems to bring not just growth but prolonged income inequalities. These are increasingly reflected in concentrations of lower income households living in poor housing and without adequate social infrastructure.

Secondly, growth brings benefits, but also associated environmental costs. We’re likely to see rising domestic energy and fuel costs in the future. Good city planning will be about maximising choices in that new ‘accessibility’ era.

If you could do one thing to improve cities what would it be?

First, to make sure that emerging concentrations of poverty do not hold back growth. The second is to avoid building city structures we will not want in the future, but which will create global environmental damage in the meantime. I think the latter is the most urgent to act on now. The key to better cities will not be growth boundaries and the like, but a politics that challenges the assumption that success is owning homes and large blocks of land.

What is one thing the general population could do to improve cities?

Big adverse outcomes for geography and the environment can grow as a tyranny from all our small quotidian actions. For example, when we make choices of where to live or how to travel we need to have more regard to the consequences for children (both environmental and social).

Is there something have you changed your mind about in the past 5 or 10 years, and why?

Professionally, as an economist, I have shifted at least emphasis, possibly beliefs, away from what is the core paradigm of microeconomics to embrace what is called the new behavioural economics. I no longer believe that city planning focussed on shaping constraints is the right way to manage cities, but that a broader approach that maximises future choices is a more positive and politically manageable perspective. More specifically, I now believe that it makes no sense for the state to own housing and that non-market provision is best done by non-profits.

What book / lecture / film / podcast over the last year would you recommend?

Over the last year there has been a growing number of books and films from the Indian sub-continent that have been embraced by the western media. They often remind us of the universality of the human condition and human nature. Slumdog Millionaire is by no means the most intellectually interesting of the genre, but it is the most accessible.

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