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World Cities Summit Issue, Jun 2008
Planning and Innovation
for City Success
Alan Altshuler
In this interview, Professor Alan Altshuler of Harvard University discusses the attributes of a successful city and compares the city success of Singapore with US cities.
What makes a city successful?
The first step toward answering this question must be to specify what we mean by success for a city. My own starting point is that cities are for their residents, and consequently that a successful city is one in which the great majority of residents feel very fortunate to live, and in which they would happily think of their descendants continuing to live for generations to come.
In comparing cities with reference to this definition of success, I find it most useful to focus on seven criteria. In no particular order, these are Prosperity, Personal Security, Sustainability, Equity, Liveability, Liberty and Democracy (see box story
for elaboration).
Cities vary in the challenges that they find particularly hard. Singapore is notable for the rationality and long-term vision that has guided its policy- making since its independence, enabling it to make remarkable gains in terms of prosperity, health, safety, liveability and sustainability. Cities in the United States (US), by contrast, tend to be plagued by short-term perspectives and policies driven by narrow interest groups. On the other hand, US cities are remarkable for the liberty and democracy they afford their citizens, their overall prosperity—although with wide variations—and their liveability.
Master planning of land use and public investment has played a large role in Singapore’s development. You have commented elsewhere on tensions that may exist between key attributes of Planning, Democracy and Capitalism. Can you elaborate on this?
First, let me emphasise that Singapore’s planning has been truly exemplary in terms of its comprehensive, well-conceived vision, its integration of the parts, its analytic rationality, and its actual impact on the ground. Nonetheless, intrinsic tensions exist between the imperatives of planning, democracy and capitalism. Planning, for example, is most centrally about
rational analysis and long-term, integrated perspectives. Democracy is about responsiveness to constituencies and tends toward a multiplicity of
discrete, short-term perspectives. Capitalism is about private property rights, business competition and consumer sovereignty. Quite a few countries have reconciled two of these three themes at a very high level, but very few indeed have managed to do so for all three.
Singapore, for example, has been highly successful in reconciling the tension between planning and capitalism, primarily by making the attraction of international capital the highest priority—along with national security—of its planning. The US has been highly successful in reconciling capitalism with democracy, mainly because Americans are so committed to private property rights and business is so influential in US politics.
Singapore’s planning success has been significantly attributable, on the other hand, to its political continuity and unitary structure (just a single level of government), which has enabled a highly stable leadership to develop and pursue its long-term vision without interruption for nearly half a century. In the US, by contrast, broad governmental planning is generally impossible because electoral competition is so intense, leadership turnover is so frequent, and public authority is distributed among a vast array of governments—not just federal, state, and local, but also within each metropolitan area.
It is similarly interesting to compare the nature of business power in the US versus Singapore. In the US, business has traditionally had enormous direct influence on the political process—via its financing of political campaigns, its lobbying prowess, and its great public communications resources. In Singapore, by contrast, business seems to have little direct capacity to influence policy decisions, but since the central thrust of government policy is to attract and retain capital, the effect is similar. And indeed we see the same trend in the US. The great majority of local businesses that used to influence city politics have now been absorbed into national and international corporations. These corporations have little interest in the details of local politics, but they make clear that their investments will go where they deem conditions most favourable for their pursuit of profit. So, while they are far less visible than before in day-to-day local politics, they are in some respects more influential than ever.
Are there countries that are terrific in all three?
There are a few, I believe, most notably small countries in north-western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland. Of these, I am most familiar with the history of planning in the Netherlands. Like Singapore, it is a small trading country without natural resources, mainly capitalist in its economic organisation, and very open to the world. It has a tradition of strong, very thoughtful planning, though, which goes back hundreds of years, primarily because it is a land reclaimed from and constantly threatened by the sea. So its people have always understood the imperatives of collective action and have never become imbued with the extreme reverence for private property and individualism that developed in the wide open spaces of early America.
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