World Cities Summit Issue, Jun 2008

Planning and Innovation for City Success
Alan Altshuler

What do you consider as innovations in urban policy?
Some of those that have struck me here are Singapore’s policies for balancing car ownership and usage with road capacity, for achieving a high level of self-sufficiency in water supply, and for both liquid and solid waste disposal. In each of these domains, Singapore is either the world leader or one of two or three. Each of these policies is not just innovative but highly conducive to sustainability and environmental quality.  

As an American, I am struck by the fact that many of the ideas and technologies underlying Singapore's innovations originated in the west, and often indeed in the US. But they have, in general, been far more difficult to implement in the west, and particularly in the US. The idea of congestion pricing, for example, was originated by an American, William Vickrey, who won the Nobel Prize largely for having done so. For political reasons, though, it has proven impossible to implement congestion pricing (except on a few stretches of privately managed expressway) anywhere in the US. My key point is that a fresh idea or invention becomes an innovation only when it is put into practice, and in this regard, Singapore is truly a world leader.

The US is terrific at generating ideas and private sector innovations, but generally a bit of a laggard among highly developed countries in public sector adoption. Where the US has innovated in public policy, on the other hand, it has most typically been as a result of bottom-up pressure. During the 1960s and 1970s, the US pioneered in the area of citizen participation and environmental protection. Mass motorisation was also a US (and partly urban) innovation, but like many other innovations of great importance for American cities, it was driven mainly by private business and consumer decisions. The government participated, but reactively: by investing in roads and urban renewal schemes to accommodate motorisation, and helping to finance new private housing attractive to the new auto-owning public. If we look back further, the US led the way in developing mass public education, likewise in response to strong grassroots pressures.

Some other important innovations in the US, not purely urban but of great urban significance, have involved a mix of public and private sector initiatives. Think, for example, of America's great non-profit universities, hospitals and cultural institutions, encouraged by the tax system and specific public grants but overwhelmingly the products of private initiative. Similarly, America led the way in the development of air transportation, with a mix of private entrepreneurship, public subsidies and infrastructure investments. More recently, it pioneered the Internet, which started as a public sector project but was later developed mainly by the private sector. We don't normally think of these as urban innovations, but they have had, and still have enormous impacts on urban development.  

Does the Internet threaten the existence of cities?
Human interactions have moved into a different space where physical boundaries no longer exist. Everybody has been predicting for decades that cities would decline with the progress of telecommunications. In practice, however, cities are growing everywhere. In countries with lots of space relative to the population size, like the US, Canada and Australia, modern cities can be more spread out than those of yesteryear, but they are no less cities for that. Urbanisation is about opportunities for face-to-face interaction rather than specific spatial patterns, so as travel and communication speeds increase, land use densities can decrease significantly with little or no loss of agglomeration benefits.

As for communications specifically, the late Ithiel de Sola Pool, who was my colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered in the wake of the 1973 oil shock that when travel was curtailed, the volume of telecommunications fell as well. His conclusion: a great deal of telecommunications is about planning for trips and following up on them. It seems that communications and face-to-face interaction are complementary activities far more than alternatives. And this seems to be true of email as well. We phone and email most frequently those whom we also see a lot. With a falloff in face-to-face interaction, electronic communications tend to fall off as well. So there is no indication that the age of the city is passing.  

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