On February 8, the Brookings Global-CERES Economic and Social Policy in Latin America Initiative (ESPLA) and the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) co-hosted a presentation and panel discussion of CAF’s latest Report on Economic Development (RED 2017), “Urban growth and access to opportunities: A challenge for Latin America.” The report looks into four key determinants of urban accessibility: land use regulation, housing markets, mobility infrastructure and transport coverage, and metropolitan governance institutions. After the presentation of the findings, a panel of experts discussed the relevant implications for improving public policy in Latin America.

Following the conversation, panelists took audience questions.

       

Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address offers the president an opportunity to list his achievements over the past year and outline his policy agenda for the year to come. In the realm of technology policy, the past year has seen an emptying out of key science advisory positions, the repeal of existing net neutrality regulations, and discussions of a major infrastructure plan among other developments. Brookings experts Alaina Harkness, Chris Meserole, Nicol Turner-Lee, Tom Wheeler, and Niam Yaraghi weigh in on the first year of technology policy in the Trump administration, and what steps to take moving forward.

Executive Branch Expertise

Alaina Harkness, Fellow, Project on 21st Century City Governance

One of the most alarming features of the Trump Administration one year in is its lack of expert advisers on critical science and technology issues. Congress created the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 1976 to ensure that the Executive Branch had access to high-level expertise on technology’s impact on the economy, environment, and society. Under Trump, OSTP still has no appointed director (a first), and is operating with a third of 2016 staffing levels. Despite repeated calls by members of Congress and the science community to fill the top post as required by law, there are few signs that capacity inside OSTP – or the agencies it is supposed to coordinate with – is going to ramp up any time soon.

This is particularly distressing because technology is such a cross-cutting issue: it undergirds major threats to U.S. security and stability, from foreign policy to the integrity of elections, and it provides some of the most promising pathways to employment, education, health, and economic opportunity. The Obama Administration’s OSTP launched initiatives to strengthen STEM education, improve veterans’ access to healthcare, streamline commercialization of federal R&D, and accelerate the development of robotics and advanced manufacturing. These efforts attracted billions in additional private sector investment, spurred activity in high-growth sectors, and made the economy more productive. President Trump should up the ante: appoint an OSTP director with a mandate to use the post to find every available avenue to strengthen American excellence in science and technology, and use it to power an innovation–based economy.

COuntering terrorist recruitment ONLINE

Chris Meserole, Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy

Last September, after a bombing on the London Underground, President Trump tweeted:

Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner.The internet is their main recruitment tool which we must cut off & use better!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017

The President’s message perfectly encapsulated his approach to counterterrorism overall: tough talk, but little in the way of actual policy guidance. In this case, the trouble with cutting off internet recruitment is that social media platforms are a dual-use technology: the Islamic State uses the same apps to attract new recruits that human rights activists rely on to find new supporters. Blindly cut off the social web for terrorists, and you will find yourself crippling pro-democracy movements the world over.

Finding the right regulatory balance is easier said than done. In lieu of constructive guidance from President Trump, technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are now taking the lead in building out the governance layer of the social web, mostly notably by forming the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) last summer. The big tech and terrorism question for 2018 is thus whether President Trump will continue to call for “cutting off” the internet – or instead work with the GIFCT to find innovative policy solutions.

Net Neutrality

Nicol Turner-Lee, Fellow, Center for Technology Innovation

One year into his presidency, President Trump is planning to release the details of his $1.7 trillion infrastructure plan during the State of the Union. While the plan will fund the nation’s public works projects, the jury is still out on whether or not broadband infrastructure will be sufficiently covered, especially as it has become the nation’s next critical asset. Last week, the bipartisan House Rural Broadband Caucus encouraged the president to include funding for rural broadband access, citing its deployment as a pathway to job creation, economic development, and improved service delivery for remote populations. However, net neutrality remains a highly unsettled concern in tech policy that can have implications for the growth of the broadband sector.

A leaked White House memo suggests that the president wants to allocate nearly half of the federal spending toward private sector incentives for planned infrastructure projects. Despite the recent repeal of the net neutrality rules by the Federal Communications Commission, this issue remains uncertain. In recent weeks, several state attorney generals filed a lawsuit to block the repeal of net neutrality rules and compliance. Democrats are heavily weighing the possibility of a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to reverse the Commission’s actions, creating additional uneasiness for the private sector. Whereas the private sector was vocal about the impact of reclassification on their business models (especially their future capital investments), the looming uncertainty of this issue may affect and possibly spoil the aspirations of the president and Congress when it comes to broadband deployment.

Tom Wheeler, Visiting Fellow, Center for Technology Innovation

To paraphrase Proverbs 29:18, the last twelve months of the Trump Federal Communications Commission warns us that “Where there is no vision, policy perishes.” The agency has spent twelve months looking backwards at the previous administration’s policies and dismantling what they dislike, rather than developing a vision for the protection of consumers and a competitive market in a time of rapid technological change. At its height came the decision to not only reverse the law of the land with regard to an open internet, but the even more shocking surrender of authority to the Federal Trade Commission. For the agency charged by Congress with responsibility over electronic communications to walk away from the most important network of the 21st century is the epitome of lack of vision. You cannot walk away from responsibility and call it progress.

Sharing Medical data

Niam Yaraghi, Nonresident Fellow, Center for Technology Innovation

An integrated digital network that enables medical providers to access their patients’ data in a timely manner would revolutionize the fragmented health care system of the United States. It will not only curb costs, but will also foster groundbreaking medical and pharmaceutical innovations.

The Office of National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) was established in 2004 to ensure that “appropriate information to guide medical decisions is available at the time and place of care”. Despite trying for fourteen years, and spending nearly $35 billion dollars, we have not yet achieved a nationwide interoperable network for sharing medical data.

In spite of the failures in the past, changes in the market economy promise a brighter future for health IT. With the technology of interoperability already in place, the entrance of information technology companies into the health IT domain will bring demand for interoperability. As I have discussed before, interoperability will not be achieved unless there is a clear financial incentive for it.

The lack of business incentives will no longer be a problem in the health IT domain. In the very near future, we can finally share our medical data as easily as our financial data. It has always been very difficult to define and measure information exchange in a meaningful way. Rather than focusing resources on defining measures of information exchange and creating incentives to comply with them, ONC is shifting toward an advisory role to guide governmental and private efforts toward interoperability. The approach of the current administration in deregulating the market could be beneficial in the health IT domain.

       

This November, residents of more than 30 U.S. cities voted to elect their top leader. Whether four-term veterans like Cleveland’s Frank Jackson or first-time politicians like Helena’s Wilmot Collins, U.S. mayors are now more than ever on the front lines of major global and societal change. The world’s challenges are on their doorsteps—refugee integration, climate change adaptation, economic transition—yet the federal government has withdrawn and many state governments are actively opposing cities’ agendas. What do these new leaders need to do to succeed in a climate that is at worst hostile and at best indifferent to pressing urban priorities?

Mayors must first recognize that we are in the midst of a paradigmatic shift in urban governance and problem solving that is catching up to an established fact on the ground: Cities are networks of public, private, and civic institutions that power the economy and shape critical aspects of urban life. This “new localism” is pragmatic and solution-oriented, and by design includes exemplary leadership across sectors and segments of society. Yet mayors, as the top political and executive office in cities, have a special responsibility to set the vision and activate their networks to design, finance, and deliver everything from basic services to transformative infrastructure projects.

For such an important office, we know frustratingly little about the specific mechanics that make mayors effective. A new Brookings Institution report, “Leading Beyond Limits: Mayoral Powers in the Age of New Localism” examined the sources and uses of mayoral powers and the capacities they need to lead and govern. Though cities and governance contexts vary tremendously around the world, there are plenty of common challenges—fragmented governance environments, the need for increasingly technical skill sets to address complex problems—and some broader recommendations that could strengthen mayoral leadership in cities everywhere.

First, though they vary, mayors have to exercise the formal powers they do have—to plan, tax, and zone—to the fullest extent possible. For example, New York City’s High Line would not have been possible without the Bloomberg administration’s creative maneuver to rezone the area to assign air rights to existing property owners and create a new investment market that valued density and development. Recognizing and realizing this opportunity depended on highly sophisticated staff in the mayor’s office, and a willingness to experiment on a high-risk, high-reward project.

Second, mayors have to demonstrate extraordinary network leadership to expand their reach and impact beyond the limits of their formal powers. Successful mayors are able to articulate a clear vision and recruit a range of public and private sector partners to implement city improvement strategies. For example, though he did not have direct control over all the actors in the Louisville region’s education and workforce development sectors, Mayor Greg Fischer championed the goal of seamless education and training pathways for his residents and drew in a diverse array of supporters and backers of this vision. The resulting Cradle to Career initiative is a well-documented model of the coordinated approach to city problem-solving that is a hallmark of the new localism. Though each of the four strategies—kindergarten readiness, elementary and secondary education, college completion, and workforce-oriented skills training—is run by a different organization, Fischer and his team play key roles convening, coordinating, and holding the partners collectively accountable for results.

Third, mayors need to focus the full force of their formal powers and their networks toward identifying and maximizing the value of public assets. It will be impossible to meet the needs of residents today or prepare for the future without a significant increase in local resources. U.S. mayors may need to look outward for the best examples of institutional innovation in this arena, even as they develop their own models. For example, Copenhagen created a new publicly owned, privately managed corporation to capture and distribute the value of land from the redevelopment of its port and harbor. This vehicle helped insulate the process from politics and allowed Copenhagen to finance a massive investment in public transport infrastructure with the proceeds. The Swedish finance experts Dag Detter and Stefan Folster argue that the use of similar models, combined with a key move to develop city balance sheets that closely track the value of public assets, could yield billions of dollars to fund infrastructure, education, and other critical needs.

There is much more to know, and much more to do if we are to equip today’s city leaders for the challenges on their doorsteps. Mayors need help to build the capacities and connections to supporting institutions that can boost their ability to perform as successfully networked leaders. They need help identifying the financial instruments and organizational vehicles—such as publicly owned, privately managed corporations—that will help fund city projects when federal and state resources cannot be guaranteed. We all need a better store of knowledge about mayoral powers and city powers and the ways they are changing, including national data sources that track local government changes over time and measure quality and effectiveness of city governance.

Today’s mayors—veteran and novice alike—need to be able to lead beyond the limits of their formal powers, even as they organize themselves to advocate for powers matched to the scale of the challenges they face and the outsized contribution they make to state, national, and global economies. In this time of big governance shifts, cities in the United States and around the world need to learn quickly from examples of institutional adaptation and change.

       

Alaina Harkness, fellow in the Centennial Scholar Initiative at Brookings and the Project on 21st Century City Governance, discusses the key findings from her report on the evolving role of mayors and their position on the frontlines of public policy challenges like refugee resettlement and workforce development.

Also in this episode, Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director in the Metropolitan Policy Program, introduces his research on the digitalization of the American workforce.

Show notes:

“Leading beyond limits: Mayoral powers in the age of new localism”

“Power and problem solving top the agenda at Global Parliament of Mayors”

—

Thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo with assistance from Mark Hoelscher, and to producer Brennan Hoban. Additional support comes from Chris McKenna, Jessica Pavone, Eric Abalahin, Rebecca Viser, and David Nassar.

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on Apple Podcasts, send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

The Brookings Cafeteria is a part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

       

There are many reasons to be concerned about the wide and growing inequalities in U.S. society, not least between the upper middle class and the rest. There are fewer clear solutions. In Richard’s book Dream Hoarders, he argues that those at the top – the “favored fifth” – can and should take some personal responsibility for their role in perpetuating the advantages that deepen inequality. These individual sacrifices, he argues, could help create a fairer society.

But will they? There are some reasons to be hopeful. Affluent, well-educated Americans are increasingly voting Democratic, expressing a preference for liberal and progressive policies. New research suggests that across income and demographic groups, people want to live in a fairer society – even if not a perfectly equitable one.

As it happens, we have a real-time test of the “willingness to pay” for fairness underway in Cook County, Illinois. A recent investigation by the Chicago Tribune revealed an unusually regressive pattern in the County property tax assessment system: homes in low-income (and predominantly minority) areas of the city tend to be overvalued by 10 percent or more, while homes in more affluent areas tend to be undervalued by 10 percent or more. An analysis by University of Chicago professor Chris Berry found that from 2011-2015, the average home that sold for $100k paid an effective tax rate of 1.6 percent, while the average million-dollar home paid 1.1 percent. This might feel like a rounding error, but it actually means the tax rate on the $100k home is a whopping 45 percent higher than the tax rate on the million-dollar home. The cumulative result? A disproportionate share of Cook County’s total $14 billion in annual property tax collections are paid by the people who are least able to absorb the extra cost.

Inequality is a complex, multidimensional problem. But in this specific instance, there is a relatively simple, straightforward, and technocratic fix. A new property tax assessment system that would result in more accurate, efficient, transparent assessments – and a less regressive system overall –has already been designed, tested, and delivered to the assessor’s office. Yet evidence suggests it has not yet been implemented and a formal study to review the situation has been months in the making. 

What would a reform of the current unfair system look like in practice? Let’s take two properties sold in Cook County in 2011: a $309,000 home in the relatively affluent North Park neighborhood of Chicago, and a $130,000 home in the southwest suburb of Stickney. Under the existing scheme, the North Park home was assessed at 90 percent of its total value – $281,100 – while the Stickney home was assessed at nearly double its value — $238,660. Using a uniform tax rate to estimate the property tax bills, the North Park homeowner would pay $5,100 and the Stickney property owner $4,300 in taxes.  Under a system that assessed the two properties at closer to fair market value, the North Park owner’s tax bill would rise, but only marginally – to $5,900, while the Stickney homeowner’s bill would fall to $2,400.[1]

Nobody likes a tax increase. But it is not difficult to see why an $800 increase in the annual tax bill for a North Park resident, where 50 percent of residents hold a college degree and the median household income is $71,000, would be easier to absorb than the $1,900 additional taxes that the Stickney resident is already paying – in a community where the median household income is $43,000 and only 10 percent of residents hold a college degree.

Charts source: University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy professor Chris Berry “Briefing on Property Tax Regressivity in Cook County.”

So much for the economics. Now for the politics. Overall, Chicagoland’s residents are a liberal group: 73.9 percent voted Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. They presumably value a fairer, and perhaps even a more equal society. This property tax assessment reform moment presents a real-time opportunity to show that they are willing to pay—just a little—for it. And if they are not persuaded by a purely moral argument, it its worth making an economic one:  inequality may be a costly drag on the entire regional economy, as a recent study by the Metropolitan Planning Council and Urban Institute study has shown.

Some of the less affluent Chicagoans who are losing out under the current assessment system are beginning to organize for reform. The question is whether they find enemies or allies among the affluent who stand to lose just a little in return for the chance to live under a fairer taxation regime.

Perhaps this seems like a local story. But the stakes are quite high. After all, if even liberal affluent Chicago residents are not willing to a pay a little more to correct a proven unfairness in property tax rates, what hope can we hold out for broader redistribution?

[1] Property examples drawn from a University of Chicago Center for Municipal Finance working paper: “The Impact of Property Tax Appeals on Vertical Equity in Cook County, IL”, by Robert Ross May 2017”

       

These are trying times for the world—and acutely challenging times for cities. Whether grappling with the challenges of integrating refugees or adapting to new environmental realities brought on by climate change, mayors are on the front lines, dealing with disruptions brought by technology, economic transformation, and demographic shift. 

In the United States, socioeconomic and political pressures are disrupting federalist governance arrangements and destabilizing sitting mayors, forcing them to take on new responsibilities with fewer resources. A wave of state preemption laws, fueled by advocacy campaigns from conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Republican-controlled state houses, are rolling back city-led efforts to expand municipal broadband, raise the minimum wage, and regulate home and ride sharing. Proposed reforms to city charters have sought to expand or restrict mayoral control over city budgets, powers over police departments, and more.

In Europe, rising populist sentiment is having similar effects on political discourse, creating tensions between social and economic policy preferences at the local and national level. In the United Kingdom, a devolution movement is granting sweeping new powers to directly elected mayors in cities and metropolitan regions that never had consolidated local leadership before. Mayors are flexing their muscle on the global stage as well, generating coordinated action on issues like climate change where many national governments are falling behind, and pushing for more formal recognition in an international system that remains organized around the nation state.

This paper explores the state of mayoral powers in a shifting political economy and governance landscape; identifies ongoing challenges for research, policy, and practice; and recommend ways to address them. The study began as an investigation of city charter challenges, but expanded to address the heightened urgency of the current political moment and the looming federalist crisis in the United States. The analysis primarily centers on the United States with a U.S. audience in mind, but illustrative examples from countries such as the United Kingdom and Chile help provide important international context for emerging city leadership dynamics around the world.

A clearer articulation of the underlying governance structures in cities and the ways they are evolving will help mayors and other city leaders stay grounded and govern more effectively in a rapidly changing world. The lessons from mayors solving problems and making progress in spite of constraints on their formal powers and available resources are even more necessary today, as federal resources and leadership on critical urban issues are on a steep decline and the gulf between urban policy preferences and state and federal priorities widens. Though cities and governance contexts vary tremendously around the world, some generalizable insights can guide and inspire efforts to strengthen mayoral leadership in cities around the world.

KEY FINDINGS:

• The need to lead beyond the limits of formal powers is a defining condition of mayoral reality. Though there is tremendous variation in urban governance arrangements, with few exceptions, formal mayoral powers are shaped and limited by fragmented governance environments. Mayors are only one piece of a diverse and complex urban governance landscape. Yet mayors must (and do) deliver results despite fragmentation of power and authority within their own cities and across other levels of government.

• Key functional capacities help mayors lead, innovate, and deliver results in their cities in spite of fragmented governance environments and limited formal powers. As demands on cities increase, mayors’ jobs become increasingly technically complex, multidisciplinary, and network-oriented. Effective mayors govern by network, exercising soft powers of persuasion and executing strategies to improve their cities that rely on a range of public, private, and civic resources. A strong orientation to building, maintaining, and engaging with networks, professionalization of key roles and responsibilities, and collaboration with specialized intermediaries can all help mayors lead beyond the limits of their formal powers

• In fragmented governance environments, any proposed expansion or reduction in mayoral powers should focus on improving accountability and transparency in decision making. Efforts to improve the quality of city governance can focus on function or form. There is no one “right” way to design the role of mayor; mayors can be effective in many different forms of government. In fragmented governance environments, clear executive structures and transparent lines of authority and decision making are essential to promote transparency and accountability.

• Urban governance arrangements are under pressure and in flux. City leaders must adapt to and shape this change. The powers that cities and their mayors wield relative to other levels of government and other forces in a globally connected market and society are changing quickly. In the United States, the current federalist arrangement is being tested in real time as progressive urban needs and preferences grow increasingly out of sync with more conservative state and federal priorities. Devolution, regional consolidation, and pressure to include city representation in the international and global system are three multilevel governance changes to watch on the global stage. Mayors are on the front lines of them all.

In spite of constraints on their formal powers, mayors everywhere have developed important capacities to overcome them. In the last decade, there have been several promising efforts to strengthen the capacities of mayors and their staff and build leadership networks that allow them to share ideas and innovations. Whether focused on core capacities or pressing issues of the day, efforts to help mayors exercise their powers more effectively—by activating their networks; using data to increase accountability, effectiveness, and responsiveness; or adapting to whatever change is around the corner—can be force multipliers. 

Formal governance changes may not be necessary for mayors to rise to the complex task of governing cities, but in many cases change is coming for better or worse. It is a mayor’s job to navigate the changing preferences of citizens and residents and to negotiate and network across other levels of government and sectors to get things done. Advocating to overcome fragmentation or to demand more resources from states and central governments are reasonable and necessary functions of mayors. However, most mayors have few resources to dedicate to this task and the advocacy networks that exist to support these functions may need to evolve to keep up with new demands.

Cities are networks, and mayors are network leaders. Their ultimate success rests on the investments and actions of a number of different stakeholders—and on their ability to leverage them. Cutting across all of these recommendations is a call for greater focus and attention to these networks and the ways that cities and mayors build, activate, and engage with them. Though the primary audience for these recommendations are the mayors themselves, they are also relevant to other civic leaders, the heads of state and central governments, and philanthropies and donor organizations.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

1. Invest in professionalization and capacity building for mayors and key staff, focusing on the essential skills of building, maintaining, and leveraging networks. Mayors everywhere need to understand the fundamentals of good government and governance, and they need to understand how to engage with other levels of government and to advocate for city-level interests. Certain capacities are becoming even more essential: building and activating networks; using data and information technologies more effectively to plan, manage, and evaluate programs and services; and developing creative mechanisms to leverage public assets for greater value. Beyond these general capacities, mayors could benefit from domain-specific expertise in areas such as climate adaptation and mitigation, police reform, or immigration. In a time of increasing need and complexity, mayors and their teams need support and expertise.

2. Identify the specialized intermediaries and instruments that support successful cities and mayors. Then document, strengthen, and spread them. Mayors rely on relationships across other sectors of government, civic institutions, and the private sector to get most things done. Skilled and specialized intermediaries can help deliver on complex projects by coordinating, aligning, and activating networks of stakeholders, both for short-term projects and long-range planning. In most places, cities rely on a range of financial instruments and organizational vehicles—such as publicly owned, privately managed corporations; public authorities; and philanthropic investment funds—to help resource city projects. Their design matters: How public value is created and the way benefits are distributed vary widely from project to project and place to place. Mayors should know their options, understand the trade-offs, and be able to set the terms of city engagement.

3. Establish national data sources that track local government changes over time and support efforts to track the quality of city governance. There are too few sources of consistent, comprehensive, and credible data on local government and governance to enable the quality and quantity of research that is needed on this important topic. These could be housed in census or statistical bureaus at the federal level or within nongovernmental organizations. Regular surveys of mayors (such as the Menino Survey) and of city residents’ attitudes toward their mayors are important data sources as well. These should include specific questions on the quality of government functioning, network capacity, and partnerships with intermediaries as well as public perceptions, attitudes, and overall trust in government.

4. Increase public awareness about the role of mayors and city leadership, in particular the ways they are changing.  Even many experts who work with cities lack a detailed understanding of the fundamentals of mayoral powers. Public information campaigns about how local governments work and the role mayors play in leading them would help voters make informed choices when local government changes are proposed. Most importantly, in this time of great potential for governance shifts, cities in the United States and around the world need to be learning from examples of institutional adaptation and change.

With few exceptions, the pace of institutional and bureaucratic adaptation generally lags behind the accelerating changes in the world. Efforts by mayors to adapt and lead within the span of their existing formal powers by developing and strengthening their functional capacities are useful and essential; many promising examples exist that could be amplified, replicated, and scaled. There is a great need to identify potential governance reforms and to find ways to accelerate them.

The time is ripe for mayors to lead beyond the limits of their traditional roles. Such expanded mayoral leadership could have far-reaching effects, not only for cities and their residents, but for a world that needs them to succeed.

       

When more than 40 mayors from cities around the world gathered in the fjordside city of Stavanger, Norway for the second Global Parliament of Mayors, two topics dominated the discussions: power and problem solving. The agenda included the usual sweep through the most pressing issues cities face today — refugee resettlement, safety and security, resilience to withstand the effects of climate change. But the convening’s attention to urban governance arrangements and the powers that enable and constrain mayors to rise to meet these challenges set the convening apart. As Cape Town Mayor Patricia DeLille, newly appointed chair of the Global Parliament is fond of saying, “mayors don’t just talk, we actually DO.”

Launched in The Hague in 2016 after years of organizing efforts by the late political theorist  Benjamin Barber and a small cadre of activist mayors and expert advisers, the Global Parliament of Mayors is an action-focused body by design. The power of cities and the mayors who lead them comes from the force of their activity and actions: economic, political, social. The Global Parliament of Mayors aims to empower cities and their leaders by identifying concrete actions they can take – individually and collectively – to channel and amplify these forces to into stronger city decision-making powers to address pressing common governance challenges.

The low-hanging fruit is collective commitments to strengthen city responses to shared challenges. Examples abound of cities taking action in the absence of leadership from state and national governments, or in the face of opposition from them: city covenants to commit to Paris Agreement climate targets, or sanctuary city policies to protect and care for refugees and undocumented migrants.

But a formal pillar of the Global Parliament’s agenda is to fight for “the right of cities to self-governance.” This focus on identifying concrete ways to help cities and the mayors who lead them to overcome limits to their formal powers is what sets the Global Parliament of Mayors apart from other city leadership networks. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed made a pointed call for the GPM’s distinctive purpose:  “The only way we’re going to have a voice big enough to focus on cities instead of nation states is having a unified body where we can think and work and plan. If we don’t have an organization like this we will continue to be relegated to second class status with respect to nation states.”

A firm advocacy agenda is still in development, but a set of of prioritized actions is emerging. Strengthen devolution and metropolitan governance agendas, such as those underway in England, Chile, and France. Advocate for enhanced fiscal powers and fairer share of revenues to deliver on the infrastructure and services that allow states and nations to thrive. Create meaningful channels for public engagement in urban governance. Maximize the voice and vote of local governments in the international institutions setting and implementing urban development agendas, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and New Urban Agenda.

The second meeting of the Global Parliament of Mayors strengthened the foundation of this still-nascent body and set ambitious goals for the future. It hopes to grow to 90 mayor or city members by the time the next Parliament convenes in Bristol in 2018, and to 1,000 members by 2030. In the meantime, the Global Parliament will be working to formulate and advance specific actions to support its member mayors and their cities in their push to gain powers and authorities matched to the scale of the responsibilities in their hands.

Benjamin Barber believed in the force and legitimacy of cities as political actors in their own right, and saw earlier than many that their role relative to states and nations would have to shift. He would have applauded the conversations in Stavanger and the clear push for cities to take forceful and decisive action on the most pressing issues of our time.

       

To adapt to the growing leadership demands of a world in flux, cities need a strong grasp of the fundamentals of urban governance and finance—and an understanding of how to improve them.

Since launching The Project a little more than a year ago, the world has changed in dramatic ways. Yet with power balances in flux on the international stage and populist movements disrupting national politics in Europe and the U.S., the original imperative remains. 

By design or by default, cities have been shouldering more of the burden of solving the world’s problems: addressing climate change, improving economic opportunity and social mobility, integrating refugees, and more.

Our goal was to begin to unpack the fundamentals of urban governance and finance that allow cities to deliver on these demands, to sharpen the starting point for cities, and to provide more fertile ground for solutions.

The products from the Project’s first year describe the foundations of successful governance and fiscal arrangements in Europe, highlight key institutions and tools used to drive major urban regeneration projects, and surface vital questions to guide future research and practice. The papers examine 1) the different powers that cities and city governments enjoy; 2) the disparate ways these powers affect the design, financing, and delivery of urban redevelopment projects; and 3) the institutional arrangements that are emerging to spur large-scale sustainable growth and finance modern infrastructure.

In our examination of city powers, three country-focused papers provide grounding context for ongoing devolution and regional consolidation processes underway in France, Germany, and Italy—some of the most ambitious European examples of multi-level governance shifts. Two comparative papers distill core lessons from these case studies, illustrating important similarities and divergences between devolution strategies and experiences and isolating important crosscutting themes that are relevant within Europe and beyond.

Shared challenges, differential powers

In “Promoting effective and fiscally sound local investments in infrastructure,” Teresa Ter-Minassian identifies two key challenges local governments face: institutional and capacity weaknesses and financial constraints. The interaction between these challenges illustrates how effective investment and financing policies can help bolster local capacity.

Ter-Minassian provides a list of clear recommendations for countries and cities looking to improve access to finance and the quality of local governance, and models how to inventory and assess the capacities cities need to secure sustainable financing and work effectively across other levels of government. Taking the theme of good governance and political structure further, Bernard Soulage provides a focused analysis on common devolution strategies and policies across major EU countries and distills key transferrable lessons

Designing and delivering urban redevelopment projects.

The devil is truly in the details of urban governance and finance—the mechanics that undergird every successful urban revitalization project as well as the quotidian functions of city life.

Taken together, these papers provide a more detailed, comparative backdrop for deeper dives into city- and project-specific examples of transferable institutional innovations.

A recently published paper unpacks the policies and institutional mechanisms that facilitated Copenhagen’s successful transformation of its port and harbor to drive investment in broader growth and development goals. Forthcoming case studies on Copenhagen, Lyon, Hamburg, and Helsinki will compare Copenhagen’s institutional arrangements to three other cities to identify common features that undergird successful complex growth and redevelopment projects and modern infrastructure finance.

A forthcoming paper will examine the disparate ways these powers affect the design, financing and delivery of urban redevelopment projects. These future studies will provide more granular detail on the organizational structures, financial tools, and transactions that allow cities to maximize the value and social benefits of their land and real estate assets, sustain growth, and distribute the gains more equitably.

Model institutional arrangements

While this research focuses on European countries and cities, the models have application potential far beyond Europe. For U.S. cities in particular, lessons from Europe can be useful in an era of diminished federal resources and changing demographics. The cases examined in these papers illustrate a range of different models of power and resource sharing between central, state, and local governments and the resulting impacts on the ability of cities to fund infrastructure, housing, and services.

Many cities identified local strategies to augment national government funding, including identifying transitional measures to help them adapt to new fiscal autonomy and responsibility. The European Union’s investment funds offer an interesting example of how to incentivize regional collaboration and cooperation.

The papers also outline the kinds of limitations and friction points that can alter the fundamental power structures and governance arrangements within countries.

In England and Chile, new metropolitan governance structures and new leadership roles for individuals and organizations are being created right now. The evolving experiences of Lyon, Manchester, Torino, and Santiago with governance structures in flux will be the subject of future research. A comparative analysis of their real-time efforts to grapple with institutional change can inform other cities’ attempts to gain greater powers to plan, finance, and govern core functions of metropolitan life, including housing, transport, and social services.

In its first full year of work, the Project on 21st Century City Governance has identified common challenges and promising avenues for institutional innovation and change and surfaced new lines of inquiry that should animate further urban governance studies. Even across very different country and city contexts, there are consistent fundamentals of good governance and finance as well as sound institutional design that can help cities improve how they do what they must do—build functional infrastructure, deliver quality services, and provide opportunity for their residents. We hope these papers will outline many new directions for future research on these important topics and look forward to exploring new collaborations to advance the work.

       

United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May’s call for a snap general election on June 8 has threatened to overshadow another important vote that could reshape the landscape of urban leadership in England. On May 4, voters in six regions, including the large metros of Manchester and Liverpool, will head to the polls for the very first time to elect metro mayors (technically known as “combined authority mayors”). Collectively, these leaders will assume responsibility for almost 10 million people—nearly a fifth of England’s population—and economies worth £214 billion. 

The importance of the new role goes beyond sheer scale and novelty and could have far-reaching impacts. Here are four reasons to pay close attention to this election and the urban governance transformation it could accelerate:

1. The six new metro mayors—and the combined authorities that they lead—will get new formal powers to plan, manage, develop, and govern their regions. Though the details of the devolution deals are specific to each region, this new group of mayors will all have responsibility for setting long-term economic development agendas and will have access to a 30-year investment fund that can be used to make grants for employment and development purposes. Most will gain control over at least some aspects of housing, transport, and skills; in Greater Manchester, where the combined authority has been in place since 2011, expanded powers include control over health care and social spending.

The powers of the mayors will be balanced (or diluted) by other actors and interests, and some critics have pointed out that the powers are still too limited to have far-reaching impact. Still, this is a significant increase in the power to plan and act decisively for the region as a whole. And this initial set of powers can be seen as a baseline for future negotiations—if successful, they could be expanded over time through secondary legislation in Parliament, as Manchester’s have been.

Source: Centre for Cities, www.centreforcities.org/publication/everything-need-know-metro-mayors/

2. The new mayors will have the potential to lead beyond the limits of their formal powers, setting a vision for the region and harnessing networks of public, private, and civic actors to deliver results. If the experience of London’s mayor is any indication, the new metro mayors are likely to be popular. This increased visibility and stature—combined with an explicit charge to act as a strong network leader to coordinate other actors in the region—could help them succeed in spite of the limited suite of formal tools and powers at their disposal.

As Bruce Katz and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer have written, England’s metro mayors need only look across the Atlantic to find mayors exercising their role as networker-in-chief to set and deliver on ambitious and complex agendas. A report from the U.K.-based Institute for Public Policy Research lays out a number of recommendations for “enabling policies” that mayors can use to achieve a bigger bang for the bucks they do have: encouraging silo-busting, integrated planning, unlocking new finance mechanisms, and investing in opening and analyzing data for more effective government performance.

3. The new mayors could become a powerful voice—and target—to influence an urban agenda and address a growing democratic deficit. If they can align and organize, the new metro mayors have the potential to shape a metropolitan agenda for England and for the United Kingdom more broadly. Though they will likely come from different parties, these mayors will share common interests in transport networks, housing, and economic growth. If these pragmatic concerns can bridge partisan divides even to a degree, the metro mayors could become a powerful advocacy network for urban investments, working jointly to make the case that the success of the United Kingdom relies on the success of its cities.

They could also become an organizing target for advocates of inclusive growth, stronger transport, and more. While it is unlikely that the new mayors will play a formal role in Brexit negotiations and other matters of state, they could change the broader political context for these decisions. The Leave campaign gained traction in part as a backlash against centralized power in the United Kingdom and Europe. A group of directly elected, accountable mayors at the head of its largest metros could help the country address its democratic deficit and curb the regional disparities that lead to political shocks like Brexit.

4. This election expands on two big governance shifts—devolution of power to local government and consolidation of power in metropolitan regions—that have relevance for cities around the world. Greater Manchester’s regional governance experiment is now well established. (In many ways it is the blueprint for the devolution agenda that the U.K. government has been pushing in earnest since 2014.) The move toward metro mayors marks a significant expansion of both the devolution and consolidation trends and will prove a greater test of the models. Their success could be a force to accelerate the devolution wave, both to U.K. cities that do not currently have mayors and to regions that lack combined authorities.

Elsewhere in Europe, France and Italy have been on their own paths to streamline and consolidate local powers; in South America, Santiago was recently consolidated into a metropolitan government for the first time. In the United States, a contentious city/county consolidation proposal is playing out in Syracuse, New York, and the suburban annexation debate has been reignited by years of population loss in Chicago. All around the world, the boundaries of city governance are in flux. The way English metros embrace and adapt to their new leaders will have broader relevance for cities grappling with similar shifts.

The U.K. government has worked hard to raise awareness about the May 4 election and role of the new mayors. High voter turnout would undoubtedly provide a boost to the government’s broader devolution agenda and give the new mayors—even in the most hotly contested races like the West Midlands—the mandate to hit the ground running that their fledgling offices will be seeking.

Regardless of the outcome of these contests, the forces driving the devolution agenda from the top down and the ground up are very likely here to stay. Cities and metropolitan regions will continue to seek greater power and control over policies and development decisions that will shape their future. The central government has incentives—clearer in economic terms than political ones—to ensure that the cities powering the country are working. Whatever happens in England’s mayoral elections, its regional devolution experiment will have a lot to teach the world—if it will pay attention.

       

In this brave new world, expectations for city leadership are rising by the day. Home to the majority of U.S. residents who did not vote for Donald Trump, cities are a natural center of resistance to the new administration’s agenda. Already leading on policies to raise the minimum wage and combat climate change, cities are now on the front lines in battles over refugees, immigration, and other federal actions that threaten to stifle the diversity and entrepreneurial activity that powers the American economy. But as the ongoing conflict over sanctuary cities shows, the sources, uses, and limits of city power with respect to other levels of government are complex and not widely understood. Which tools should city leaders be sharpening, and which of the many anticipated battles are the most strategic to fight? 

In City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), University of Virginia law professor Richard Schragger offers some answers. Though it is nominally about the more expansive concept of city power, Schragger’s real concern is the messy business of institutions, systems, laws, processes, and norms that define how decisions are made and where authority sits. By focusing on the structural and institutional forms that shape cities, Schragger puts a fine point on the vertical and horizontal limits to formal city policymaking and makes a compelling case for what can and should be done in spite of them.

Schragger’s first claim is that cities should not only fully exercise the powers they already have to the greatest extent possible, they should advocate for more powers. As “a process of economic development, as a generator of the middle class and as the primary location for the exercise of robust self-government,” cities have critical roles to play in building a thriving society.

He offers a clear prescription for what cities should use their powers to do: implement policies to enhance and expand the delivery of basic services and to ameliorate the burdens of income inequality. In Schragger’s words, inequality is “a function of the city itself, both something the city creates and something the city can solve.” City power should therefore be used to “enable cities to help their citizens manage the inevitable cycle of economic growth and decline.” With concerns for equity rising, and new research showing the costs of segregation and inequality to cities in the long run, Schragger’s advice to cities is clear: identify every available power and tool to address distributional issues, and activate them.

The flip side of the argument—what cities should not do—is likely to be his most contested claim. Schragger is deeply skeptical of the ability of city powers and policies to be decisive in altering a city’s economic development trajectory. He finds efforts to use city policies to grow local economies through business attraction and corporate subsidies an ultimately fruitless pursuit that diverts resources and attention from the more pressing goal of meeting the basic needs of residents. “Tying growth or decline to any particular policy is a hazardous business,” Schragger writes. “Unsurprisingly, city leaders tend to take credit when cities are booming and deflect blame when they bust.”

Yet there are numerous examples of cities using economic development policies to stimulate productive industrial clusters and innovation districts. Though these projects often rely on state and federal policy (and funding), they don’t happen without supportive city leadership. A plea for greater balance between policies that aim to drive growth and those that seek to improve equity seems more pragmatic than a wholesale abandonment of city leadership on development projects. Yet the commonsense call for cities to do more of what they can do well and less of what they cannot, should resonate in a time of such scarce public resources. Schragger’s book should remind city leaders that the goals of growth and equity need not be mutually exclusive, and that they have not only the imperative, but the tools to address equity concerns at a time when they are paramount. 

Federal and state investments in cities have been generally declining, particularly for critical infrastructure and for services that support the most vulnerable residents. With the exception of a federal infrastructure bill, this trend is likely to continue under the Trump administration. At the same time, state governors and legislators hostile to urban agendas are preempting progressive municipal policies on everything from paid sick leave to taxing authority, aided by ALEC-authored bills designed to enforce the strictest limits on city power. Cities must be vigilant, resourceful, and aligned in their pushback to this pressure—and creative in their exploration of new paths to empowerment.

This will require a sharper understanding of the current extent and limits of city powers. Schragger’s book is an important contribution, a call for cities to exercise powers they already have to address the pressing concerns of our present moment. But this will not be enough: cities are going to have to lead beyond the limits of their current formal powers and find ways to expand them to champion their more progressive agendas in the absence of state and federal support. The time is ripe for a revival of the study of city power and urban governance, both within academia and in the professions that will be called on to help adapt urban institutions to new conditions and circumstances: law, policy, economics, and public administration. The resurgence of academic centers that aim to cultivate both the scholarship and practice of urban governance, like the Fordham Urban Law Center (which hosted a conversation with Richard Schragger, co-directors Nestor Davidson and Sheila Foster, and myself earlier this year), is an encouraging sign. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a groundswell of interest and investment in a field that can change the trajectory of cities and impact the lives of millions of people.