Power,place and the New Civic Leadership

Introduction

Should city leaders be servants of the citizens who elected them, or should they be agents of international economic forces? For some the answer will be obvious. Many of those who are committed to democratic values will argue that locally elected politicians should focus entirely on meeting the needs of local communities – they should disregard international economic interests. Others will claim that this is a loaded question. They will argue that, while elected city leaders should be accountable to local citizens, they also need to pay attention to the requirements of global capital.

How to handle this tension has been centre stage in discussions and practice relating to ‘local’ economic development ever since Local Economy was launched in 1986. This Viewpoint offers a contribution to this ongoing debate. By drawing on recent research on place-based leadership in 17 innovative cities across the world it attempts to throw new light on the possibilities for ‘local’ economic development and, more broadly, the whole idea of local place shaping.

The argument is in four parts. First, a distinction is drawn between place-less and place-based power. Second, the exercise of bold civic leadership in Melbourne provides an illustration of how the exercise of place-based power can make a major difference to the quality of life in a city. Third, the discussion turns to consider current UK national policy for cities and city regions. Chancellor George Osborne claims that new proposals for ‘devolution deals’ with selected city regions will bolster local power when the reverse is actually the case. The measures will lead to an extraordinary centralisation of power within the British state. A new word is put forward – Osbornification – to draw attention to this troubling development. A fourth section, by drawing on the experience of innovative city and city regional leadership on an international basis, puts forward a conceptual framework – described as the New Civic Leadership (NCL). This may be helpful for those wishing to explore new relationships between place-based civic leadership, public service innovation and progressive policy making.

Place-based power versus place-less power

In the first issue of Local Economy Sam Aaronovitch was right to draw attention to the importance of developing local economic strategies and initiatives: ‘Large areas of the UK economy have been deeply affected by restructuring, relocation and technological change. Overcoming decline and responding to change have become major preoccupations of local authorities, voluntary organisations and community groups’ (Aaronovitch, 1986: 3).

In the years since then many articles have been published in these pages, and elsewhere, showing how elected local authorities have worked with partners on a collaborative basis to advance local economic prosperity and reduce social divisions. However, notwithstanding these efforts, place-less power has grown inexorably in the last 30 years.

Place-less leaders, that is, people who are not expected to care about the consequences of their decisions for particular places and communities, have gained extraordinary power and influence in the modern era. Globalisation, and, in particular, the growth of massive, multi-national companies, helps to explain the growing disconnect between societal needs and the behaviour of many, albeit not all, economic actors. In his perspicacious analysis of the moral limits of markets Michael Sandel puts it this way: ‘ … without quite realising it, without ever deciding to do so, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society’ (Sandel, 2012: 10; author’s emphasis).

His argument is that the obsession with markets is having deeply troubling consequences. Sandel shows how many of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities. Other scholars confirm that, across the world, neo-liberalism is having unwelcome impacts. It is beyond doubt that neo-liberalism is creating societies that are becoming increasingly unequal (Lansley, 2012; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). The growth of social and economic divisions is not just morally unacceptable. As various scholars have shown the dominant economic forces of today are threatening the civic quality of communities (Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2012). Basic values relating to, for example, solidarity, generosity and compassion are being downplayed – it is almost as if social relations are being remade in the image of market relations.

However, the growth of place-less power has not gone unchallenged. While researching my new book on how to create inclusive cities, I discovered 17 examples of inspirational civic leadership drawn from cities across the world (Hambleton, 2015). I found impressive stories of urban achievement in cities as diverse as Auckland, Copenhagen, Curitiba, Freiburg, Guangzhou, Malmö, Melbourne, New York City and Portland. A key feature of these innovation stories is that place-based leaders have been successful in developing and implementing strategies that are guided by locally determined social and economic priorities. Take Melbourne as an example.

Melbourne makeover

In 1978 the centre of Melbourne in Australia was a dump. The local newspaper, The Age, described Melbourne as having ‘an empty useless city centre’ – and published pictures to prove it. Leap forward 30 years and The Economist praises Melbourne as being ‘the most liveable city in the world’. Indeed, Melbourne has now established itself as an international leader in how to create a people-friendly public realm at the heart of a major metropolis. How did they do it? Answer: strong, place-based leadership.

Many local leaders contributed to this remarkable transformation – local politicians, community activists, urban designers and others. Under the leadership of Rob Adams, Director of City Design for the City of Melbourne, city planners and urban designers played a decisive role. The first Melbourne strategic plan of 1985 aimed to switch the whole of the central area from a 12-hour pattern of activities to a vibrant 24-hour centre. The plan set out robust urban design principles and clear priorities for land use, built form, an increased central city residential population, community services and streetscape.

Out went the previous developer-dominated approach to urban regeneration and in came the very strong design requirements – for example, insisting on building up to the street frontage, requiring active frontage on all streets and a very protective stance in relation to historic buildings and spaces. Purposeful planning, coupled with an imaginative approach to development control, has reshaped the public realm. The term Central Business District (CBD) was discarded and replaced by the idea of a Central Activities District (CAD). The results are spectacular.

The central area residential population rose with a growth in the housing stock from 650 dwellings in 1985 to 28,000 in 2013. The city is now much greener, there is more pedestrian space and there are many more bicycle routes – a really lively street café culture has been created and local, service-oriented businesses are thriving.

Melbourne is not alone in demonstrating that powerful, place-based leadership can make a big difference to the quality of life in a city. For example, as Ivan Turok (2014) explained in his recent article in this journal, remarkable changes have taken place in Medellin, Colombia. His analysis shows that it is possible for imaginative local leaders to transform a city, even a city faced with formidable problems. In this case a city noted for violence and street crime has, in a period of 20 years or so, changed itself into a welcoming place that is strongly committed to social inclusion and equality.

Osbornification: The centralisation of state power in the UK

Until November 2014 Prime Minister Thatcher stood tall as the unrivalled centraliser of power in British politics. Her Rates Act of 1984 enabled the central state to decide, over the heads of local voters, how much they would be allowed to tax themselves. In countries that value the importance of local democracy in society such a centralising step is regarded as incomprehensible.

However, with his speech on 3 November 2014, Manchester to get directly elected Mayor, Chancellor George Osborne hopes to introduce into England an era of centralisation on steroids, one that goes well beyond the Thatcherite command and control state of the 1980s. His Autumn Statement, presented to Parliament on 3 December 2014, confirms his bid to finish off the idea that locally elected democratic institutions should be accountable to the people who elected them. Rather these elected local authorities are to be told by the central state to decimate local public services in the name of austerity.

So startling is the nature of current central government policy towards local government that I suggest we need a new word to encapsulate it. To Osbornify public policy involves introducing extreme measures to boost the power of the central state while all the time pretending that power is being decentralised. It takes political spin to a new level of deception.

Mr Osborne said, in his November announcement, that his proposals to create a directly elected mayor for the Manchester conurbation, with powers over transport, housing, planning and policing, would: ‘… give Mancunians a powerful voice and bring practical improvements for local people’. Not all bad, you might say. But he went on to state: ‘I want to talk to other cities who are keen to follow Manchester’s lead – every city is different and no model of local power will be the same’.

The Osborne proposals involve Whitehall taking three massive steps to centralise power. First, who is going to decide which areas of the country are to have these new governance arrangements? Ministers. Second, who will decide the criteria for devolving power to these lucky localities? Ministers. Third, who will be crawling over the detailed proposals individual cities have for urban development and socio-economic innovation? Ministers.

This is classic divide and rule tactics. Cities around England understand this well enough. However, at this point in time, they have few options. The solidarity of local government is a casualty as localities vie for the bespoke attention of ministers. It is truly disappointing to note that the recent RSA City Growth Commission report on Unleashing Metro Growth says nothing about the centralisation of power that would stem from their proposals (Royal Society of Arts (RSA), 2014). The Commission notes correctly that: ‘The UK is one of the most centrally driven countries in the world when it comes to tax raising and spending’ (p. 8). It then goes on to advocate a ludicrously over-centralised model of decision-making. Under the RSA proposals, welcomed with delight by Chancellor Osborne, individual cities are expected to prepare detailed metro applications for devolved status.

The dynamics proposed here resemble the dialogue that takes place between autocratic parents and their children over pocket money. The government seems to be saying to cities (by the way, counties and country areas are left out of the loop completely which is another major flaw) if you do as I say you can have a bit more to spend. The proposals bolster centralisation to a wholly unacceptable level. In this vision city regions are expected to be accountable in minute detail ‘upwards’ to distant figures in Whitehall when it should be obvious that any sensible system of local democracy requires politicians to be accountable ‘downwards’ to the citizens who elected them.

The New Civic Leadership

In the 1980s New Public Management (NPM), which involves the use of private sector management practices in the public sector, gained popularity in many countries (Hoggett, 1991; Hood, 1991). In essence, the approach stems from the belief that government should be run like a private business. Various writers have shown that privatisation, marketisation, treating citizens as if they were self-interested consumers, and similar strategies, have serious limitations (Mintzberg, 1996). In my new book I suggest that those interested in progressive public policy making might find a notion that I describe as New Civic Leadership (NCL) to be more relevant and useful than NPM. NCL involves strong, place-based leadership acting to co-create new solutions to public problems by drawing on the complementary strengths of civil society, the market and the state. If we are to understand effective, place-based leadership, we need a conceptual framework that highlights the role of local leaders in facilitating public service innovation. Here I provide a sketch of a possible framework.

Figure 1 suggests that in any given locality there are likely to be five realms of place-based leadership reflecting different sources of legitimacy:

Political leadership – referring to the work of those people elected to leadership positions by the citizenry.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The realms of place-based leadership.

These roles are all important in cultivating and encouraging public service innovation and, crucially, they overlap. I describe the areas of overlap as innovation zones – areas providing many opportunities for inventive behaviour. This is because different perspectives are brought together in these zones and this can enable active questioning of established approaches. It is fair to say the areas of overlap in Figure 1 are often experienced as conflict zones, rather than innovation zones. These spaces do, of course, provide settings for power struggles between competing interests and values. Moreover, power is unequally distributed within these settings. This is precisely why place-based leadership matters. The evidence from my research is that civic leadership is critical in ensuring that the innovation zones – sometimes referred to as the ‘soft spaces’ of planning (Illsley et al., 2010) or ‘space for dialogue’ (Oliver and Pitt, 2013: 198–199) – are orchestrated in a way that promotes a culture of listening that can, in turn, lead to innovation. Civic leaders are, of course, not just ‘those at the top’. All kinds of people can exercise civic leadership and they may be inside or outside the state.

Conclusions

Powerful forces shape the context within which place-based leadership is exercised. Influential place-less leaders – in globalised corporations, central governments and elsewhere – may care little about the quality of life of particular communities living in particular localities. However, cities and localities are not helpless victims in a global flow of events. A key challenge for place-based leaders is to understand how to use their local power to negotiate with place-less organisations to bring about desirable outcomes and enhance the power of local democracy. The analysis presented here suggests that place-based leadership can, even in heavily constrained situations, work to expand the amount of political space available to local communities. The obsession with markets and market values has done great damage to societies across the world. But many cities are, right now, pursuing progressive strategies that amplify the power of communities living in particular places to shape their own future.