Most of us take utilities like water, electricity and even wireless internet access for granted as necessities to flourish in modern cities; but what about good public transport? Many would argue that successful cities are walkable or even cyclable which is a fair point; but doesn’t successful transport in these situations at least serve as a backup choice?

Public transport has lots of faults from being crowded, humid, late, over-priced; but it usually provides a flow to a city, an option to get from A to B for anyone from school child to pensioners, but I think most importantly it compresses the flow of traffic by moving more people per square meter than ordinary cars do.

Councillor Peter Box mentioned during the CLES labour fringe event that public transport needs to be integral to the way we work, that it must not be an add-on. Other good points that were mentioned were:

• Desrisking private investment in public transport  – Neil McInroy, CLES
• Coherent policies with transport at the core – Cllr Peter Box
• Social justice in investing in bus services – Willie Bain, MP

In a recent interview with CEOs for Cities, Richard Florida talks about how the velocity of cities, or the speed of which people move, do business etc., is crucial to success of cities? The argument goes that any additional 5 minutes spent commuting is essentially a loss in productivity. The message seems to be: Internalise lost time and gain productivity.

While I am sure that there is a financial gain in looking at speeding up processes and optimising processes for efficiency – it is also interesting that a study on Pace of Life showed that side effects of a higher pace of life also had side effects of “people in fast-moving cities are less likely to help others and have higher rates of coronary heart disease”.

However, there are other considerations to take into account. Studies show that there is a correlation between the length of commute and quality of life and it looks like this “waste time” is not only a waste in terms of lost productivity but also impacts on people’s quality of life.

Personally, I think there might be other criteria than speed and velocity that are crucial to cities – let me know what you think?

See the full interview with Richard Florida elaborating on this theory on the CEOs for cities YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mernwfTTW3E

In recent writings both Sarah Longlands and Matthew Taylor suggest that our immediate surroundings seem to have an increasing importance in our everyday lives. Personally, I think this could possibly be a reaction to economics before the credit crunch when some ecomonic models, like like long tail, seemed to defy locality and use the global scene as their local market but with which result – we could ask ourselves whether this contributed to brining our economies to their knees.

I really enjoyed Sarah Longlands’ article on City Regions on the CLES website and think this is an interesting follow-on to Neil McInroy recent blog post Snuggles Cities – on cities and polycentricity.

I agree with the point of view that by introducing the larger frameworks of city regions, local social enterprises of a limited size and working in the local environment could be challenged when facing the scaling up of projects. And although this would of course give opportunities to partner with like-minded organisations and win bigger contracts, there is a danger that organisations sever their bond to their locality and the community they are immersed in. As Longlands writes:

 ”a consequence of the city region governance is that we may find that there is less emphasis, and less value, placed on activity and knowledge at the “local” level. However, CLES believe that this would be a mistake [...]  when it comes to delivering support to local communities and knowing your customer base, nothing beats the quality of local knowledge. From CLES’ research, we know that social enterprises play an important role in supporting communities, particularly those who are most deprived, through employment and their supply chain. This investment in localities is a vital part of supporting the resilience of local economies.”

On a very similar note but from a slightly different perspective, Matthew Taylor of the RSA mentions in a recent blog post, called For good ideas – go local, two challenges has heard over and over again from public service leaders and managers:

1. a growing ambition to reduce social exclusion, increase attainment and improve life chances with the expectation of declining resources,
2. there was the emphasis on the urgency of greater co-ordination and collaboration between public sector institutions and agencies.

Matthew Taylor wisely concludes:

 ”So the message out in public sector land is; we have to do things very differently if we are meet growing needs with shrinking budgets, and that crucial to the capacity to reform and innovate is a much higher level of collaboration, focussed around a shared strategy and a strong sense of place.” 

In a recent blog post, Neil McInroy from Centre for Local Economic Strategies, introduced the concept of Snuggle Cities.

I like the idea of snuggle cities where polycentricity of cities is seen as a value to to an area and the relationship between the different centres is seen as being important. Where many polycentric cities seem to have one predominant centre the idea of snuggling as bed partners is also the idea of none of the centres taking hegemony over the others but they all co-exist with respect for each other. As Neil writes

“the trick is to create economic development activity in these places, which does not erode the success of the [predominant financial centre]. They can’t collide. They are forever joined and are in bed together and they need to cosily ‘snuggle’ together.. “

I understand this snuggle as a constant negotiation of the relationship to the other centre, a constant repositioning in terms of one’s strengths and what different. This dynamic, if it works, can be a tremendous benefit for cities and city regions. The challenge, as I see it, is to persuade representatives of the existing strong centres to enter open-heartedly into this equal relationship and the constant negotiating of this relationship.

What a wonderful word to describe the lack of innovation and creativity in business and organisations. In a recent IdeaCast, Umair Haque explains how business in the current downturn fail because they fail to truly renew themselves. Instead they innovate by reapplying outdated innovations to existing products, patching dated models rather than totally rethinking their products in a twenty first century context. These businesses end up being unresponsive or zombie like to the changing world around them – an example of this is the car industry where the concept of cars is not rethought but rather cars are adapted with older technologies.