Reflections on Regional governance, via Enrique Penelosa

Great interview with Enrique Penelosa here

A quote:

Many people say that cities should be given more control by their national governments – but I think what’s even worse than having governments controlling cities is having a myriad of municipalities, each one doing whatever they want. It’s completely mad. In Colombia, we have a constitution which gives a lot of independence to municipalities. If they are located exactly where a city needs to grow, they can simply decide “no”. And so that city is instead forced to grow very far away, in a low-density suburban development.

Nice to know that metropolitan fragmentation is a non-American problem. But I suppose it's a problem for federal governments in general--their component units of of governance can't be dissolved and re-arranged the way they can be for more centralized governments (France, China, Canada, present-day UK). When polities have only administrative existence, they can be split and aggregated sort of at will. But when polities are units of governance, it's much much messier. Not that agglomeration is the solution: Witness Rob Ford in Toronto, or the long term consequence of lumping all the NYC boroughs into one city. (Ditto Chicago). But, perhaps, faced with metropolitan fragmentation, perhaps a federation is the only way to go about regional governance. Which implies a federal structure of governance as well, with a bicameral legislator. 'Councils' are questionable in terms of responsibility, and 'borough presidents', rather that supplying (in the words of Michael Dell) 'one neck to choke', seem to result in 'one vote to buy' (or rather, one veto to buy off).

Market Urbanism

Markets are efficient only through repeated transactions. Market attempts at mega-projects reliably fail, falling foul of the same problems as public mega-projects. Plans that need everything to go right inevitably fail. The larger the number of things that need to go right, the larger the number of critical failure points. Like evolution, markets are efficient providers because they are good as discarding inefficient participants. Iteration is essential.

Iteration is also essential if you ask the government to do anything. A government is subject to the same kind of errors as any market participant (and a few others to boot). So if you are going to ask your government to provide something, it can't be a one-off. It has to be something which is going to be provided again and again--something your government can practice at**.

Mega-projects are stupid. If something needs scale to be successful, chances of success are marginal*. If something can't be built incrementally, don't do it. Demonstration projects that relies on scaling up later (monorails monorails monorails) are doomed to failure. To forestall the inevitable failure of mega-projects, demand everything be phased: broken down into smaller segments. If none of the segments are independently viable, odds are that the project as a whole isn't either. 

*Simplicio points to social media of Facebook and Google as a counter-examples: But I'm old enough to remember the silent evidence: MySpace and AltaVista, and the whole cemetery of non-Google not-Facebook social media firms.

**There is no guarantee you government will get better at provision. There is no competition, and no way to discard the 'inefficient provider'. Providing better provision of public goods requires a public agency with a cultural commitment to self-improvement. (Go read Good to Great: The social sectors).