Urbanism: economic governance relation to urban development

Urbanism: Economic Governance Relation to urban development is the fifteenth article assessing the dialectic of architecture and urban design in the urbanism field. I will go through this relationship from the top scale of urbanism in the city to the smallest scale of urbanism components of urban space.

In this article, I will discuss and analyze what is economic governance, what type of public policy it relates to, what recent papers in the academic, research, and practice study in economic governance, how international organizations deal with economic governance, and how they produce principals, and how urban development occurs in reality and its direct relation to economic governance, what architects and urban designers need to consider in practice related to economic governance relation to urban development?

Economic governance is produced by the government for many related matters within the government work in the country. It relates to social matters like social network support. Economic governance also takes into consideration environmental matters and directly impacts sustainable development. Economic governance is the main concern of any political party, or body because it relates to moving a country’s economic and political system forward for the welfare and well-being of the society.

Now, what is economic governance?

 Economic governance refers to the policy and regulation system that governments adopt to manage the economy of a country. Economic governance is the process of supporting two major works economic activity and economic transaction through protecting individual and organization’s property rights, enforcing contracts, and involving collective action to provide appropriate physical and organizational infrastructure.

What are the two broad areas or categories of the economy that economic governance deals with?

Economic governance deals with the two categories of economy macroeconomics and microeconomics.

Microeconomics studies people’s decisions when they run their businesses and the allocation of resources and prices of their goods and service provision. The study considers taxes, regulations, and government legislation. And it considers the supply and demand of the market. Microeconomics deals with several key principles like demand supply and equilibrium, production theory, costs of production, and labor economics.

Macroeconomics studies the country’s economic behavior rather than individual businesses and deals with the analysis of the entire industries and economies in the country. Macroeconomics tries to answer several questions like, “What should the rate of inflation be?” or “What stimulates economic growth?” governments and their agencies rely on macroeconomics to formulate economic and fiscal policy. One of the main economic indicators that many economists look for when analyzing a country’s economic status is the fiscal balance.

In this manner, I have illustrated what economic governance in its two categories focuses concerning urban development. It is how money or fiscal matters are directed and managed to serve economic development whether supporting businesses or allocating and managing funds for urban development.

Now, what recent papers in the academic, research, and practice study on economic governance, how international organizations deal with economic governance, and how they produce principals?

Many research papers rotate the same research question or topic, the jargon of research, in areas of economy and politics. Google Scholar alone revealed 3.8 million research papers on the topic of economic growth. Google search engine revealed 200 more results than Google Scholar for the same topic.

The research topic that is cycled in the research, academic, and even in practice is about the answer to the research question: what are the five principles of good urban governance?

The five principles¹  are effectiveness for economic facilities, equity for social opportunities, participation for political freedom, accountability for transparency guarantees, and security for protective security. The research papers rotate the same topic of social inclusion concerning poverty reduction, equity of economic growth, and local ownership of development projects.

On the other hand, organizations²  in the world are concerned about urban economic development strategies that are based on good economic governance. The new urban agenda vision is concerned with the four guiding principles: Inclusive urban economic growth, economic growth must be in a strong rights framework, the national and local contribution of economic growth to sustainable development, and economic growth must enable informal livelihoods. Adding to that there are several enabling conditions such as well-governed local and national institutions, businesses that support formal and informal sector activities, policy dialogue with all private and public entities, improvement of quality of life through the improvement of physical and social infrastructure, and support for innovation and entrepreneurship.

In the two examples of papers and organization publication the rotation of the same principles and supporting and enabling conditions. Organizations hold international conferences worldwide and a country in the Middle East appears active participants and shows willingness to develop and achieve but the reality is different. Issuing a permanent residency when buying a property worth 330,000 $ 330,000 leads to nothing. Providing golden visas for people having the same rules as EU, and USA countries but with no legal rights. Giving foreigners the Passport but not specifying what are the roots, paths, and methods to achieve that is not logical. Now, why I should come to this country to get a permanent residency or golden visa or passport if the country is suffering from economic decline, economic activities and construction are declining, and the country is relying on foreign workers? Why should I stay in the country if there is nothing to do? These economic and policy changes in a country that does not have a constitution will not boost urban development. There is no relation to the strategies and methods to move the real estate or economic cycle in a country.

Now, how does urban development occur?

In my previous article about the alternative approach to building a local development plan, I introduced the three steps which include defining needs. A need could be an urban problem like city deprivation coming from unemployment, reduction of population in the city, vanishing businesses, and migration to other locations. The resolution could be directed action through the government and joined private sector by pumping funds or the workforce. An indirect approach is to change policy to attract foreign investment to solve the problem.

Another form of the need is to respond to the demand such as the shift of working professionals to healthier workplaces may require for instance, an increase in public transport movement and quantity, an increase in the construction activity to supply housing demand, a development of traffic network due to increase in car flow and demand for parking lots, due to increase in shifting people an increase in foods and goods and opening retail projects, and the tax generated from this shift to be used in government priority development projects.

Returning to the article concerns the intervention of architecture and urban design within the economic governance building and development. Economic governance issues related to economic policy related to businesses, entrepreneurship, funding for new economic activities, public sector focus on urban development projects, investment policies, funding policies, and defining areas of decline and growth in the economic sector.

Architects should regularly check and identify the newly issued policies to target their efforts of attracting new projects to their businesses,  check the areas of demand and growth in economic activities to advise their client towards the proper selection of investment, a decline or deprivation in an area could be an opportunity for development such as defining what types of development are flourishing within this decline and how the government is willing to solve this deprivation in their economic policy.  

Urban designers are concerned with managing and coordinating urban development in the city. They are concerned about defining development opportunities in the city. In the booming of construction activity, certain functions are flourishing and causing an increase in construction. An open and relaxed policy for foreign investment and reduction of overhead on investment like tax could happen in certain functions like housing, residential, and industrial sectors. Targeting the public sector’s current approach to development in their economic policies could lead to new urban development projects like landscape projects, public transit development projects like transit nodes, stations, and road networks, new national rail connections to adjacent countries, development of new trade economic governance that could lead to the development of ports and border facilities building and plants, the increase in tourism flow in the country is a sign for development in the hospitality projects, what a city can consume is another approach for defining development, for example, a city that relays on importing most of their farming products like eggs, milk, and so on is a good sign for the development of agricultural projects, a city that relays on adjacent or another location of supply of construction material like concrete could lead to a new development of concrete mix plant that supply the city and growing construction, a degradation in an environmental area like area pollution, water beds like marshes, lakes and rivers could lead to environment development projects, and the list continues.

References:

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