Urbanism: What are the key elements of good urban governance?

Urbanism: What are the key elements of good urban governance? is the sixteenth 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 the first article on how political governance creates urban change, I have discussed and analyzed many research papers in the academic context, and publications of political governance in practice. Political governance is built, issued, and concerned with four main criteria. Human concerns are the first focusing on many urban issues related to society like the human rights of citizens and improving social conditions of people like poverty and social despair. The economic interest includes many urban issues like economic development, concerns about the urbanization process and its relation to capitalist socialists – private-public partnership, entrepreneurism urbanization, and transformation approaches and changing political ideology to solve market problems. The cultural and national loyalties include political change towards new successful urban change, consideration of political power in the process of creating political governance, private sector leadership, and delivery of governance. The religious commitments include the determination of laws controlling the people’s relations and freedom of practicing religions and beliefs, initiatives that support religious activity in society, and government support.

In analyzing these criteria conclusion is made that human concerns like human rights are how fiscal matters flow and its management to create for example employment access to funds and social support. Reducing poverty and social despair’s main subject is fiscal matters. The main economic interest without analysis main subject is the funding process and management. The main cultural and national loyalties subject is power and decision making and how to build successful political governance that means economic success, in other words, capital flow and its management. The religious commitments the main subject is the human value represented in the social-religious relationships, and how the government supports these matters by raising awareness programs or funding religious activities.

To sum up these four criteria main subjects are fiscal flow, funding, management, power, and decision-making, social-religious relationship laws, and social activities funding. The main subject of these four political governance criteria is capital spending and management.

In the previous article about the relation of economic governance to urban development, I have discussed research papers and publications on the practice of economic governance’s role in urban development. Economic governance is the management of a country’s economy. Economic governance has various roles in the organizations and people’s rights within the country’s economic system and providing the essential physical infrastructure for economic activities for the public sector and private sector. Economic governance deals with the two sectors of the economy microeconomics and macroeconomics. Macroeconomics deals with the economic growth stimulation of the country. Microeconomics deals with the study of decision-making in related business, allocating resources and prices, and it consists of the supply and demand of the market.

Economic governance is built based on four 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. Economic growth is concerned about the social dimension of governance like poverty reduction, equity of economic growth, and local ownership of development projects.

Economic governance on a larger scale deal with the management of fiscal flow in the country to stabilize the country’s economy. And how cash flow is directed to protect people’s rights by providing the essential infrastructure. Governance related to Macroeconomics on the one hand is to strengthen the economy and microeconomics is how to guide businesses to proper and successful decision-making of using their funds by proper management and pricing. The four principles of building economic governance main subject is increasing country capital and reducing loss, protecting financial resources, and supporting informal businesses to support business cycles.

To sum up economic governance from the social dimension is concerned with protecting human rights in development and ownership which means that capital is directed equally to people. From the political dimension, how the political system is managing the country capital and directing it to the growth of the economy and development projects. The main subject of economic governance is how capital flows and is directed in the country’s economic system and how it is managed for the well-being of the society.

I have articulated and analyzed in my article about environmental governance and its role in shaping the urban from various research papers and practice publications. I have discussed and analyzed how environment governance is built and the similarities to building public policy. Within the process of building and issuing an environment governance many barriers, difficulties, and obstacles arise. For example, if environment governance is on the global scale a competing interest in producing environment governance is when some countries are not affected by the environmental issue and are forced due to global contribution to achieve and apply the governance. Another barrier is when the environmental agency has less limited funds, assets, and workforce to deal with the evaluation and implementation of the governance. The logic of capital constraints of various levels the local and international has its effect on achieving the governance. Modernizing industries to cope with environmental issues and the efficiency of energy use and waste reduction not only needs professional people but also high-level involvement from many engineering disciplines and others.

Critical issues arise when an agency starts the process of building an environment governance. For example, involving the international political agenda especially when the countries are from different political backgrounds and directions. The difficulties of negotiation, management, coordination, evaluation, and implementation within the process of building environment governance.

Environment governance’s main subject whether it is on the global, local, or city scale is the capital reserved to support the implementation of the governance. The various issues facing building governance like the evaluation, implementation, and coordination rely on the amount of capital to supply the workforce and mobilize the assets towards achieving it. The capital and its flow towards the supply of the organization chart of the related body to implement the governance is the main factor of success.

A good urban governance key elements are the capital reserved to fund its creation, the political system that is adaptive and friendly with other political systems in the time of urban change, and the availability of sufficient knowledge and professionals to run the operations towards its successful end.   

One of many initiatives that discuss the creation of urban governance was in cop26 in Glascow of the various political, economic, and environmental dimensions to better cities and environment. figure 1 is one of the targeted cities of the discussion.