Comparative Analysis and Urban Public Policies: A methodology for conceptualizing the role of the actors

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1 World Bank Washington DC, September 16, 2008 Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin (CNRS, director of research) CGG holds a Ph.D. in urban planning UCLA and a doctorat d Etat from the University of Paris 1. She is affiliated with the CNRS where she is director of research and teaches at the University of Pari-Sorbonne and the Institute of Political Studies (Paris).. Among her many publications, Dictionnaire des mondialisations she edited in 2006 and which is currently revised before being translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Comparative Analysis and Urban Public Policies: A methodology for conceptualizing the role of the actors The field of social sciences in general and public policy in particular, has so far given limited attention to comparative analysis. Planning issues have been understood as either local or national issues and in the theory of development it has been assumed in the 60s and 70s that non-industrialized countries should follow the path of industrialized countries in order to give a better standard of living to their populations. However, as globalization processes bring rapid and deep social and economic changes, public officials are now asking planners to perform benchmarking and to evaluate policies especially in relation to the role of the private sector. In response to this demand, international institutions have developed a Best Practices (BP) approach. Collecting data and planning stories as suggested by BP programs has turned out to be a convenient way to learn about public policies in different parts of the world. BP reports and books were indeed thought as a way of presenting performing models of planning and thus paid limited attention to implementation processes or the complex process following the choice of a technical device. Thus BP programs have brought limited knowledge about conceptualizing the role of the shareholders and stakeholders, even in the apparently well known examples of transit and budgeting as in Curitiba (Brazil) and Bogota (Columbia). Very little is actually understood about the political process behind the policy as well as about the interaction among the various actors involved in this process. BP books are more about diffusing blueprint models than they are about giving tools for translating successful planning from one context to another. The discussion argues in favor of the need of a comparative analysis focused as well on the technical device than on the implementation process for explaining policy effectiveness and helping conceptualize public and private roles in urban contexts. We posit that urban planning is a complex process which requires a conceptualization It is organized around the two following questions: -Why comparative analysis (CA) should be an alternative to Best Practices (BP)? -What is the goal of a comparative analysis in the urban planning field? 1

2 I- ADOPTING A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE OR MAKING SENSE OF THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS As social scientists immersed in planning practices, we should be adopting a comparative perspective because we live in a new and more complex world largely shaped by global economic and cultural processes along with a significant change in the functioning of the capitalist system and the role of the State. Social, economic and cultural changes are going rapidly and there is a need to know more about how the way urban and metropolitan areas are coping with them and how their inhabitants are getting adjusted to them. In order to make a comparative perspective meaningful for future planning decisions, we need to emphasize the role of the many actors involved in the planning process, public sector (national and local), private actors and civil society. It is not difficult for planners and social scientists to understand the need for more comparative analysis and even share part of this argument. However a large number of them will disagree with the idea that we don t know enough about urban planning in other metropolitan areas. They will mention books and documents referring to Best Practices around the world. It is indeed correct to say that Curitiba (Brazil) is well known as the first city including civic participation in the adoption of a municipal budget; Bogota (Columbia) is recognized as the first city using a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) on its urban territory and allowing a large part of its population to travel without increasing traffic and air pollution; London (United Kingdom) is among the first city to implement a road pricing policy based on the use of new technologies. Today California and some other states in the United States are also launching congestion pricing schemes for regulating traffic on the freeways. The amount paid by the drivers is usually to be reinvested in improving public transportation routes. In France, two cities (Paris and Lyon) have given their inhabitants the choice of using bicycles for their urban travels thanks to a partnership with a private firm which is in charge of making bicycles available in a large number of districts and neighborhoods while using new technologies. There are of course many more examples of cities which could be presented as models in one specific aspect of planning (transportation, housing, and public services). However knowledge about the motivational and intentional forces behind those measures is extremely limited. We almost know nothing about the insights of the policy and we are hardly able to tell anything about the vision behind the policy, about the main individuals who initiated the process and how they were able to convince others and get their support. We may know a little bit of the financing but we don t know about the foundation of the so called public-private partnership. We usually miss the matching fund part of the story and we fell to understand anything about civic participation. Even though, we no longer believe in the power of one universal model for all urban contexts, it seems that with BP programs, we continue to think about planning in terms of a topdown process based on a blueprint model without even differentiating shareholders points of views as compared to stakeholders ones. Therefore it is not difficult to think of Best Practices programs as misleading because there are failing to explain the rootedeness of a device (such as reducing the number of cars in order to alleviate traffic 2

3 while making people pay for entering a city with their cars) in order to figure out how to translate it in a different context. Explaining the rootedeness of a planning device means referring to the specificity of a local political culture (shaped by local history as well as national history) is viewed in a comparative analysis as a key factor in making sense of the implementation process. Taking into consideration the specificity of a political culture may help understand why French people do not usually share American perceptions about what is and what should be the role of the central State in urban planning. Within the United States, there is also a variety of attitudes among the metropolitan areas as concerning the delivering of public and urban services. In California, the inhabitants of Los Angeles have fought to maintain a municipal ownership of the water and power systems but they rejected the idea of municipalizing the transit system. In the 1920s, through a referendum procedure, they refused to upgrade and modernize their railway and streetcar networks. This situation is opposite to that of a city like Paris where transit is a public service and water is under the responsibility of a private agency 1. It becomes then urgent to recognize the need for a comparative perspective in social sciences because it becomes instrumental in facilitating the diffusion of planning knowledge. Contrary to best practices documents, the knowledge acquired through the comparative analysis is far from being limited to the technical device of planning and incorporates implementation processes. A comparative analysis of planning issues in different urban and metropolitan areas which stresses the insights of planning and its embeddedness in local and national political cultures becomes the best tool for understanding and conceptualizing the roles of the various actors involved in the implementation process. If we agree to the definition of urban planning as a complex process which requires certain knowledge of the implementation process, then getting a comparative perspective becomes a tool for conceptualizing the role of the private and publics sectors as well as their interferences with civil society.. 1. This situation may be changing in the near future as the municipal council is ready to take control over the water issue. 3

4 II- COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS AS A MEANS FOR MAKING URBAN PLANNING KNOWLEDGE MORE RELEVANT A comparative analysis means being able to track similarities and differences between (at least) two urban sites by focusing on the policy analysis as well as the implementation process while insisting on the various actors representations of a planning issue. The planning issues may well be building an airport or a highway, reducing traffic on a freeway, improving access to job opportunities in poor neighborhoods, changing the spatial organization of the city in order to make it more sustainable or organizing the delivery of a public service such as water. In the comparative analysis undertaken on Los Angeles and Paris for my French doctorate dissertation (80s) aimed at explaining the differences in the spatial organization of the cities (a dense urban fabric versus a sprawl one), first I started to say that if Paris as a capital city symbolizes the French national identity, Los Angeles as the capital of the movie industry, is the iconic image of the American way of life. In the 80s (and even today), most scholars analyzed Los Angeles and its urban form as a city shaped by the car and the freeway while they thought Paris has been mainly shaped by the boulevards and avenues of Napoleon III and Haussmann. However taking a comparative perspective helps to explain the complexity of their urban planning stories. In LA, the streetcar and railway networks (long before the freeways) shaped the city and allowed for the building of an American dream of the 19 th century, a city of houses. American households who - once the city has been connected to other American cities thanks to the railway companies- made the decision to move and settle in LA, came with the intention of living in a house surrounded by a garden. They were then ready to fight (through referendum procedures) for maintaining and preserving their urban myth in a period of demographic and economic growth, a city of houses or a private city, a city where street life is limited. On the contrary Paris was supposed to fulfill the dream of a public city as thought by central government (with no input from the inhabitants) concerned with making a livable city for the inhabitants while making it a symbol of a national identity for its citizens and a aesthetic model for the rest of the world. However cities and their planning processes are not determined once for all, they have to cope with changes. Urban life has been changing in LA over the last decades as migrations flows from Latin America as well as from the rest of the world are slowly changing the street culture. Today Los Angeles is described as a dense urban sprawl city and as a city which is registering a revival of public space in some ethnic neighborhoods. Today Paris as a municipality is engaged in a political debate with central government about what should be the political role of a central city in a metropolitan context. Should the city (2, 1 million inhabitants) be annexing its inner suburbs or should it be included into a city-region political structure? A comparative analysis stressing the similarities and differences between two planning stories in two different cities (Paris & Los Angeles) makes us understand that planning is not limited to the conceptualizing of a device (a public service such as a freeway, a transit or water access) it is also about being strategic in getting the support and adhesion of a variety of actors and social groups during the implementation phase. It is possible then to 4

5 say that if planning is more than formulating a policy and that it requires a strategic conceptualization of the various actors engaged in the implementation phase, urban planning as a research and educational field should not be limited to theoretical and technical knowledge associated with BP examples. Urban planning may well become about translating public policy stories from one cultural political context to another cultural political one while stressing the strategic part of the implementation phase. It is not the policy device which is supposed to define the role of the public and private actors but it is up to the political cultural context to define the role and responsibilities of the various actors involved in the implementation process: the public agencies (national and local), the private actors (local and/or national or transnational), and the inhabitants organized or non-organized through secular or non-secular organizations. In the American context, Homeowners Associations (HA) are usually powerful while they may not even exist in countries where middle class groups of homeowners are not that important. In most American metropolitan areas (except for some specific cities such as New York in given historical periods), tenants do not share the political legitimacy of homeowners and thus barely influence the planning process which may not be the case in other urban contexts. However there is not way to define a political culture as a static object since it may as well be shaped differently along with global economic and social changes. With the Welfare State, the public sector has been perceived as the most accountable actor in the planning process along with the contribution of the taxpayers as a way for reducing social inequalities. Today this representation is no longer as accurate as it used to and there is a serious debate about the financing of a public service and the need for a more balance position between the users fees and the taxpayer s contributions. If the purpose of a comparative analysis within the planning field is to help each urban context define its own appropriate implementation strategy in order for the policy to be performative, its main purpose is also to stress the invariant of planning which is about building the accountability of a specific institution or actor. 5

6 Conclusion Translation as a methodology for conceptualizing the role of the actors This presentation has argued that comparative analysis could be seen as the best methodology for translating planning devices from one urban context to another urban context. A comparative perspective prevents us from focusing on the technical device of planning or on making the device a model while making enough space for including an analysis of implementation processes. Urban planning is not about borrowing best models of planning but it is about conceptualizing a policy while taking into consideration implementing processes which includes a large variety of actors, stakeholders as well as shareholders. A comparative analysis has then as an objective to stress the specificity of the political culture (which allows for a better understanding of the role of the various actors) as well as the invariant which is the accountability of a specific institution or actor for performing a policy device. A policy aiming for instance at delivering a public service in poor neighborhoods may rely on the choice of one actor (public or private) being accountable for it but this actor or agency should also be embedded in the political context which is supposed to guarantee its legitimacy. 6