BRICS+ City Lab Moscow, 7-9 December 2016 Outline of the BRICS+ City Lab The BRICS+ City Lab was first convened in Shanghai, China, in November 2015 as a partnership of research-based institutions across five leading cities in BRICS countries. The purpose of the initiative was to provide a platform for ongoing collaboration in support of improved urban governance across BRICS countries, and eventually also in other countries confronting similar urban challenges. The network created through the BRICS+ City Lab is autonomous of formal BRICS structures but it committed to giving active support to these structures, and especially to city governments within the BRICS. The second annual meeting of the BRICS+ City Lab was hosted by the City of Moscow and the MGUU University and held between 7 and 9 December 2016. In addition to researchers, the event brought together officials from city governments within the BRICS allowing for dialogue between scholars and practitioners of governance. The event also included a youth component with the aim of developing a new generation of leaders in urban governance. The theme of the event was adaptive governance in large cities reflecting the need for agile city government able to adjust to continual change and uncertainty at all scales. Sessions of the BRICS+ City Lab Day One The event was scheduled over three days. The opening session on Day One set the context for the City Lab. The welcoming remarks by Yevgeny Kozlov of the Moscow Government and Vasiliy Fiveyskiy emphasised the importance of a collaborative initiative of this sort, and the opportunity to share the experiences of Moscow with a global audience. Professors Philip Harrison and Qiyu Tu then explained the origins and purpose of the BRICS+ City Lab and the importance of comparative urban study. They described the initiative as a journey with a destination still unknown. Professors Patrick Heller and Robin Moore offered a conceptual framing for the idea of adaptive governance. Professor Heller explained four key requirements for effective city governance: 1. The autonomy of city government 2. The bureaucratic capacity of city government 3. The ability of city government to coordinate across a range of actors
4. The embeddedness of city government within society (as the complexity of challenges in large cities requires government to work closely with civil society) Professor Moore emphasised the importance of moving beyond traditional and crisis-coping modes of governance emphasising the need to develop a deep capability for quick turnarounds. Important capabilities include those of developing shared visions of the future, societal learning, and building trust among different urban actors. Our institutional architectures often insulate rather than enable and we need mechanism that would give us nimbleness to navigate around slow-moving organisational structures. Day One continued with presentations and discussions on adaptive governance within each of the BRICS countries. Professor Alexander Puzanov explained the dominant role of Moscow within the national urban system and the challenges it faces in responding to an increasingly complex. One of the requirements for future adaptation, for example, is better coordination with the neighbouring region. Vladimir Kovalev explained the different ways in which Moscow City is responding adaptively to change including the re-use of previous industrial land, the new Central Ring, and the integration of technology into city administration. Professor Renato Cymbalista presented the case of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This is a city which has been given a high level of autonomy in terms of Brazil s national constitution and has been through a successful process of re-democratisation. The city illustrates many creative responses to change including mechanisms of participatory governance such as participatory budgeting. It does however have challenges including the lack of a real metropolitan structure which would enable coordination with neighbouring municipalities. The power of newly elected mayors to appoint up to 4000 new officials is an example of a mechanism which allows for periodic inflow of new energy and ideas although it has the downside of disrupting the continuity of governance. Dr. Partha Mukhopadhyay and Professor Patrick Heller used the case of Delhi to discuss adaptive governance in India. India has a different institutional context to the other BRICS countries as municipal government is relatively weak with much of the power for urban development being held by state governments. The institutional arrangements are also extremely fragmented with multiple agencies across the different levels of government responsible for urban governance. Much of the development in India s cities happens outside formal regulatory frameworks resulting in large-scale informality. There is also a system of classification across the city which determines the level of urban services provided to citizens. Only 23% of the population lives in fully planned neighbourhoods. These challenges are compelling creative forms of adaptation at local level while the newly elected Government of Delhi is trying to achieve greater citizen participation and more inclusive provision of urban services.
Professor Qiyu Tu explained how the development of the revised Master Plan for Shanghai is handling future uncertainty. The Government of Shanghai has taken firm decisions around the need to curb further sprawl, divert new growth to neighbouring cities, and contain population increase into the future. At the same time, however, it has built various forms of flexibility into its spatial plan by reserving well located parcels of land for still unknown future use. Importantly, Shanghai forms of inter-city collaboration are emerging within the expanded urban agglomeration which is increasingly enabling joint planning and decisionmaking processes. Dr. Margot Rubin and Dr. Romain Dittgen used the City of Johannesburg to discuss adaptive governance in South Africa. They explained that city government is empowered and protected by the national constitution, and that Johannesburg is almost fiscally autonomous. However, the allocation of powers to local government is limited and does not allow for sufficient local coordination. The city government is proactively attempting to reshape city form to achieve a more inclusive city through the Corridors of Freedom initiative but needs to develop more effective mechanisms to persuade private developers to respond to its plans. Day Two Day Two took the form of three international round tables. The first round table chaired by Ksenia Mokrushina explored the use of technology and information in adaptive city governance. Among the key experiences discussed were: the success of Moscow in using technology as a tool to transform city government, including its relationship with its citizens; the Smart City Programme in India which is seeking to transform around 100 cities; the efforts by Shanghai to upgrade manufacturing to meet the smart factory standards of Industry 4.0; the way in which technology was used to expand citizen participation preparing the new Master Plan for Sao Paulo; and the role of the Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO) in South Africa in strengthening urban government through providing improved information, analysis and policy advice. The second roundtable on governing complex urban agglomerations was chaired by Professor Renato Cymbalista. The presentations included accounts of how: a concept of city region governance is gradually evolving in South Africa as a series of practices and new instruments are emerging in the Gauteng City Region; an inter-municipal consortium has emerged in the ABC Region of Greater Sao Paulo as a voluntary response to the lack of effective metropolitan governance; Shanghai has shifted in its economic and spatial form over time which requires evolving responses; Russia lacks the legal basis for metropolitan wide coordination but how a Joint Transport Agency for the Moscow region has been established; Delhi has a multiplicity of bodies involved in regional coordination but some helpful practices are emerging. There was agreement in the session that we need to focus careful attention on understanding the details of cases where some form of success is evident.
The third roundtable chaired by Professor Qiyu Tu focussed on the possibilities and limits of transforming the spatial organisation of a large city. The presentations included accounts of how: commuter and spatial form in Moscow is changing in response to both macro economic and demographic trends but also specific policies of city government; the lack of municipal powers in India makes it difficult for local government to influence changes in spatial form; Shanghai has responded to the need for greater coordination by changing the boundaries of district municipalities; South African cities are proactively attempting to address the legacies of apartheid spatial form but are still struggling to develop the instruments to influence decision-making of private developers. An important critique offered in the session was the way in which cities present a conflict free version of adaptive governance. The different interests in city governance must be understood and there is a role for an advocacy-based planning approach. In the final session of the day representatives from each country indicated their perspectives on the discussion and the insights they derived from the sessions. A key point of discussion was around the need to balance the requirement to provide clear direction and proactively shaping urban processes vis a vis the requirement for being adaptive by responding to citizen concerns, market signals and other forms of learning and feedback. The answers are partly contingent on the very different contexts of the BRICS but most cities are still grappling towards finding an appropriate balance. Day Three During the morning delegates were taken on a Smart Moscow Tour. They had the opportunity to visit the control centres for Moscow s Health Care and Traffic Management systems. They saw in action how technology is used to improve governance processes and had the opportunity to engage with senior officials in the City of Moscow. In the afternoon, a youth in governance panel chaired by Dr. Margot Rubin explored the challenges of young people in cities across the BRICS, and the various initiatives to involve young people directly in governance processes. There are considerable differences across contexts. In some cases formal structures have been set up to channel youth participation in government but in other cases youth have self-organised to put pressure on city governments to respond to their concerns, and city governments have been responsive to varying degrees. The colloquium concluded with two parallel working sessions. The youth delegates explored various ways in which they could collaborate across cities to create a youth lab. Other delegates considered the future agenda of the BRICS+ City Lab including collaborative research, joint publications, a website providing a repository for information on BRICS cities, policy briefs for local government, interactive forums between researchers and government officials, and the next meeting of the BRICS+ City Lab.
The meeting was closed with words of warm appreciation to City of Moscow and the MGUU for their hosting of the event, and with a response from the City of Moscow emphasising the ongoing complex challenges of adaptive government but the immense benefit of mutual sharing and learning.