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Encouraging the development of new urban centres
Solvent
Econ-artistกรุงเทพมหานครRegistered User regular
Econ-artistกรุงเทพมหานครRegistered User regular
What can policy professionals and politicians do to make small cities grow?
This is a question I’ve had some interest in for a little while. Despite having a passing interest in development economics and a more substantial interest in public policy, I’m not aware of a lot of research in this area.
Let me set the scene for you briefly: in Australia, ‘the public’ (in the sense that you’d hear the media describe it) got vocally upset about our ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declaring that he believed in a ‘big Australia’. That is, he thought Australia needed more people for a variety of reasons: many hypothesised that because of his background in and passion for foreign affairs, he thought that an Australia with a bigger population would command more of a presence in the region.
This upset many Australians because our population has an extraordinary distribution across the continent. It is very heavily concentrated into cities. Our Bureau of Statistics just released last year’s census data, and we apparently have 21.5 million people living here. 62% of us live in just the 5 biggest cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide). Apparently, a lot of people feel that Australia is already crowded. Venturing into personal opinion here, I suspect that especially a lot of Sydneysiders feel this way, since they're the biggest city, dealing with the most sprawl, probably the most migrants etc.
I don’t want to labour too much on these points and the surrounding. This is not about asylum seekers. I don’t think Australia is overcrowded by any stretch (and I hate the Howard-inspired 'fortress Australia' mentality). But I’d like to see more discussion on what can be done as an ‘actionable’ effort of governance, to ‘create’ other population centres rather than continuing to stack people in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. This is not a new suggestion, and I know there are plenty of people who’d also like more discussion on this topic. In my mind, Australia does have other locations amenable to development, it’s not as though it’s only 100% desert between our big cities.
As far as I know, though, there is no ‘playbook’ for growing a secondary urban centre outside a country’s (or state’s) capital. As someone who has studied in the social sciences I’m aware that a big reason for this question being a tricky one is that fundamentally, people do their own thing regardless of what planners and intellectuals want them to do. It has the characteristics of a self-reinforcing cycle, as well: people move to cities because having more people creates more need for employment/employees, and more possibilities of connections and mutually beneficial trades. Growth creates growth.
So, what are your suggestions to make small cities grow, and make living in a ‘second city’ more attractive relative to a state capital? Can you suggest things that you think would be actionable ‘rules’, i.e., do x, and the city will grow? What are good examples of smaller cities that drew population away from bigger urban neighbours? Since this is D&D, let’s have things more fleshed out than ‘make sure people can get jobs there’. Also, let us know if you think that it’s basically an intractable problem. Are Sydney’s suburbs doomed to march ever westward as the Australian population grows?
There are some things which should be obvious at this point, and that I’m not trying to draw out here, for example:
-Suggestions to site a town where there is large natural potential for industry nearby. Let’s rule this out. Let’s discuss existing towns. After all, in Australia we do have (largely dusty and unpleasant) towns being built up because they’re right next to an extractable mineral deposit. But public officials mostly can’t control that.
-Cheap real estate and housing incentives. We don’t have to rule this completely out of the discussion, but be aware that this already exists – it’s already far cheaper to buy in Albury-Wodonga than it is to buy in Sydney.
For my own particular take on the matter-
I’m always wary of people suggesting ‘build it and they will come’ approaches to infrastructure. I don’t think the problem is ever as simple as just building more roads, schools, and parks in an attempt to pull people to a region just by having excess available infrastructure. This is particularly problematic as a policy approach, because although laypeople tend to suggest it a lot, it is an awful look to do something like this and then have a white elephant when a population boom doesn’t eventuate. It’s a common refrain in letters to the editor in newspapers here that Australia should stop allowing migration until we build more infrastructure. I don’t know how people imagine this should happen – should developers just build out empty subdivisions, with councils linking them up with roads and utilities, and then when the government decides “OK that’s enough spare capacity” we open the gates and let people in?
As an alternative to that option, perhaps there is some way to make existing infrastructure and services in a community as awesome as possible for the existing community, and then heavily marketing that in an effort to draw people? Schools, for example: although in a state-run education system it is difficult to recommend giving more resources to one area over another, fundamentally what this question is about is trying to make one location more attractive than its competitors. At least with this approach, if the population boom never comes you haven’t overbuilt existing infrastructure that becomes useless, but you have overspent on things that the community will nonetheless benefit from.
This is a question I’ve had some interest in for a little while. Despite having a passing interest in development economics and a more substantial interest in public policy, I’m not aware of a lot of research in this area.
Let me set the scene for you briefly: in Australia, ‘the public’ (in the sense that you’d hear the media describe it) got vocally upset about our ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declaring that he believed in a ‘big Australia’. That is, he thought Australia needed more people for a variety of reasons: many hypothesised that because of his background in and passion for foreign affairs, he thought that an Australia with a bigger population would command more of a presence in the region.
This upset many Australians because our population has an extraordinary distribution across the continent. It is very heavily concentrated into cities. Our Bureau of Statistics just released last year’s census data, and we apparently have 21.5 million people living here. 62% of us live in just the 5 biggest cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide). Apparently, a lot of people feel that Australia is already crowded. Venturing into personal opinion here, I suspect that especially a lot of Sydneysiders feel this way, since they're the biggest city, dealing with the most sprawl, probably the most migrants etc.
I don’t want to labour too much on these points and the surrounding. This is not about asylum seekers. I don’t think Australia is overcrowded by any stretch (and I hate the Howard-inspired 'fortress Australia' mentality). But I’d like to see more discussion on what can be done as an ‘actionable’ effort of governance, to ‘create’ other population centres rather than continuing to stack people in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. This is not a new suggestion, and I know there are plenty of people who’d also like more discussion on this topic. In my mind, Australia does have other locations amenable to development, it’s not as though it’s only 100% desert between our big cities.
As far as I know, though, there is no ‘playbook’ for growing a secondary urban centre outside a country’s (or state’s) capital. As someone who has studied in the social sciences I’m aware that a big reason for this question being a tricky one is that fundamentally, people do their own thing regardless of what planners and intellectuals want them to do. It has the characteristics of a self-reinforcing cycle, as well: people move to cities because having more people creates more need for employment/employees, and more possibilities of connections and mutually beneficial trades. Growth creates growth.
So, what are your suggestions to make small cities grow, and make living in a ‘second city’ more attractive relative to a state capital? Can you suggest things that you think would be actionable ‘rules’, i.e., do x, and the city will grow? What are good examples of smaller cities that drew population away from bigger urban neighbours? Since this is D&D, let’s have things more fleshed out than ‘make sure people can get jobs there’. Also, let us know if you think that it’s basically an intractable problem. Are Sydney’s suburbs doomed to march ever westward as the Australian population grows?
There are some things which should be obvious at this point, and that I’m not trying to draw out here, for example:
-Suggestions to site a town where there is large natural potential for industry nearby. Let’s rule this out. Let’s discuss existing towns. After all, in Australia we do have (largely dusty and unpleasant) towns being built up because they’re right next to an extractable mineral deposit. But public officials mostly can’t control that.
-Cheap real estate and housing incentives. We don’t have to rule this completely out of the discussion, but be aware that this already exists – it’s already far cheaper to buy in Albury-Wodonga than it is to buy in Sydney.
For my own particular take on the matter-
I’m always wary of people suggesting ‘build it and they will come’ approaches to infrastructure. I don’t think the problem is ever as simple as just building more roads, schools, and parks in an attempt to pull people to a region just by having excess available infrastructure. This is particularly problematic as a policy approach, because although laypeople tend to suggest it a lot, it is an awful look to do something like this and then have a white elephant when a population boom doesn’t eventuate. It’s a common refrain in letters to the editor in newspapers here that Australia should stop allowing migration until we build more infrastructure. I don’t know how people imagine this should happen – should developers just build out empty subdivisions, with councils linking them up with roads and utilities, and then when the government decides “OK that’s enough spare capacity” we open the gates and let people in?
As an alternative to that option, perhaps there is some way to make existing infrastructure and services in a community as awesome as possible for the existing community, and then heavily marketing that in an effort to draw people? Schools, for example: although in a state-run education system it is difficult to recommend giving more resources to one area over another, fundamentally what this question is about is trying to make one location more attractive than its competitors. At least with this approach, if the population boom never comes you haven’t overbuilt existing infrastructure that becomes useless, but you have overspent on things that the community will nonetheless benefit from.
I don't know where he got the scorpions, or how he got them into my mattress.
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So far as public policy goes, I do not see this as having been planned, more as a consequence of neoliberal reform of government & economy punishing regional centres, efficiency of investment ( building on other pre existing factors like more consumers, workers, density of demand etc) and choices made by immigrants.
If the site is too close to an existing city and you are worried that people will just commute, then impose a commuter tax to disincentivize that behavior.
One thing I don't think makes sense is trying to grow a city through state backed cultural institutions. Better to use economic incentives and let culture develop organically from the population influx.
There's a really awesome documentary from the 1970's by a university professor and his students that studied public spaces in NYC and came to some pretty fascinating conclusions, but I can't seem to find it
In NZ, with Christchurch's centre city effectively destroyed by the quakes, there is a requirement to rebuild. It will be interesting to see what they can do to make what was NZ's second city by population (Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington) attractive again.
See: http://www.rebuildchristchurch.co.nz/default.aspx, http://www.ccdu.govt.nz/
This is largely true. The only cities I can think off the top of my head that are largest in state, and capitals, are Boston, Providence, Columbus (OH), Indianapolis, Denver, and Cheyenne. Although a state's capital city is commonly one that is geographically central, or equidistant, to other major cities. The only exception I can think of here is Boston (and that is more a result of it's historical legacy than anything intentional).
You Americans are fucking crazy like that.
Florida is a better example, since most people live in the I-4 corridor and Miami but Tallahassee is way the fuck up in South Georgia.
Scotland tried this in a few places in the 50s. Cumbernauld was one of the biggest. They've mostly ended up as commuter towns for already existing urban centres. There's kind of a paradoxical pressure for that to happen, since if the location is too far from existing centres it's tough to convince employers to move there, but that very same fact coupled with cheap (or even subsidised) housing and decent transport links makes them commuter magnets.
More recently the problems have stemmed from there being only a few employers in the town itself, employing large proportions of the residents. If one of them shuts down, relocates, or even just makes a lot of people redundant, it tends to hit them really hard.
16/50 apparently.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763765.html
Quebec City, Fredericton, Victoria, Regina, Edmonton not to mention Ottawa.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Also, a single urban core is fairly problematic, especially if you want to reduce traffic. The best method I can think of is building up the area around each train station with mixed use and affordable housing and allowing the areas in between to be closer to dense suburbs.
What about Albany? NYC was good enough to be the nation's capital, but the state has to be run out of (what is conparitvely) a frozen backwater? I know it's a sizable city in its own right, but NYC should be the capital.
Albany is roughly the same distance to NYC, Buffalo, and the Adirondacks. Hence my earlier point that most state capitals are located in a way that is geographically central, or equidistant. As much as NYC has a substantial population, and economy, NY is a large state, and I don't think NYC should dictate everything about NY. At this point NYC could probably become something like Hong Kong. Also NYC was initially a candidate for the nation's capital because, again, it was somewhat equidistant with other states. Of course now DC's "centrality," has been outdated since westward expansion, but with the advent of air travel there really isn't a need to make a new nation's capital (also it would probably be a logistical, and legislative, clusterfuck).
Tallahassee is definitely a better example of a state capital that breaks the rule of a non-central capital city than Boston. Also I'm surprised I forgot Atlanta is part of the largest/capital club!
Also describing Albany as a "frozen backwater," sounds like the kind of ivory tower mentality of someone that probably hasn't been to any place in new york other than "the city."
NZ did the same. It sort of makes sense though - all the new towns were about the same age and importance, scattered across the two islands - so why not go for a central location with a good port?
Every single one the second largest population centre in that province. (except maybe Freddy which I think is #3)
But not the largest, so you're still a goose.
Yeah what exactly was the point of the "lol only in America" remark? I mean there's a lot of criticism to go around on the US, but I don't think the designation of captial(/ol)s is one of them. Except with Florida, but all of us already know that Florida is the country's cancerous tumor, so it makes sense that they worked it out like that.
In the late-USSR/early-Russian Federation, Moscow became a Federal City, for largely the same reason NYC was important. It was capital of both the USSR and also the Russian SFSR. That being said, its sheer hugeness meant its own representation in the legislature became important. For a century or so before the Russian Revolution, Moscow had decline in importance because of St. Petersburg.
City/Federal management can get weird.
Addressing OP's question, one thing you can do, which has been done in the USSR, China, and other places, is national delimination--with the exception of Kiev, Ukraine and Baku, Azerbijan pretty much all of the CIS capitals were quite small prior to the Soviet efforts to implement their republican nationality solution. Before that, Minsk, Yerevan, and even Tsibilisi were all quite small, and cities like Alma-Ata and Tashkent were absolutely tiny. For all the problems they'd encounter, it was a lot more effective to manage certain matters federally, on a republic-to-republic basis. Of course, this also meant some cities would shrink, like Leningrad (after it stopped being the capital) or Smolensk (with the Soviets liberated occupied Belarus, and moved the capital to Minsk).
That might not seem very relevant now, but the same happened in Taiwan--Taipei did really become a city until it became the capital of Imperial Japanese Taiwan, and then grew further when the ROC relocated to the island after the civil war. Going there, you can tell that a few generations ago, it was not a particularly big city.
Um, the fuck?
PantsB's point is ridiculous and misses the point. Canadian provincial capitals are all major population centres. Often at the time THE major population centre of the province in question.
American capitals seem to have often been chosen for a variety of other odd reasons, like geographic centrality or some such.
Apparently this is insulting? Fucking overreaction geese.
Perhaps one should say that then instead "You Americans are fucking crazy"
Wonder why people would take umbrage at that.
you Canadians are just fucking crazy like that I guess
Also who was overreacting exactly to your initial statement?
I don't know. It's a perfectly innocuous comment.
Apparently I should have said "You Americans are fucking over-sensitive?.
Anyfuckinway
I'd say it's a bit of an odd concept. Capitals have traditionally grown out of already existent major urban centres since that's where all the people in power are anyway.
Really, it's exactly as odd as the ideas that started this thread and for exactly the same reasons. Because it's basically the same thing.
London is the natural transport hub for the South East, which is and always has been the most populous region of the country (a fact that was more pronounced in the past) and the best place to export/import good and services to the rest of Europe. Its hard to say the rest of the country has suffered when the concentration of power in London is well over 800 years old and predates pretty much every other urbanization (London had 10% of the countries population back when Manchester had less than 10 thousand people, yet Manchester still managed to grow).
Its better to say that the movement away from an industrial economy has mean the London service centre is the only place that hasn't declined, rather than London being pushed ahead (and lots of places within London felt the hit as well). And that is a significant problem with this whole idea of new cities - service economies are so fluid they are going to compact in the centre, because there is nothing holding them back from doing so (unlike manufacturing's need for plant and resources).
The only new big cities you're going to see are those that develop based on exploitation of a resource, as its simply so much better for a service based economy to see growth in an existing city. Case in point is the dozen or so new towns the UK made in the 50s and 60s, they just ended up being commuter barracks as its easier for people to go to businesses rather than for businesses to relocate and draw people.
All that said, why do we even want to make new cities? Having more people using a common public transport infrastructure, and moving goods and energy a shorter distance will see less ecological footprint per capita. The problem with cities are organising them well and rent control, both of which a probably easier to legislate than building a new city outright.
Northern Ireland also had Craigavon in the 1960s, an attempt to syphon off the growing pressures of Belfast. It kinda fizzled out for a long time because the houses built there were cheap and crappy, so nobody wanted to move there. However in the decades following more Organic growth has been quite successful, since the crappy houses were replaced with more modern ones, and despite the artificial nature of it it actually has a decent underlying infrastructure, with good roads and pedestrian/cycle paths and public spaces, so it's actually getting better.
That would be my take on it: Build a good infrastructure first, and then worry about what to build as and when demand arises, although there's nothing wrong with trying to encourage demand at the same time.
Anyway.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but why would we want there to be? I'm not sure why we should want to be creating a new population center 'away' from the ones that currently exist. It winds up leading to a bunch of transit-related issues, and there aren't that many intrinsic benefits.
There are west coast cities that have, in effect, created "secondary" urban centers. In San Franciso this was the result of geography; water on three sides means the city can't easily expand, so various other communities/cities spring up on the outskirts and create the 'Bay Area.' In Portland the same functional thing has happened, but as a result of tight control of urban growth by policy rather than geography. Seattle has kind of a combination of the two things (simplifying.)
These aren't necessarily good outcomes, though. In a vacuum we shouldn't want to incentivize people to live farther apart than is necessary.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Responding to ‘not identifying a problem’ – well, maybe not. I can certainly understand that not everyone thinks this is a problem. As I mentioned, I don’t think Australia is currently overcrowded, but then I don’t live in Sydney. I also am pretty aware of the benefits of cities, and having people close together (I did remark on that in the OP).
But it’s clear that some people do think this is a problem. Most people acknowledge neverending sprawl as a problem as far as transit is concerned. Higher density infill is a possible solution, yes – but surely so is encouraging growth in a secondary city?
I wanted to make the discussion more specific than ‘what makes cities grow’. I understand, though, that maybe there’s no prescription for expanding a ‘secondary’ city in a region beyond just the usual things that make cities prosperous.
As for intrinsic benefits of having development transferred from the largest city in the region to another – I’m no geographer or planner, but aren’t there environmental benefits? Cities in Australia are starting to build desalination plants to supply them with water. These require tremendous amounts of energy to run, and pump high concentrations of salt back out into the sea. If you could transfer some of your region’s biggest city’s development out to another city which is experiencing less pressure on its water supply, or has suitable locations to construct new dams and reservoirs, is that a benefit?
Regarding development of another city as increasing the amount of travel people have to do – I’m not convinced. I’m not talking about commuter towns here. If you encourage migration to a secondary city which is smaller than the largest in the region, surely people have more opportunities to live closer to their work and recreational activities? Won’t this reduce the amount of transit necessary? Yes, you will have people moving between cities, but which effect will be larger?
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