Sunday 01.24.16

A Tale of Three Cities: From Cairo to London to San Francisco

OHK identifies five principles shaping urban regeneration

This is part 2 of a multi-part post; see part 1 here. In my previous blog post, I discussed the principle of Centrality from OHK’s framework on urban regeneration. I applied it to three cities where OHK has had experience: San Francisco, London, and Cairo. 

The Principle of Governance

In this second part, I explore the principle of Governance. This principle addresses how a city’s capability to manage its urban redevelopment is institutionalized both within the government and among non-government players. It concerns roles and responsibilities: which government entities administer urban regeneration, their mandates, and how they govern, coordinate, and deliver change in the urban environment. A crucial expression of governance is the degree of decentralization or delegation of power from the central and national to peripheral and subnational government. In the context of urban regeneration, this distinction is reflected in whether regeneration schemes are dictated from above by decree or established from below through self-governance and delegation mechanisms. Of course, one side is not always better. Though delegation of urban affairs may be more responsive to specific urban challenges, delegation may not necessarily entail a collaborative and shared role among central and local government and the private sector.

Across our three survey cities, urban regeneration has been shaped by decentralization policies in varying degrees. In Cairo, a highly centralized governance model has impeded delegation of urban affairs. Even though most urban development is physically decentralized, happening mostly at or beyond Cairo’s periphery, a centralized governance approach still predominates in the form of the 1979-established New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA), combined with line ministries’ fiscal control and dominance over housing and public works.

Urban planning in Egypt is focused on population resettlement from congested urban cores to purpose-built housing districts. Emblematic of this tendency are six new satellite cities planned around Cairo: the “first generation” cities of 15th of May and 6th of October and the “second generation” cities of Badr, Obour, New Cairo, and Sheikh Zayed. Despite being NUCA’s primary planning focus, Cairo’s satellite cities have struggled with poor economics and meager urban quality and civic amenities. Centralization within the body of the NUCA has resulted in more challenges than solutions, and subverted Cairo’s urban transformation to a mere sequence of housing projects, providing little economic diversification while adding a significant burden to Cairo’s basic services and infrastructure.

By contrast, San Francisco is an example of decisive decentralization of urban regeneration management. Until 1973, urban regeneration relied on federal government funding and oversight, first through the Housing and Home Finance Agency, then the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). After 1973, urban renewal was directed and financed through direct city governance. At the outset this was viewed negatively as an act of de-funding of urban renewal because regeneration projects in effect had to compete for funding with other local programs. In retrospect, the decentralization of governance proved to be highly beneficial to San Francisco’s urban policy. Much like Egypt’s NUCA, what HUD lacked in creativity and local engagement it made up for in the sheer volume of federally-driven urban renewal projects of the 1960's which had traumatic effects on local communities.

The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) was a key inheritor of this shift. Though disbanded in 2014, SFRA’s projects such as the Rincon Point-South Beach and Mission Bay have generally been successful because they were locally driven and underscored social objectives and public consensus. SFRA was an instrument of decentralized governance through which not only was coordination among all public agencies achieved but also provisions for financial and regulatory tools were provided. Federal defunding has pushed governance “down the chain,” and as a result, has widened the focus of regeneration from the narrow federal perspective to a holistic view informed by synergy among local priorities and community needs.

London is a model that stands apart from Cairo and San Francisco in the complexity of urban policy evolution, its deep-rooted centralization, and the variety of institutional experimentation that has taken place since the 1970s. The British Government’s 1977 white paper on inner city regeneration depicts a decentralization intent that is undercut by deep-rooted centralization. The 1978 Inner Urban Areas Act that followed pushed for a decisive shift towards localized, socioeconomic-centric partnerships to counter national top-down policies but struggled to effect improved governance.  At the local level, a single authority was meant to lead multi-agency coordination. But since funds were shared between national and local governments, achieving decentralization of urban affairs proved an operational challenge that persisted until the advent of Urban Development Corporations in 1981, a new delivery vehicle created to bypass local government and act as a quasi-autonomous, non-governmental organization. In essence, corporations were a centralization instrument to reduce friction and exercise fiscal control and direction over localities, which became even more centralized when corporations were phased out and folded into a national regeneration agency, English Partnerships (EP), in 1998.

In London alone, three development corporations have existed to implement sizeable urban regeneration plans: London Docklands, London Thames Gateway, and London Legacy. London, however, is quite different from the rest of the UK because it has a structure of elected regional government represented by the Greater London Authority (GLA), and hence has an inherent autonomy. A functional body of the GLA was formed in 1999 as the London Development Agency (LDA) to act as the regional development agency and custodian of the EP’s projects. Thirteen years later under the Localism Act 2011, it was replaced by GLA Land and Property, an arms-length corporate body that controls the assets of the LDA. This was yet another UK policy that was aimed at decentralizing decision-making powers from the central government to empower local communities, but ultimately retained a deeply rooted centralized approach to regeneration policies.

The lack of true decentralization has been criticized in the UK for decades but it did not stop London from being a global urban regeneration success story, and London’s GLA is considered a best practice case study for how to run a central strategic hub of regeneration governance. Moreover, the GLA’s centralization was not absolute, insofar as it did share local government powers with 32 borough councils and the City of London Corporation. Many believe that if the GLA’s LDA did not exist to pull together administrative subdivisions and local government districts, the depth of strategic thinking behind London’s multitude of regenerations projects would not have been achieved.

At the beginning of 2016, 130 regeneration projects are in place across London, ranging from infrastructure development to regeneration of town centers, public squares, and high streets, many of which took shape under the LDA’s watch.

Governance should ultimately be judged by its results. As London’s regeneration successes show, institutional reforms that do not produce profound decentralization are not necessarily bad. At the same time, the centralization that has served the UK might have been traumatic to San Francisco communities during the Federally financed regeneration era. Approaches to governance should not follow any one-size-fits-all approach. Moreover, governance alone cannot explain the full spectrum of tensions that emerge over funding sources, financing mechanisms, and the distribution of benefits, which are tightly bound to the evolving role of the private sector. I will discuss funding and public-private partnerships in more detail in Part 3 of this blog post.

This is part 2 of a multi-part post. See part 1 here.

Ahmed Al-Okelly is Managing Partner at OHK and regularly writes about urban design, community development, and sustainability. Contact him to learn more.