 speeches. So governance reform is an important issue in every urban-aged city and it's clear from the last day and a half that it's a central issue here in Bombay. But what kind of reform is desirable? The difficulty of solving the governance problem in urban-aged cities stems from the polarization of society that global cities and cities wanting to be global cities are currently fostering. In a city inhabited by millions of very poor people and also by financial and business executives working at a global scale the governance question is stark indeed. Whose city is this? Notice this is Casey's question from the session just before lunch. Whose city is this? But Casey I think the governance way of putting the question is who decides whose city this is. Many people think it's obvious that the city belongs to the people who live in it but there's nothing obvious about this at all. First of all cities often distinguish some city residents from others leaving some of them with no voice in city government at all. The most obvious target for this second class citizen status are immigrants, people from other countries as in Johannesburg in New York, people from neighboring provinces as in Shanghai, or people who come after a certain date say after 1995. But even the residents considered to be legitimate have priorities that many global city proponents think cannot be satisfied. Residents tend to want the city to provide them basic services such as sanitation, water, housing, transportation and education. Global city advocates might well agree that these services would be a good idea but they insist the prerequisite to providing them is fostering the city's economic growth and they have a particular kind of economic growth in mind. To pay for the services people want and need they say the city needs to attract foreign and domestic investment, build a service and high-tech economy and attract the kind of people who can perform the necessary tasks. As a result the city needs to be responsive first and foremost to the people who relate to the global marketplace. From this point of view city residents can be a problem for the city rather than its constituency. Some of them live in the very places that should be developed as business centers. These residents should be moved out of these areas perhaps even out of town. Of course many people who live in the city disagree with this globalized conception. They think that the city government exists in order to promote their welfare. By this they mean not only providing them basic services but equally importantly creating a city in which they can afford to live. The problem with the globalization agenda for these people is not just that the city spends money on the wrong priorities, roads rather than trains, luxury housing rather than affordable housing. Even more fundamental is the fact that a government focused on being a world-class city will create a city designed to exclude them. They insist that the city's economic growth strategy should be focused instead on including them. From this point of view a city that fails to provide a place for its own residents to live in a dignified way has a governance problem. Its governance problem is that it's not responsive to its own people. These two understandings of what a city is and who it should be designed for conflict with each other. Taken seriously they would produce starkly different government structures. The global city version would understand governance in terms of putting its economic growth agenda into place as quickly and efficiently as possible. It would focus on cutting red tape, getting things done. Doing so, its proponents think, presents the only real chance of raising the standard of living for city residents. A major problem that those who embrace this agenda face is that too many of the people they see as benefiting from their strategy don't agree with it. It would be good to convince these doubters, but it would be an overwhelming perhaps impossible task. If so, the preferred form of governance might well be to place decision-making power at a level comparatively immunized from the city's population as a whole. There's a number of ways to do this. One would be to make most of the decisions at the level of the state, Maharashtra or New York state, rather than the city. Another would be to create a number of entities, public corporations, port trusts, regional development authorities that empower officials appointed by the national or state government rather than elected officials to make policy decisions. Another ingredient might be to emphasize the difference between governance and government. The idea of governance is based on the notion that private decision-makers, developers, business leaders and other so-called stakeholders should help formulate and implement the city's policies through negotiations and public-private partnerships. These private entities aren't even imagined to be democratically responsive. The list of ways to implement a global city strategy includes many more ideas, but most of them, like the ones I've mentioned, share a key ingredient. The power they allocate to locally elected representatives is as limited as possible. The governance regime favored by critics of the globalization agenda, including many people who live in informal housing and work in the informal sector, is likely to be very different. They're likely to want a government that's as responsive to them as possible. The first level of organization might be a democratically organized neighborhood government, one small enough to allow ordinary people to participate in its decisions. But neighborhoods can be parochial, favoring their own welfare over that of the city as a whole. So another layer is just as important. This institution would link the neighborhoods together so that they could work out their differences. This inner neighborhood institution would be the building block for the city government. It, too, of necessity has to be linked to higher levels of government, a regional metropolitan government, the state, and ultimately the nation. But noticeably absent in this structure is a reliance on appointed bodies, public authorities, and public corporations. Noticeably absent, too, is the conception of power, the concentration of power in state or national government, rather than in city government and its neighborhoods. This is not to say that the higher level of governments would lose all authority. Local autonomy is a pipe dream. The point instead is comparative. Major authority would be decentralized to democratically organized layers of government. Those who adopt this position don't have a governance problem. They have a government problem. Government is not organized in a way that serves their needs. The two ideas have just outlined about the structure of government conflict with each other. But no urban age city has adopted one of them to the exclusion of the other. Everywhere, cities embrace democratic forms and at the same time, embrace state or national decision making and appointed public authorities. The ways they do so differ and the differences matter a great deal. But the conflict between them is so pervasive that one of the major problems of governance is caused by the resulting confusion, inconsistency, and fragmentation of authority. These problems cannot be solved by choosing sides. Both of these ingredients of governance are going to remain in place in every urban age city for a long time to come. The issue that cities face is figuring out how to balance should be struck between these opposed visions. In trying to find such a balance, two other problems arise. The first is that the two ideas about governance that are just described may not actually work out the way I've suggested. A strong state government and appointed officials might not adopt a policy that globalizers prefer. They might focus on neighborhood services, on local education, on sanitation, and on economic development of small businesses. At the same time, a democratically organized government might embrace the global city objective rather than focus on city services. After all elected officials often see their city as powerless, locked in an inescapable structure of competition for investment. There is in short nothing automatic about how these structures work out in practice. Whatever structure is put into place will have to be revised over and over again as the weaknesses in the design become apparent. This need for constant revision raises the second even more serious problem with governance reform. Everywhere I go, people tell me that any kind of governance reform is impossible. It's easy to get people around the world to concede the defects of their current system, but whatever it is, whatever it is, people always insist that the status quo is essentially unchangeable. Given the conflicts and ambiguities that beset the issue of governance, and given the despair about the possibilities for change, what are we supposed to do about governance reform? I want to spend a few minutes giving some suggestions. I want to discuss first whether governance reform is possible. After all, if nothing's possible, there's no reason to discuss anything else. On this point I must say I simply don't agree with the despair. In every country one can name the government institution that has power to reform the current system and create a new one. In many countries it's the national government. In other countries such as the United States and India, it's the state government. The leaders of these governments are the people responsible for change. These are the people who have the power to bring it about. They should be held to account for whether change occurs. In some places around the world change has occurred. The national government in the UK created a new government for London in 1999. The national government in Mexico enabled city residents to elect the mayor of Mexico City in 1997. The national governments of China and South Africa redrew the boundaries of Shanghai and Johannesburg in the 90s and therefore changed the very definition of what we mean when we talk about the cities of Shanghai and Johannesburg. In 2003 the New York State government allowed New York City to take over its school system, a critical city service that had previously been run by an independent body. In every one of these cities there were political problems before the change occurred. There are always political problems and in every one of them there's more to do but the basic point remains it's just not true that nothing can happen. Reformers have to pinpoint who's responsible for change and get them to act. But what do we want them to do? The most important change I think is to enable more changes later in the process to make government reform easier to accomplish than it is now. Whatever changes are made some will turn out to be mistakes. Other reforms will fail. Some reforms won't even be attempted. Government reform is a continuous task. Government structures are like business plans. They have to be revised regularly or the venture fails. The most serious governance problem in urban age cities in my view is that none of them has a process that enables regular and routine governance reform. We need to think about how to create such a mechanism but before we can we have to confront the problem with which I began. The substantive conflict between the opposed notions about what kind of governance reform is desirable we can't design a structure for continuous reform without deciding what kind of reform we want. As I've already said I don't think it's possible to choose between the alternative visions of the city I've just described favoring one at the exclusion of the other but I do think that every city has to confront the question whether the globalizing vision or the resident focus vision is now too dominant. I'm in no position to analyze this issue here in Bombay. I've come only for a few days. People who spend their lives here would not listen to me. They should not listen to me. All I can do is discuss the issue more generally think about urban age cities as a whole. People who live here can then think about whether it applies here. As I see it most urban age cities face a common problem. The democratically responsive ingredient in the organization of government is too weak. Obviously someone else giving this talk might adopt the opposite stance. They would want to talk instead about how to make globalization work more quickly and effectively. That talk would be well worth hearing but it's not to discuss how to strengthen local democracy. The first task is to decentralize genuine power to democratically accountable city governments. State or national governments and public authorities intervene in every urban age city far too often. Equally importantly their failure to reform city government in light of the growth of the regional population across the city border has made the city less and less able to control its own future. Locally elected officials recognize the limited impact they can have on their own city's future. But city residents take another stance. They blame the city government for every problem the city faces including those the city have no power to fix. When the city disappoints them as it's bound to do the reaction to the public is not to change the government structure to make it more responsive to their needs. They don't pay any attention to the government structure. They think that the only option is to organize protests to go to court to defend the status quo against the proposed changes to resist. They fight to hold on to their traditional place in the world even though the world is changing. I'm proposing a different strategy. I am proposing not resistance but the reform of government and the first reform should be the decentralization of power. Academics and practitioners need to spend a lot of time thinking about what the decentralization of power would mean in their city. There are many possible meanings and any particular idea needs to be carefully examined in the context of the specific city being analyzed. Consider first what many people think is the silver bullet here. The answer to the riddle and elected mayor. The mayors of London New York and Mexico City are all powerful figures in their cities and two of the three of them are in office that didn't exist 10 years ago. This may be a reason in itself to have an elected mayor but these elected mayors don't have the same job. The greater London authority which the mayor of London leads has limited responsibilities particularly for transportation and planning. Many of the tasks that are responsibility of the mayor of the city of New York are the responsibility not of the mayor of London but of the London boroughs the local governments within the city. In addition the mayors of Mexico City and New York have to struggle with the power of their suburbs in the way the mayor of London does not. The three cities are also differently affected by the intervention of national or state governments. In New York City much of the development policies in the hand of something called the Empire State Corporation a public authority appointed by the governor of New York State not the mayor. There's also no question that if the mayor of the New York City wants to impose a congestion charge for traffic in the business center of the city he needs state permission to do so. The mayor of London needed permission for its congestion charge too but there was the national government not the state government that made the decision. The powers of the greater London authority are defined by parliament and parliament not only specifically authorized the congestion charge but has created an astounding number of public corporations and quangos to make policy in London. These kinds of institutions are familiar to people here in Bombay. The state appointed Metropolitan Regional Development Authority and the Port Trust, established by the government of the state and of the nation are obviously examples but the institutions of the different cities are not the same. Their current role needs to be carefully examined. Only when we determine what an elected mayor can do can we debate whether it's a good idea to have one. There's no reason to have an elected mayor if he has no power to do anything. The same should be said about a local legislature. People don't talk about local legislatures very much. They usually talk about the executive but there are local legislatures and in London and York these legislatures are designed to be weak. They're weak because they're seen as a problem for effective government of thorn in the mayor's side but in other places particularly in places like Johannesburg and Berlin where the chief executive officers selected by the legislature the legislature at least has the potential of having more authority. Whether a strong legislature would be a good idea is a debatable issue. Sometimes a legislature can be a source of parochialism and corruption but at other times a powerful legislature with neighborhood voices will be more responsive to a city's diverse population than officials elected on a citywide basis. Besides local legislatures local legislatures were organized in many different ways. In London some of its members are elected citywide. Others by large subdivisions of the city. In New York the elections are by district but the winner take all election system allows one political party to control the legislature. Until the early 1940s New York had a very different election system proportional representation that produced a much more diverse political party representation. I've raised enough complications about the organization of local democracy that some people might simply throw up their hands. It's all too complicated. It won't work. Let's just centralize power. Let's just create appointed bodies and public private partnerships. This instinct is not surprising. It's being implemented across the world. So is another reaction privatization. Sometimes privatization takes the form of specific entitlements given private actors by the national government such as the creation of Canary Wharf in London or the special economic zones in China. At other times privatization allows private bodies to control specific resources such as the railroads. I don't have the time to address these forms of power. Let me just say that when anybody suggests to me that we need to create another public authority I ask how will this form of government be responsive to the people who live in the city? Who will appoint its members? Why are they the right decision makers for the city? When anyone talks to me about a public private partnership I ask can I see the partnership agreement? What's the deal? Who represents the public in the public private partnership? And why are they the adequate representatives of the public? Let me repeat these bodies sometimes make sense but in the design of government we have to be very careful about every one of them if we believe in local democracy. Given the complexities of decentralizing power and the complications of designing a democracy it should be clear why whenever government is reform mistakes will be made. That's why reform has to be a continuous exercise why we need to make reform easier. At the moment reform decisions in urban age cities are in the hands of either the national or the state governments. Their role is not going to be eliminated but a way has to be found to give local governments a voice in the process of designing reform. Many people outside of major cities do not understand the value of cities in the life of the country. Thinking about how to implement a local voice in the reform process has to be done on a city to city basis. There's not going to be one model but a new institution will have to be created. It's essential that the new institution bring an urban perspective of the process of governance reform. Local voices need to be included in the decision making that answers the central question who's city is this? Governance reform has the potential to do more than improve the organization of city life. It can enable people to think more deeply about the future of cities about who cities should be designed for and who should decide the the design. Thanks. Jerry thank you very much for not only setting an agenda for what will be the discussion which follows but probably setting an agenda for the next generation of city leaders which as Wolfgang Novak from the Herrhausen Society knows is probably the core objective of the urban age. How do we begin to help those who are going to be leading cities not just those of you who are in the room now distinguish as you are but the next generation those in their 20s and 30s to begin to address the issues that Jerry and others have articulated so well. Before passing on to Darrell I can't help Jerry reflecting when you say we would have liked to see the piece of paper which was the public-private partnership agreement between the Mayor of London and an organization who we don't know who the hell they were called MetroNet which ran the London Underground or part of the refurbishment of the London Underground which a month and a half ago went bankrupt for two billion pounds Tony and left that money over to the public purse to pick up. So those are the issues and I think are very real today all over the world and I think the more we can discuss them the better.