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FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO A SUCCESSFUL
AND PROSPEROUS REGION IN A GLOBAL WORLD
Pasqual Maragall SUMMER 2000
My experience with Swedish cities
Global village or a globe of cities
From the system of cities to the single city
A proposal.
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I want to express my gratitude to the City of Malmô, the Swedish Federation
of Municipalities, and the Forenings Sparbanken and in particular to M.Sòren
Andersen, Deputy Managing Director and M. Ulf Svensson, Head of the
KOMMEK -committee. M. SVENSSON, who must have a first class data base,
has been trying for a number of years to get me to this growingly important
meeting on urban and regional policy.
My life changed a bit in the last four years. I ceased to be Mayor of Barcelona
after 15 years of office; immediately after I quitted the Presidency of the
Committee of the Regions of the European Union and embarked in teaching at the
3 rd University of Rome a course of one semester about "A Closer Europe" . Back
to Barcelona I engaged in candidating for the Presidency of the Government of
Catalonia but even winning in popular vote I wasn't able to overcome the
subtelties of the electoral law and the alliance of the Catalan nationalist coalition
with M. Aznar's Popular Party: thanks God, this permits me to be here to-day.
Nevertheless I promise to come back next time as President of Catalonia, if
fortune helps. My wife and I feel always at home in Sweden.
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ÍMv expérience with Swedish Citicsl
I have learnt a lot out of my stages in Stockholm, Goteborg and Malmoë with
myfriendsMatts Huit, Lisbet Palme and Gunnar Ericson, the former member
of the International Olympic Committee.
Stockholm was bold enough to launch the so-called Bangemann Challenge, a
project confronting a number of Eurocities in the implementation of the 10
recommendations of the Commission on the Information Society who wore the
name of the then member of the European Commission.
This initiative was a pioneer one. I want to stress here my belief in the European
network of cities and regions as one of our main assets in global competition.
Global companies are decissive. But global cities and their metropolitan regions
are decisive as well.
Externalities count. If global companies are able to understand to what extent
their long term success depends on the existence of strong local and regional
communities, we will approach a kind of welfare optimum. Otherwise we will
not. Negative externalities, such as pollution, divided communities, and the new
social divisions stemmingfromdifferent levels of iníòrmatization, will eat up the
benefits of global competition.
Europe has to show that this new equilibrium between markets and social
cohesion is possible. I am no talking about theoretical concepts: I talk about real
and specific regions and cities where global competition and the quality of
local life do not hinder each other. The dialogue between these to main factors
of modern Ufe, territory or community and economic exchanges, has to have
strong and concerned actors. And you in Scandinavia are again one of our
references in this field.
I recall the strong impression obtained out of the the visit to the House of
Science, at Chalmers University, in Goteborg, where close to a hundred firms
were being created, and not only small ones. Indebo had been among them.
Since my return to Barcelona I used some of the inputs I learnt at Chalmers in the
implementation of Initiatives Inc., a capital risk company owned then by the
municipality and to-day 75% private and 25 % public, and in the creation of
Barcelona Activa, a municipal entreprise helping young professionals and women
to establish small businesses.
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A lot of time has elapsed since then. But as I will stress later on there is still a long
way to go in the cooperation between local goverment, business and
universities. Universities have to change a lot their corporatist approach to social
life and business. And cities have to understand to what extent they can help to
welfare by creating links and both assuming resposibilities from higher levels of
government and devolving them to citizens. Business can help a lot in teaching
both governments and universities to increase efficiency. But at the same time
they will certainly learn to deal with them in a more friendly way, because they
themselves will depend on the efficiency of social overhead and the
multiplication of knowledge in specific territories.
Malmoë has produced a splendid example, along with Copenhaguen, in the
strenghtenning of the the European network of cities and communications,
with the new bridge. This is one of the best news of the year 2000 for all
Europeans.
I am a believer in Adam Smith's sentence that growth is bom out of the expansion
of markets. One thing only has to de added: markets do not grow solely by long
distance investment; markets grow of the deepenning of connections between
more or less close by agglomerations of people otherwise barely related to each
other.
The Internet revolution hinges on this principle: it makes long distance
exchanges cheaper and quicker, at the same time that it allows for the
multiplication of closer contacts with close people, a factor which ends up being
crucial.
This is so much so that the great difficulty, as I recall, in the auction of the cable
network in Stockholm by Telia was the related obligation for the winning
company to extend a costly cable system far North in Sweden. Density is still a
decissive factor in the networking business. Part of the talk about the coming
changes in the pattern of locational decisions due to internet is unfortunately
empty talk.
Investments like the ones Malmoë has been experiencing in recent years are more
strategic than certain very advertised year 2000 wonders. The bridge for one, but
the recovery of the old entrepôts close to the harbour also (I very well recall the
meeting there of the victorious ESParty after Jospin and Blair had arrived to
government in 1997). A city with dead zones is an ill city. Citizenship requires
elimination of nonsense spots. Remaking a city is a long process of giving sense
and beauty - as Richard Rogers reaclls once and again - to every corner.
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The combination of a big event project with a fixed capital program of city
improvements is the winning strategy. Some say this was the secret of the
Barcelona "renaissance", related to the 1992 Olympic Games. They are right. Yet
it is also true that the event alone does not necessarily help. The event provides for
a certain climate which is very helpful in creating the synergies, private and
public, which will change the city. And it gives coverage to a particular city image
and name. You then are in the market. But you have to produce something more
than a momentum. You have to produce something consistent and stable, for
good. The improved city becomes then the product and the engine of new
moves ahead.
This is specially important for cities which are not capital cities. True cities so to
speak. Capital cities enjoy the advantages of a critical mass of movements, both
real and virtual, physical and financial. Cities as such do not. They have to create
their own capitality in a sense or another. They have to produce their critical
mass, which is not given by political density. This enterprise is one in which the
wellbeing of the human adventure is at stake. Malmoë is one of these places.
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¡Global village or a world of cities
Cities, congestion, and diversity are at times the names of the issue that the world
is more afraid of. Cities appear to be the real problem, because they are
WHERE the problems appear.
Let me explain a little bit what my experience of mayor has taught me in this
connection.
At times the quick rythm at which the process of massification and urbanization
occurs in a given city or neighbourhood, overcomes initially the capacity of the
altready established and of their buildings and social structures to absorb
diversity, or the ability of the ethnic majorities to share social life, or of those
whose wealth is not currently used to contribute to public spacefinancingto do it,
or of grown ups with repect to young ones, or of local youngs with repect to
young newcomers and even of old and established inmmigrants vis à vis the more
recent ones.
It is true that a well managed city is able to absorb incredible amounts of
diversity. Cities act as a kidney able to purify an amazing amount of liters of the
fluid in circulation But, as in the case of the kidney, given certain circumsances, a
limit to this assimilation capacity appears. The limit can be improved or
enlarged, thanks to robust democratic and c ommunity values but cannot be totally
denied. It dependes a lot on the density of the phenomenon of diversity over
space and time, and therefore on the ability to obtain good processes of
integration in specific neighborhoods and over specific periods of time.
This is why the robustness of neighborhoods, communities, cities and regions,
as well as of local businesses, has a lot to do with a well accepted cultural
plurality or, to use a name that does not satisfy me totally, with multicumiralism
Left parties have been too slow in assuming the complexity of these processes as
well as conservative parties have been playing the greedy but dangerous game
of obtaining popular suport, namely working class support, against newcomers.
This is going to be one of the political keys to the quality of life in cities, among
other factors. We will need in Europe perhhaps not 100 million inniigrants in
the next 50 years, as was predicted, but well around 50 million - a million a
year -. This in case we suceed in aplying in general in Europe measures of the
kind you in Scandinavia have been able to design some time ago in thefieldsof
the increase in birth rates and in that of the ability of couples or singles to go on
working while having young kids, which amounts to the same. Otherwise the
problem will be only compounded at a larger scale.
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And we should even recall that Gosta Espin Andersen has showed the costs and
problems of the Scandinavian welfare model, which is in many senses superior
to the continental or the anglosaxon one, in case wages in the service sector follow
the quick growth of those in the new economy.
Up to here we have seen a reasonable sociopolitical approach to the growth of
cities. But also an economic approach to the growing size of cities is possible.
It can be helpful in obtaning some clues for the design of strategies of
improvement at the local and regional level.
You see in the present graph how the equilibrium size (Pe) of a city does not often
coincide with the optimum size (P*)
•
P* P"
Population
OPTIMUM SIZE (P*) AND ACTUAL SIZE (P") OF CITIES
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�Population growth does not stop at the minimum average costs per person,
where the city size would obtain a so-called optimum (the cheapest town per
person), but goes beyond towards an non-optimal or extra-optimal actual
population
perhaps because people, in moving or not to that particular city, perceive
the predominant average cost rather than the actual marginal cost of the last
arriving to it.
perhaps because the relative prices countryside/city have changed in favor
of the latter so that the countryside is not able any more to buy urban services,
among them education, health and leisure. (In my country many aged people, not
only the more mobile youngsters, move to bigger towns because of the health and
pharmaceutical services)
Should we be scared by that hypotetical tendency of cities to go beyond their
better size ? No. It is a fact of life that people in general prefer to live together
than alone, and for sound reasons. Let's disregard for the sake of the argument the
case of third world megapolis which involves a much longer chain of resoning.
We concentrate in the cities of the Northwestern hemisphere. Here and now we
should find ways to compensate for congestion costs and other negative
externalities as we experience them
At any rate the psychology of people and social thinkers as to the amenities or
threats involved in urban life and in general in a world of increasing population
has proved in history a very cyclical one.
Ricardo and Malthus foresaw global stagnation linked to the increase in
population and to the extension of the margin of bad land being cultivated. They
didn't count on America.
Almost 2 centuries after (from 1815 to 1974) the Meadows Report told us about
the same: in 1994, according to their MIT research, there would be no oil left ( not
good land this time but oil). It is perhhaps not the best moment to comment on oil
prices, but 25 years passed the deadline, it is hard to deny that stagnation is not
precisely the rule of the day.
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Let's take a recent example and we will realize both thefragilityof predictions,
with their underlying doctrines, and the need to approach regional and urban
strategies on sounder basis, which is the main purpose of KOMMEK 2000, as I
understood it.
One of the cultural vehicles that I respect most, the British weekly THE
ECONOMIST, evolved in the last years in the following way: a cover story
announced five or six years ago that "Hell is an American City". That cover
portrayed a picture of a crippled, poor black person walking against the
background of decaying housing units in, say, the Bronx. The very definition of
hell was made to correspond to that image.
Not much later, proving the candidness of their managers, the same magazine
conducted a thorough reasearch showing in the end that the tide had turned around
and that cities had become the place of knowledge creation and knowledge
transmission.
Two years and a half ago (1998, Jan 10th, p.15) THE ECONOMIST showed that
''America's cities can yet be resurrected". The period since the 1960's, when
central cities began to loose populetion, has ended.
This changing psychology about thefeteof cities permits us to think of the global
world in a new manner.
We can now think not in an abstract and inmaterial global village, which
otherwise is not a true and practical reality, but in a world of cities, which is a
more reasonable hypothesis.
T4e best way to get to a real global village is therefore to build a world of cities
That would function well
Reasonably open
And efficiently interconnected
This is valid too not only at the world level but also at the national or regional
level. An efficient nation and an efficient region will be those who have built an
efficient system of cities.
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�From the system of cities to the single city
For any given city of the system we have to take into account three principles:
1 - The city does not admit internal islands or lack of communication
2 - Both misery and wealth tend to colonize their environment
3 - The city is an intermediate level between society and state and also
between market and state.
Out of these three principles stem three policy rules. But let's first explain better
what mean by incommunication, colonization and the intermediate role of cities.
1 - The basis of the existence of cities is the existence of economies of scale or
economies of agglomeration. Until a certain threshold, of which we talked before,
living together in agglomerations is cheaper than living alone or in small
population entities.
But this implies the inexistence of obstacles to the interaction of those living
together. A city with incommunicated or seggregated small neighborhoods would
be the worse of the worlds, that of the lack of scale and that of the lack of access
to services.
2 - The tendency of economically segregated cities is towards incomunication.
Fear of those who have less (or are ethnically different) and price of land where
those who have more live makes economic diversity very difficult in any given
part of the city.
3 - The proximity of citizens to local goverment and local services makes cities
more accountable than nation-states. The perception of what I get from and
what I pay to local government is much more straightforward than in nations.
The three policy rules emerging from this picture are the following:
1.- The city must prevent barriers of all kind from existing. Public
space should provide all citizens with a sense of pride and with easy access
to services. In Barcelona we talked about "monumentalizing" the working
class periphery and "hygienizing" the old downtown. We meant to
eliminate the urbanistic barriers of suurban or dwntown lack of quality .
We spent a lot in the quality of the interventions in poor neigborhoods and
even more in preventing internal ghettoes.
2.- Free riding must be prohibited. Wealthy metropolitan suburbs paying
low taxes and making daily use of tax expensive and poorly equipped
downtowns makes for a vicious circle of poverty and wealth. Metropolitan
areas must be recognized not only for statistical purposes but also to
produce a fair sharing of the costs of the real agglomeration.
�3.- Cities should obtain a larger share of public responsibilities if we
want to optimize the accountability of governments. The subsidiarity
principle declared in the European Treaty should not be limited to the
relationship between the nation-states and the Union.
The last point deserves some comment.
Cities could and should become the first level of a reorganization of
government in the sense of competitivity and equivalence between price and
service.
Regions can become the place of devolution of government to cities and citizens,
by defining the economic and overhead strategies needed to survive in an open
world market.
Cities can do more than just being perceived as more sensitive to local needs and
costs.
A proposal!
Cities can create virtual markets by being audited on several counts by
independent bodies.
My proposal is that European cities and universities network to define a
battery of common urban indicators on a regular time basis.
The items to be measured could be initially the following:
1 - Pollution
2 - Noise
3 - Criminality
4 - Traffic accidents
5 - Housing prices
6 - Educationa levels
7 - Health
8 - Justice
9 - Public transport
A tentative set of the correspoding indicators could be:
1 - CO 2 in the air (three points in tne city)
2 - The % of main streets with more than 60 decibels
3 - Victimation rate
4 - People killed in accident per 100.000 inhabitants
5 - The # of yearly wages to buy a new/used apartment
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6 - Scool drop outs in %
7 - Life expectancy, infant mortality and basic health assistance cost
8 - Average time ofjudicial resolution for minor offences
9 - Commerial speed
By regularly auditing efficiency in a number of urban services cities
in credibility. The corresponding universities of these cities would provide for the
needed relayability of the audits.
It is not unlikely that the London School of Economics ( via theUrban Program,
conducted by Richard Sennet and T. Burnett) can engage in a similar kind of
project. In the last meeting of the Advisory Council of the program that I attended,
mention was made of the fact that the LSE was analyzing the possibility of
cooperation in a series of projects with a number of European universities
(Humbolt in Berlin, the University of Milano and Sciences Politiques in La
Sorbonne, to which I would like to add the University of Barcelona, via the Aula
Barcelona program).
Businness and in particular the financial sector would certainly welcome this
kind of effort. The rankings of cities obtained by surveying businnessmen on a
certain number of charecteristics of European cities are helpful (namely the
Healey and Baker ranking survey). What I am proposing is a complementary kind
of measure, not based on opinion but in objective measures conducted on
common basis and similar protocols by a network of independent University
departments.
Local and regional finance, once the Euro is adopted, is going to become a
booming sector. Perhapps the FòreningsSveriges Kommunalekonomer and the
FôreningSparbanken, which is already operating in the Swedish local finance
market, would be interested in obtaining good records of municipal efficiency
in European cities. Certain mayors are not enthusistic about it. They probably
don't know that they will be forced to give up if they want to be financed in the
not so distant future.
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02. Activitat professional
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Sèrie
Description
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Documentació emanada de l'exercici professional de Pasqual Maragall.
- Gabinet Tècnic de Programació de l'Ajuntament de Barcelona (febrer 1965-1968, funcionari 1968-1979) : com a economista.
- Servei d'estudis del Banc Urquijo (1965-1968).
- Aula Barcelona (setembre 1997 - març 1999): funda i presideix Aula Barcelona com a centre de gestió del coneixement per a l'administració de les ciutats. És un espai comú de reflexió entre universitat, empresa i administració en relació amb la ciutat i el seu passat, present i futur.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Factors that contribute to a successful and prosperous region in a global world
Creator
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Maragall, Pasqual, 1941-
Date
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2000-07-18
Type
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Conferència
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Textual
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Anglès
Subject
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Economia
Ciutats
Globalització
Description
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Conferència organitzada per l'Ajuntament de Malmö, la Federació Sueca de Municipis i el Förenings Sparbanken.
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Malmö (Suècia)
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Aquest document és còpia digital d'una còpia en paper custodiada a l'Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya.
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Document
Discursos i conferències