The City in Focus
Cities are dense urban settlements that have become the epitome of modernity, development, and economic prosperity. They have been described as one of the humankindâs greatest social innovations and are arguably a fundamental precondition for improving the material and immaterial conditions of peopleâs lives (Glaeser, 2011). This holds true in particular for cities in the developed world, that is, cities in wealthy countries with post-industrial economies, technologically advanced infrastructures, and institutions needed to sustain democracy.
However, even if cities have helped us grow richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier, as claimed by Edward Glaeser (2011), their rise has not been without challenges and contradictions. Many scenarios portraying our urban future demonstrate risks and dangers resulting from technological development, environmental problems, public health issues, instability due to socio-economic inequality, and external threats such as those exacerbated by global climate change.
Due to a profound transformation in the techno-economic paradigm which evolved in the post-war decades, it has become a major challenge for cities to adjust to changing conditions in the global digital age (Sassen, 2010). Accelerated scientific development resulting in various high-tech applications has led urban governments and communities to emphasize the role of technological solutions in solving urban problems, as reflected in the rise of smart city discourse (Komninos, 2015). On the other hand, a matter not to be overlooked when considering urban development is that even if the physical infrastructures, facilities, and applications in urban technology are essential for the functioning of the city, its soul lies in human interaction. Innovativeness, creativity, entrepreneurship, revitalization, and resilience of urban communities rest primarily on the social nexus. While fairly recent discussions ranging from the productive role of social capital to the stabilizing impact of inclusive prosperity increase our understanding of this social nexus, there is still a lot to learn about the social dimension of urban development.
Balancing Social and Economic Development
The social dimension of urban development invites us to consider how human and social potential in the pursuit of urban development can be strengthened. This challenge is often referred to as the social agenda or more broadly as social sustainability (Baldwin & King, 2018). Such an approach often tends to focus primarily on social problems such as poverty, inequality, and exclusion, while downplaying the need to secure preconditions for productivity, innovativeness, and long-term growth. Such an orientation generates problems in times of global competition and makes the provision of welfare and well-being for large segments of society unattainable. The need to balance sound economics with social equity and stability urges us to reconsider central premises underlying public policy, at both national and local levels.
Local governments tend to suffer from a lack of resources to further their urban development. It is therefore worthwhile examining how cities could better enhance their ability to benefit from having local stakeholders on board and let them contribute to inclusive prosperity. This would imply creating conditions for the optimal utilization of human capital, social capital, and various other forms of capital available in urban communities. A concept encapsulating this discussion is inclusion. Our hypothesis is that while inclusion is conventionally seen as a policy challenge motivated by human rights, equality, and justice, it has in fact tremendous potential as a morally more neutral strategic concept to foster urban social and economic development in a broader sense.
While decade-long global economic growth has lifted millions of people out of poverty, our world has also reached unprecedented levels of income and wealth disparity in that same period. Consequently, wealth is held by a tiny minority of the people and large segments of the population have been left behind. In such a situation, issues related to inclusion, sharing, and solidarity are bound to become critical. Discussions about inclusive capitalism (Green, 2017; Jacobs & Mazzucato, 2016), inclusive prosperity (Naidu, Rodrik, & Zucman, 2019), and inclusive growth (Lee, 2019) are signs of such concerns. The inclusive city is a development-oriented policy concept that can play an important role in adducing a social perspective to the promotion of economic development and, reversely, an economic perspective on social development.
We contend that the idea of social inclusion should be more than merely fixing the perverse outcomes and exclusionary practices of instrumental neoliberal approaches to the promotion of urban growth. We make a plea for a new urban socio-economic model in which a fine balance is struck between the social and the economic dimensions of urban development. This can be done by making both value creation and consumption inclusive and accounting for the contributions that various types of capital (human, social, physical, and natural alongside financial) make to trigger economic development. The above line of thought paves the way to redefine public policies, including measurement that goes beyond GDP alone, commitment to building competitiveness through broad-based utilization of various capabilities existing within the urban community, democratization of innovation, the building of sharing institutions, and reliance on ecological modernization, just to name a few aspects of this new paradigm for socio-economic development (cf. Aiginger, 2014).
Toward Inclusive Urban Development
In this volume, we will provide conceptual tools for understanding and designing shared prosperity in cities. The foundation of the conventional idea of an inclusive city is a democratically governed citizen-centric urban community with a high degree of sensitivity to social issues (Hambleton, 2015). The historical roots of such a progressive view grew primarily in the developed world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a response to various drastic forms of social and economic exclusion. The post-war decades witnessed the rise of increasingly diverse metropolitan cities in terms of social class, ethnicity, language, religion, lifestyle, gender identity, and a host of other features.
The inclusion of societal groups representing such a variety in capabilities provides enormous economic potential. However, building an inclusive city is a complex exercise, both intellectually and politically: intellectually, because it comprises a host of different dimensions sometimes leading to contradictory requirements and situations; and politically, because the policymaking, governance, and management of inclusion-oriented urban development processes should take stock of stakeholder interests that are not always easy to accommodate.
The idea of inclusion is not as self-evident as it may appear at first sight. It is often quite manageable to address the inclusion of a particular disadvantaged group and assume the benefits of such an action. But it is much more demanding to comprehend the big picture of social inclusion in terms of complex intersectional relations in the urban context, not to speak of building an agenda in which this multifaceted set of well-intentioned actions is turned into a source of urban value creation. Thus, inclusion should not be confined only to disadvantaged or marginalized groups, but also cover groups not usually taken into account in inclusionary policies, such as families with children, students of local educational institutions, senior citizens, customers of a particular hospital, and non-credit card holders, depending in each case on the community characteristics, historical context, identified potentials, and development goals.
The power of inclusion becomes evident when, for example, students are openly invited to contribute to innovation processes initiated by local firms in a facilitated student-involving platform, as is the case with Demola in Tampere, Finland. Without such a strategically motivated inclusion the potential of 40,000 higher education students in this mid-sized post-industrial city would have simply been left underutilized. The same kind of potential can be associated with new channels for senior, academic, or ethnic entrepreneurship, crowdfunding for community-based projects, or business ideas for parents at home. Similarly, mixing urban functions, improving public transport, and promoting community safety can increase inclusion with the potential to enhance interaction, communication, and entrepreneurship. Examples like these can offer practically endless possibilities for various segments in the urban community to harness and contribute to socio-economic development.
To sum up, this book builds up a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding inclusive urban development. It discusses how various aspects of inclusion contribute to urban development; demonstrates how value trade-offs may occasionally be deemed necessary when policymakers promote social, economic, and political inclusion; and examines the governance issues related to such an endeavor. Toward the end of the book, we use the examples of four cities from both sides of the Atlantic to illustrate different conditions of and strategic approaches to the promotion of the inclusive city.
Our central assumption is that multidimensional urban inclusion is not merely a precondition for the promotion of equity, justice, broad accessibility to public services, and well-being for all, but also an opportunity to widen the local resource base, create collaborative synergies, improve conditions for entrepreneurship, and boost public value creation. In short, it is designed to widen the group of people involved in and contributing to local value creation.
Structure of the Book
Following this introductory section, in Chap. 2 we will focus on changes in and challenges to the ur...