Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
places that include: sea level rises which put coastal cities in more danger; increases
in temperatures which will lead to higher mortalities in some places; and also to the
greater frequency and magnitude of various storms, drought and fire risks in various
areas, potentially leading to greater urban damage. The increased scope is also seen
in the way that interest in improving the quality of urban life has been extended to
increasing the number of festivals and adopting slow living in various towns.
Fourth, advocates of all of the themes have created networks of various types
between cities, or people within them who are interested in similar urban ideas. The
networks promulgate and co-ordinate the policies associated with various themes,
or as in the case of the C40 group of major metropolitan centres implement poli-
cies—such as emission reductions—that make up for the absence of progress from
their national governments. Many urban municipalities are likely to be involved in
one or more of these networks, providing them with far better access to new ideas
developed in other cities and experience of best practices, as well as ways of resolv-
ing the barriers to the adoption of new policies. In some cases, like the charters for
New Urbanism or Cittaslow, they also provide foundational sets of principles, or
ways of increasing interest in sustainability, as the Transition Towns network has
done through citizen interest and involvement.
An important feature of these networks is that they increasingly bind member cit-
ies into horizontal ties, linking towns and cities with similar problems or interests,
such as improving resilience against natural hazards, or finding new ways of coping
with severe winters. So urban places are not only connected in vertical relation-
ships, downwards with small dependent places in their region, and upwards through
the size hierarchy to larger places. Obviously there were always horizontal links
between places of similar size in a country. But these new networks and specific
city to city (C2C) relationships are increasingly more significant than their vertical
links in terms of policy knowledge acquisition, especially as national governments
in big cities or capitals have become less activist in creating urban initiatives. These
horizontal urban linkages, often of continental and global reach, expand the inter-
ests and horizons of cities. They have made many municipalities more independent
in outlook and more open to innovative ideas, although most are still circumscribed
by governance rules that restrict them to their own defined territory through state or
national laws. Moreover the participants in the linkages are not simply municipal
politicians or officials but also citizens, local businessmen and academics who also
visit other cities, either to obtain first-hand experience of problems and solutions,
or to participate in various meetings and conferences that deal with new approaches
to solving and managing urban problems. However the need to provide justification
for these visits and the subsequent sharing of information is paramount, otherwise
there is a danger of the exchanges being seen by the public-at-large as just perks
or junkets at taxpayer expense. These exchanges sometimes involve the deliberate
transfer of expertise to other settlements in the developing world, by advanced cities
sending their specialists in particular problems to cities in the developing world to
provide advice over ways of solving particular problems. Examples include Bonn's
links to a set of cities round the world to help build resilience, or the way that con-
servation experts from Lille helped officials in the historic Vietnamese capital of
Search WWH ::




Custom Search