It has consciously raised more questions and policy issues than it is possible to respond to in such a paper. However, a central theme is a scepticism about the capacity of the current philosophy of reducing the role of governments and citizens, and increasing the authority of markets and consumers, to address the future of our cities in ways which produce high quality, sustainable and equitable urban development. Deconstructing government to achieve administrative efficiency and lower costs, reducing investment choices to simple comparisons of rates of return, encouraging short-term rather than long term investment, placing commercial values ahead of economic and other values, and ignoring the interactions which occur in complex ways in cities all seem to me to be actions based in an almost religious faith in market mechanisms and competition. Urban development is more than the sum of the individual investments made in infrastructure, facilities and services.
Urban development occurs in a place .
And the interaction of externalities of all forms in that place will impact on the quality and efficiency of urban development as well as on its sustainability. No market-based system of delivery of investment and pricing of services has yet been able to capture and equitably charge for the effects of externalities in an urban setting. It is true that large, public and private sector city developers produce many outstanding examples of new urban development and of urban renewal. But that is because their product is urban development, not simply some component part, and they serve as the planners and managers of that development, purchasing inputs as needed from other component providers. As national governments rely increasingly on competitive private providers of urban services formerly the responsibility of governments, more rather than less capacity to integrate and coordinate will be necessary.