Practice Area: Urban Governance, Development and Management

Urban Governance: Urban areas are uniquely important to the economic development and governance. Rapid urbanization over the past fifty years has resulted in majority of the world’s population living in urban areas. In most countries, cities form the engines of economic growth, while the higher population density in urban areas creates not only an opportunity, but also a need, for resolving communal conflicts and for making local public decisions.

Good urban governance harnesses the growth in urban areas in order to achieve economic growth as well as poverty reduction, while at the same time addressing the myriad of problems associated with urbanization in densely populated areas, including shortages of affordable housing; traffic congestion; the provision of public services, urban amenities and green space; providing a safe and clean living environment for its residents; mitigating slum formation; and balancing the competing needs and interests of different segments of the urban population. No single stakeholder controls the local public sector, so that achieving urban development invariably requires bringing together various interest groups in order to shape the urban space and find solutions to common problems.

Local Economic Development: While there are many ways in which Local Economic Development (LED) can be approached, sustainable LED interventions should be grounded in the recognition that markets, not government, drive economic growth, but that the role of local government—how it delivers services, how it manages its assets, and how it interacts and forms partnerships with the private sector—improves market conditions.

Like any local development activity, the pursuit of local economic development activities is highly context-specific, not only between countries, but also within countries. In supporting LED activities around the world, the Urban Institute understands and enhances the role that local governments play in adding value to and directing community resources toward improving the economic viability of cities. The Urban Institute’s commitment to transparent decision making, through an engaged and informed civil society, mitigates the inevitable tensions that result when making decisions that affect the economic well being of individuals and firms.

Asset Management: Governments are the largest owners of real property in the world, holding vast property portfolios that include office buildings, industrial properties, vacant land, and real estate used for delivering services to citizens. Public real property and infrastructure assets account for a largest portion of public wealth of both developed and developing countries. Yet, property assets typically remain a “hidden treasure” and, sometimes, an unknown liability: mismanaged, underutilized, and often in dire need of maintenance and repair or contamination removal.

Typical problems in (local) asset management include lack of explicit policies regarding public property; lack of professional expertise within government to recognize and address complex asset management issues; lack of complete and reliable inventory records; legal disputes over many properties; extremely fragmented and inefficient administration of property portfolios, and bad financial management of the assets. Too often there are huge deferred maintenance and repair costs associated with public property, while most governments do not have resources for investing in property maintenance. This leads to loss of public wealth concentrated in governmental real property and historically, public asset management has suffered from a lack of transparency and conflict of interests.