Urban form is the amalgamation of a web of social activity, a spatial manifestation of human ingenuity and ambition, a place of gathering and collective meaning and a place of flux and almost constant evolution. Our society is quickly changing into a network society. Cities and urban systems at once are growing upward, becoming forums of intensified information exchange, growing outward, drawing more and more upon regional resources and markets to satiate the competitive erg of an intensified and hyper connected global economy, and are increasingly juxtaposing international and local movement of people, goods and information. As growth and development has led to the emergence of dense networks of globally connected urban regions, urban governments remain frozen in time, relics of past understanding of how to govern and how to organize urban systems. As cities have expanded well beyond conventional geographic boundaries and delineations of such government institutions, actors are left to respond with antiquated tools in an otherwise more challenging and complex socio-cultural context. This thesis is a study of functional mismatches between urban spatial and social systems. This thesis is also an exploration of providing strategies to mitigate functional mismatches with new policy tools. The thesis begins with the premise that fragmentation of urban governance networks is in large part attributed to the inability of these networks to tackle regional coordination problems because of local boundary constraints. The resulting mismatch between urban governance capacity to engage larger scale urban systems requires new forms of creative collaboration, to fill service provision gaps. Digital and telecommunications technologies, their installation and their use to produce public services at the city and regional level is proposed as means not only to activate dialogues and collaboration between actors in a given network, but also to change cultures of collaboration. Learning to work together initially, then communicating and collaborating more rapidly through an increase in the quality of connections will serve to mitigate the “mismatch” of urban governance service provision at the regional level as actors will shift and adopt new roles to adjust and fully take advantage of technological change. Discussions of strategies to mitigate mismatch in metropolitan areas will be applied to two United States cities, New York and Portland, for further theoretical development application.
La forma urbana è la fusione di una complessa rete di attività individuali e istituzionali, una manifestazione spaziale di ingegno umano e ambizione, un luogo di incontro e di senso collettivo e un luogo di cambiamento continuo e in quasi costante evoluzione. Tale complessa attività è informata, strutturata da condizioni socio-culturali e di innovazione tecnologica, ed è una sovrapposizione apparente di risultati conseguiti in passato e proiettati verso desideri futuri. La nostra società sta cambiando; alla luce delle conquiste tecnologiche con una conseguente maggiore rapidità di connessione e dallo scambio di informazioni in gran parte attribuibile allo sviluppo di Internet, lo sono anche gli spazi in cui viviamo. Le città ed i sistemi urbani allo stesso tempo, si stanno sviluppando, diventando forum di scambio di informazioni intensificato e crescente verso l’esterno, attingendo sempre più risorse dal loro hinterland per saziare l’intensificarsi della competitività del mercato globale. Le nostre istituzioni, tuttavia, rimangono congelate nel tempo, reliquie di costrutti sociali di una comprensione del passato come governare e di come organizzare il tumulto costante di attività urbane. Mentre la città si è evoluta in una forma più complessa, espandendosi ben oltre i confini geografici e tradizionali delimitazioni delle istituzioni ormai antiquate, l’attività di governo è lasciata al cavarsela con strumenti troppo vecchio in un contesto di governante altrimenti più impegnatovi e complessi. Questa tesi è una presentazione dell’evoluzione degli spazi urbani e dei sistemi di governante istituiti per organizzarle. Si aprirà quindi una discussione sulla forma antiquata e inadeguata delle istituzioni di governo per affrontare i più complessi problem urbani regionali. Infine, la tesi proporrà una nuova strategia per inquadrare il trattamento degli spazi urbani, attraverso l’implementazione di tecnologie delle telecomunicazioni digitali, per promuovere nuove forme di collaborazione intergiurisdizionale nelle regioni urbane e rompere la frammentazione della governance istituzionale, concentrandosi sulla creazione di nuovi dialoghi tra le istituzioni e la città funzionale.
Network governance for urban regions : reconfiguring governance networks through the implementation of digital telecommunications technologies to meet the needs of changing metropolises
ARANCIO, MATTHEW;MIRZAEI, SANAZ
2009/2010
Abstract
Urban form is the amalgamation of a web of social activity, a spatial manifestation of human ingenuity and ambition, a place of gathering and collective meaning and a place of flux and almost constant evolution. Our society is quickly changing into a network society. Cities and urban systems at once are growing upward, becoming forums of intensified information exchange, growing outward, drawing more and more upon regional resources and markets to satiate the competitive erg of an intensified and hyper connected global economy, and are increasingly juxtaposing international and local movement of people, goods and information. As growth and development has led to the emergence of dense networks of globally connected urban regions, urban governments remain frozen in time, relics of past understanding of how to govern and how to organize urban systems. As cities have expanded well beyond conventional geographic boundaries and delineations of such government institutions, actors are left to respond with antiquated tools in an otherwise more challenging and complex socio-cultural context. This thesis is a study of functional mismatches between urban spatial and social systems. This thesis is also an exploration of providing strategies to mitigate functional mismatches with new policy tools. The thesis begins with the premise that fragmentation of urban governance networks is in large part attributed to the inability of these networks to tackle regional coordination problems because of local boundary constraints. The resulting mismatch between urban governance capacity to engage larger scale urban systems requires new forms of creative collaboration, to fill service provision gaps. Digital and telecommunications technologies, their installation and their use to produce public services at the city and regional level is proposed as means not only to activate dialogues and collaboration between actors in a given network, but also to change cultures of collaboration. Learning to work together initially, then communicating and collaborating more rapidly through an increase in the quality of connections will serve to mitigate the “mismatch” of urban governance service provision at the regional level as actors will shift and adopt new roles to adjust and fully take advantage of technological change. Discussions of strategies to mitigate mismatch in metropolitan areas will be applied to two United States cities, New York and Portland, for further theoretical development application.| File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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2010_12_Arancio_Mirzaei.pdf
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https://hdl.handle.net/10589/7581