The Urban Management Programme, as an extension of the City Consultation methodology, has implemented City Development Strategies in several cities to further improve the capacity of municipal authorities to implement participatory management mechanisms. These cities include Bamako, Mali; Cuenca, Ecuador; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Johannesburg, South Africa; Santo Andre, Brazil; Shenyang, China; Tunis, Tunisia and cities in the Lake Victoria Region namely, Kampala, Uganda; Kisumu, Kenya; and Musoma, more...

120 city consultations have been undertaken during Phase 3, and these consultations represent a major achievement of the programme at the country and city level. The underlying premise of a UMP City Consultation (CC) is that poor city administration is often the result of weak rapport with civil society, particularly where bureaucratic and unresponsive modes of administration are the norm. The UMP City Consultation approach has been designed to bridge this gap so that city administration and key more...

Coffs Harbour (Australia) has reaped higher than anticipated financial savings from the installation of energy efficient street lighting. The new lighting was expected to save $US 61,000 ($AUS 70,000) per year from Council’s electricity bill over a ten-year period. Instead, Council is saving $US 87,200 ($AUS 100,000) per year just three years after their installation. Additionally, energy consumption has dropped by 30 percent. Coffs Harbour was the first council in Australia to install energ more...

Conference paper - Urban Age. By Gerald E. Frug, Louis D. Brandies Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. " All city governments are dysfunctional. But each is dysfunctional in its own way. Some people treat the city governments of London and New York as being a lot alike. After all, each has an elected Mayor and a separately elected city council or assembly; each is a city with roughly 7-8 million people in a metropolitan area of roughly 18-20 million. If you compare the cities with this kind of more...

Germany, after leading the world for so many years as an advanced industrial economy is now offering the rest of Europe an accelerated insight into what life is going to be like with an ageing population, a falling birth-rate, and a society in which too few active young people are prepared to carry the burden of social responsibility forced on them by demographics.What was once East Germany has lost almost 1.5 million of its people since the reunification of 1990. That drop means than 16 % of al more...

Urban Age believes urban leaders can learn from each other to find better local solutions to global challenges. This is accomplished by advocating high standards for the built environment as well as intelligent city governance and management structures. A focus on the context of regional and national perspectives will expand Urban Age’s impact through research and events in India (2007), Brazil (2008) and the Eastern Mediterranean (2009); a worldwide summit in June 2010 will discuss the result more...

This volume contains an essay originally published in Asian Development Outlook 2007. It augments that publication’s contents by providing an extensive, new appendix. A central premise of the essay is that economies that successfully sustain growth do so by continuously adapting and changing their form. Incrementally, but steadily, they latch on to and master new and more productive activities, reaping gains along the way. Looking ahead, the essay notes that there are still enormous opportunit more...

This volume contains three essays originally published in Asian Development Outlook 2007. Each one looks at how the economies of East and Southeast Asia have evolved in the period since the crisis of 1997–98. The essays’ main conclusions caution against complacency and suggest a complex agenda for the future. They also underline the importance for the region both of strengthening its deftness in accessing new and growing markets in the global economy, and of assimilating and adapting to tech more...

By Shlomo Angel, Stephen C. Sheppard and Daniel L. Civco. With Robert Buckley, Anna Chabaeva, Lucy Gitlin, Alison Kraley, Jason Parent, and Micah Perlin,
Transport and Urban Development Department, The World Bank ( 2005). " This report, commissioned by the World Bank, examines the dynamics of global urban expansion by defining a new universe of 3,943 cities with population in excess of 100,000 and drawing a stratified global sample of 120 cities from this universe. Data for 90 cities out of more...

CITYNET (The Regional Network of Local Authorities for the Management of Human Settlements), based in Yokohama, Japan, came into being with the vision of bringing cities together - to learn, to flourish. Since then, the organisation has taken bold strides in bridging the gap between local governments, their national counterparts, non-governmental and international organisations. With an aim to help local governments provide better services to citizens, CITYNET is committed to capacity-building a more...