Nuno Ferreira da Cruz and colleagues have published a paper entitled ‘Structuring composite local governance indicators’ in the journal Policy Studies. The authors argue that using a multi-criteria model which employs several objective (quantitative and qualitative) indicators and relies on a participatory method to aggregate them is a suitable way of developing sensible Local Governance Indicators.

On July 14-15, the Urban Age “Shaping Cities” conference brought over 40 speakers from 25 cities to Venice. During the conference, mayors, planners, architects, academics and commentators grappled with one of the dominant questions of an increasingly urban 21^st century: How are cities shaped? A Conference Summary is available, however, particular points of interest included:

– behind the global statistics there are far more nuanced, and at times, contradictory patterns of urbanisation that both give voice to citizens and allow external forces to frustrate democratic processes through new ownership and planning regimes;

– that the rights to the city are both social and spatial, and that urban policy should recognise that the two are intrinsically connected rather than autonomous processes;

– that intensification and densification are fundamental to creating more environmentally and socially sustainable cities but that we need to re-learn what it means to plan well-designed urban expansion that accommodates large and small-scale interventions;

– that the practice of urban design is limited by its understanding of complex social and economic forces, and that urban policy struggles to accommodate complex processes of incremental growth and incompleteness which determine authenticity in the city;

– that the frameworks, language and practice of ‘urbanism’ is woefully inadequate when it comes to capturing the reality of much of the urbanisation of the Global South.

This was the 16^th in a series of Urban Age conferences. Since 2005, over 6,000 speakers and participants have participated in conferences in several rapidly growing and mature cities including Istanbul, Delhi, New York City, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, London and Johannesburg. The next Urban Age conference will be the second to take place in Africa.

The Conflicts of an Urban Age exhibition, a Special Project of the 15^th International Architecture Exhibition, can be viewed until 27 November 2016.

LSE Cities Researcher Nicole Badstuber today participated in a meeting of the London Assembly’s Budget and Performance Committee as an expert guest to discuss the challenges facing Transport for London and the implications of the new Mayor’s commitments (see the agenda here). At LSE Cities, Nicole works on the New Urban Governance project, investigating the governance networks of urban transport in London and New York. A transcript of the discussion on Transport for London’s Financial Challenge can be found here.

Suzanne Hall, Cities Programme Director and LSE Cities Senior Research Associate, is today presenting on “urban politics at the margins” at the University of Vienna’s summer school in urban studies. Her talk, “The street is not a square: urban politics from the margins”, will consider how the street is embedded in the context of marginalisation and argue that the figurative and physical “streetness of the street” fundamentally matters for who is able to participate in the reconfiguration of the city, and under what conditions that participation is brokered.