Urban Governance Futures: Scenarios for London

Research seminar hosted by LSE Cities in partnership with MacArthur Foundation

The first foresight seminar run by the MacArthur Foundation and LSE Cities with the title Urban Governance Future: Scenarios for London took place on the 16th of June 2014. Among the audience were a wide range of policy makers, practioners as well as academics who were discussing the future of urban governance with a specific focus on technology and scenarios for the London context. Welcome notes were given by LSE Cities Executive Director Philipp Rode as well as Alaina Harkness, Program Officer at the MacArthur Foundation which are the main funder of the project to investigate new urban governance.

The event included two separate sessions with two presentations each. The first session presentations came from Tony Travers, Director of LSE London as well as Eve Mitelton-Kelly, Director of the LSE Complexity Group, followed by a discussion from the audience. The second session on the urban transport in London was conducted by Nicky Gavron, London Assembly Member and former Deputy Mayor, London as well as Vernon Everitt, Managing Director of Customer Experience, Marketing & Communications from Transport for London followed by another round of discussions.

To download the piece by Eve Mitelton-Kelly on ‘Urban Governance: A Complexity Theory Approach’ click here.

Profiles

    Vernon Everitt

    Managing Director of Customer Experience, Marketing & Communications from Transport for London

    Nicky Gavron

    London Assembly Member and former Deputy Mayor, London

    Alaina Harkness

    Program Officer at the MacArthur Foundation

    Eve Mitelton-Kelly

    Director of the LSE Complexity Group

    Tony Travers

    Tony Travers is Director of the IPA and also of LSE London.  He is a professor in the Department of Government. His key research interests include local and regional government and public service reform. He has been an advisor to the Communities & Local Government Select Committee and also to other Parliamentary committees. He has published a number of books on cities and government, including Failure in British Government, The Politics of the Poll Tax (with David Butler and Andrew Adonis); Paying for Health, Education and Housing: How does the Centre Pull the Purse Strings (with Howard Glennerster and John Hills); The Politics of London: Governing the Ungovernable City and, most recently, London’s Boroughs at 50. He has chaired a number of official commissions, including the Independent Commission on Local Government Finance in Wales and the London Finance Commission.

    Philipp Rode

    Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. As researcher, consultant and advisor he has been directing interdisciplinary projects comprising urban governance, transport, city planning and urban design at the LSE since 2003. The focus of his current work is on institutional structures and governance capacities of cities, and on sustainable urban development, transport and mobility. Rode is co-directing the cities workstream of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and has co-led the United Nations Habitat III Policy Unit on Urban Governance. He is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).