Last year I wrote about the work of William Easterly, who is a noted advocate of the power of emergence in the field of development.  He has frequently criticized technocratic solutions that often fail to account for conditions on the ground, not least in his latest book The Tyranny of Experts.

Nowhere is emergence more evident than in the behavior of our cities, and thinkers such as James C Scott have criticized planned cities such as Brazilia, in Brazil.  With more and more of the World’s population living in urban areas however, a recent piece in Nature is interesting because it calls for greater scientific input in the future development of cities around the world.

The author is part of the Urban Knowledge Action Network that was launched at the UN Habitat III conference.  The conference marked the launch of a new framework that’s designed to guide urban development over the next 20 year period.  The author contends that science is largely missing from this framework, especially in terms of ensuring the growth in urban development occurs in a sustainable way.

A five step process

The authors propose five steps to ensure science is better represented in urban development:

1. Create a global urban scientific body, to enable learning to occur on a global scale.  They suggest that this group could easily connect with other global bodies such as the IPCC.
2. Ensure knowledge spreads globally, especially as most existing research is conducted in northern countries, whereas most urban growth occurs in southern countries.  Whether this is a form of intellectual colonialism or an advocacy for greater local research is not clear.
3. Greater funding for urban research, especially to support cross-comparison studies of both cities and regions.
4. Support transcisciplinary research, with communities of practice used to guide urban-development policy.  Again, whether this includes local knowledge and local participants or imposition from external experts is not clear.
5. Greater access to science-policy arenas.  The final request is to ensure scientists have a voice in policy making arenas such as the NUA.

“Increasingly, we realise cities are complex systems governed by multiple processes and interactions, and we need to achieve a better understanding of the synergies and trade-offs among these processes,” they conclude.

Whilst that is undoubtedly true, there is a long history of, usually foreign, intervention that attempts to impose a supposed best practice on a populous where it is unsuited and for whom they have little say in matters.

Hopefully these plans will involve providing such local actors with a voice and a platform to share their knowledge of how urban growth can be successfully overseen in their regions.  Time will very much tell.