« 15th Anniversary

Politics and Power in Urban Management

• Traditionally, planners have been invested by the society with the capacity to design the city shape, the rules of the development process and the procedures to stop the offenders. Public and private money has been spent to build capacity for planners and planning organizations to support the sustainable development.
• Developers are intermediaries producing projects within existing communities for dwellings, or productive activities. They take risks in doing so, such as financial risk, market risk, or time risk imposed by the planning approvals for urban development.
• Local politicians, as elected officials, are eager to „commercialize” votes from citizens in either preserving projects or developing projects in local communities. Many times, politics and objective criteria in determining the projects prioritization process generate conflicting agenda.
• Local communities evaluate the society cost of urban development. They commit or reject the project according to their level of democratization, of information, participation and implication in the process of formulating and implementing projects.

In fact the urban values depend on the long-run health of the city where the planners plan, developers invest, politicians decide and citizens live. One question still remains:

Who the ...beep... manages our city?

The result of the voting for the following 4 options is:

• Developers: 43.40%
• Politicians: 41.51%
• Planners: 11.32%
• Community: 3.77%