Governing the Future City: A comparative analysis of governance innovations in large scale urban developments in Shanghai, London, Johannesburg

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We will adopt a comparative approach to investigate social innovations in the context of large-scale urban developments. A large proportion of urban development in different regions of the world is taking place in mega-urban projects, such as new cities, satellite cities, or large new suburbs within existing cities. These developments are building the future city. They are important sites of experimentation in new ways of developing and governing the city as they often stretch across multiple jurisdictions and can take decades to bring to fruition. We specifically explore innovations in: how governments are seeking to manage the tensions between social inclusion and achieving development at scale under resource constraints; how communities are coming together across different neighbourhoods to support one another in the face of the huge changes these developments bring to their environs, including pressures for their displacement; and how developers are playing a growing role in governance. In addition, transnational connections are prolific in large scale urban developments where investors, developers, governments and communities are closely linked in to ideas, policies and practices from other contexts. We will consider how social innovations in all of our case studies are shaped by these wider, often shared, processes. Our core research question addresses concerns over whether this trend towards at-scale urban transformation emphasizes efficient delivery and market-driven financing of infrastructure over public participation in shaping city futures; or whether such large scale controversial developments might in fact be opening up a political space for new forms of governance. Based on in-depth case studies of three large scale developments in different contexts - the Mayoral Development Corporation in Old Oak Park Royal in London; a new suburb, Lingang, in Shanghai; and the ambitious Mayoral project to stitch together segregated Johannesburg through the "Corridors of Freedom" - we compare ways in which the governance of cities is changing. The three projects we have selected to study share similar challenges in terms of financing developments through enhancing land values, designing liveable and sustainable new urban areas, and fostering spatial planning models which integrate the new developments into the wider metropolitan region. In addition, the developments are linked in to shared international policy and development networks. Thus we feel it is productive to compare the range of different kinds of governance outcomes generated by large scale developments across these different planning and development contexts. Our cases consider different models of urban development: state-led new town construction in China, property-led planning-gain development in the UK, and the developmental models balancing service delivery with economic growth agendas in South Africa. This gives the research a very innovative academic component, as it is not common to compare development experiences in cities in different regions of the world; doing so means we can speak to the diversity of urban experiences across the globe, which are strongly influencing each other. Contrasting the declining scope for public participation in planning in the UK with the now well-established democratic urban planning process in South Africa, and emerging land markets, property rights awareness and concerns to generate vibrant urban communities in China expands our perspective of urban transformation to its full spectrum.A distinctive feature of the research is that it has strong policy relevance. The research design creates a framework with a high potential for wider impact, including a dedicated strand of action research to co-produce knowledge with local residents and business groups, and a targeted engagement with planners and policy makers to enable direct learning across the three cases in relation to models of development finance and management.