Urban development towards smart nation
FCL researchers facilitated a workshop on governance and systems thinking for Southeast Asian and South Asian participants in a training organised by CLC and JICA.
From the 3rd to 7th of February 2020, the training programme “Urban Development Towards a Smart Nation Vision” brought 20 leaders of city departments from South and Southeast Asian cities together.
Organised by the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the programme aimed to provide particpants with an understanding of the driving forces, challenges and opportunities for sustainable urban development and management, as well as Smart Nation development in Japan and Singapore.
The Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) facilitated a workshop on governance arrangements and systems thinking. Exploring how smart city governance relates to three intertwined concepts to tackle future challenges; sustainability, social justice, and resilience, the FCL workshop intended to broaden the horizons of existing smart city projects and leverage their potentialities. It also aimed at revealing the current governance arrangements needed to support the urban solutions brought up by the participants and how these arrangements could be shaped to ensure greater resilience.
The 20 participants were divided into 5 clusters, each focusing on a specific theme: water and sanitation; housing; transport; urban renewal; spatial planning; and on a specific case study. Each cluster carried out a systems mapping exercise, encouraging participants to adopt critical viewpoint on the selected city cases.
They were assigned specific roles (the Earth Representative, the Citizens’ Voice, the Local Expert..) and were guided by a set of questions to explore the embeddedness of their smart city case within wider city problems; identify existing governance arrangements (stakeholders, policies, technologies) and their limits; and link them to concepts of environmental sustainability, civic participation and drivers of change. Each cluster then gave a five-minute report on the key takeaways from their city cases.
Discussion with participants revealed that some cities are keen on more co-research on their urban issues; such as Dili in the young country of Timor-Leste. This could open opportunities for future partnerships between the CLC, FCL, and foreign local governments.
