According to the UN’s research, the world is becoming more urbanised. Fify four percent of the globe now live in cities, versus around 30% in the 1950s. This is set to continue to about two thirds of the global population living in cities by 2050. Nearly 40 of these have populations of more than 10 million already.
As I have previously discussed, this increase in population affords greater power to the city unit and, I believe, we will increasingly see the city unit playing the role nation units have played for the past 200 years: law and policy maker, negotiator, diplomat, trader. Hopefully not warmonger. What nation states have, however, are more or less uniform structures for the expectations associated with those roles. The role of the mayor or equivalent is less standardised and normalised.
The Brookings Institution has just published research into (primarily US) mayoral roles with recommendations of the ways in which this role could and should develop for maximum effectiveness. Citylab has done a great job of summarising the key recommendations:
- City leaders must exercise the full gamut of their formal powers
- In addition, they must have high soft power acumen to build and work the network of actors (public and private) to get things done in their cities. The best city leaders have high capability in this area: “Effective mayors govern by network, exercising soft powers of persuasion and executing strategies to improve their cities that rely on a range of public, private, and civic resources.”
- Finally, city leaders must utilise formal and informal powers to leverage and realise the full value of their city’s assets.
In the same way as we expect transparency and accountability from global business leaders so it is now time for a similar framework for the leadership competencies of mayors to be developed. The Brookings research is a good start.