5.1.2. Strategy of ‘Defining and Providing services to people’ As stated before, this strategy relates to the second dimension of ‘accessibility’ and is concerned with ‘people’ and ‘what they need’ This strategy can also be called as ‘buildings neighbourhoods based on access from bottom up’ or ‘Governance of reducing time poverty in cities’ or ‘Strategies of proximity services’ While the strategy of creating compact neighbourhoods requires building density and diversity in the neighbourhoods for localization of services through free market, the strategy of ‘defining and providing services to people’ brings to focus the communities in the neighbourhood and their needs. Unlike the strategy of creating compact neighbourhoods, It has a pronounced emphasis on soft measures rather than structural actions. However, it must be noted that both the strategies share some common principles and action-policy frameworks’ and are highly interrelated to each other. For example, both require a place-based approach and coordination of neighbourhood’s actions and city actions. The element that distinguishes both is that the former looks at neighbourhoods from technical point of view ie. Technical assessment of density, diversity, etc while the latter looks at neighbourhoods from communities’ perspective. This Strategy too, like the Strategy of building compact cities, warrants decentralizing governance structures close to people and defining together ‘which amenities are basic amenities’ or ‘which services are proximity services’ that needs to be availed. In the case of the three cities analysed in this thesis study, all of them show diverse attitudes in ‘defining basic amenities.’, based on their local socio-economic and political context. For example, Portland city undertook intensive consultation processes with the communities during the formulation of the Portland Plan 2012 and created a ‘citywide definition of basic amenities and services’ to be provided in all the neighbourhoods. On the other hand, the city of Paris has ‘participatory budget allocation processes’ already installed in the neighbourhoods/ arrondissements. Although it is not clear about its exact details, but it can be assumed that the ‘the definition of amenities and services’ will be decided individually by respective arrondissements, unlike Portland’s citywide definition. As seen from the pilot projects of Melbourne, the city has not undertaken any consultation regarding what amenities are requires by the communities and has only focussed on co-creating pedestrian environments with the residents. This shows the limitation of Melbourne case study for defining basic amenities and services through a strict top-down approach. This observation may also be interpretated as, Melbourne is inclined towards ‘Governance of Enabling ‘Service Provision’ in Neighbourhoods (by free market)’ only and is focusing on creating compact neighbourhoods which does not bother governance of provision and regulation of services in the neighbourhoods.
The definition of ‘which amenities are basic amenities’ then can be further linked to ‘what kind of’ local retail is needed through new densification of lands and buildings, or what 112
