5.1.2. Strategy of ‘Defining and Providing services to people’

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

should be provided in existing and abandoned buildings/retail spaces (using various tools of incentives or public actions). Hence, this type of governance acts as a guide to the ‘governance of creating compact neighbourhoods.’ Thus, the policy goal of ‘supporting local retail shops’ mentioned in the previous section can further be aligned to the amenities needed by the people. Moreover, putting emphasis on people and their access to services also brings focus to those neighbourhoods where traditional means of service provision by building density is not possible, like (modernist) monofunctional residential neighbourhoods with no ground floor retail spaces, or neighbourhoods in critical environmental zones where building density will threaten environmental sustainability. Therefore, this type of governance prerequisites investments in strengthening welfare oriented socio-economic policies and warrants public actions rather than free-market mechanisms.

It deems necessary to enable alternate forms of service provisions in critical areas of low accessibility (due to low density, or due to population profile) For example, Paris has inducted policies to provide alternate means of services in neighbourhoods with high number of elderly populations through programs like ‘Weekly farmers’ market and ‘handicrafts markets’.

It can be said that both Portland and Paris show many similarities regarding this form of ‘alternate’ service provision. For example, in both cities, the public school in the neighbourhood open up during the offschool hours for public use of school library and school parks, thus providing access through non-traditional means. Similarly, community hubs and abandoned buildings can be a good source to insert alternate means of service provisions. Both the cities have plans to invest in local production of fresh food through urban farming in public parks of the neighbourhood as well as city. This shall reduce reliance on traditional means of food access through grocery stores. Since Portland has a history of red-lined and segregated neighbourhoods, such policies not only help provide local access to food but also helps increasing sustenance of marginalised groups, typical of such neighbourhoods. Furthermore, Paris is promoting ‘Local childcare’ services in its neighbourhoods by bringing together the service providers (in this case, local Au-pairs) and service recipients (neighbourhood residents). Focus should also be on promoting ‘local consumption’ using various programs and campaigns. Melbourne’s neighbourhood campaigns like ‘eat local, shop local’ help build social cohesion among neighbourhood communities and promotes local consumption patterns thus reducing commute. Therefore, this strategy too, like the previous one, emphasises on place-based approach to making neighbourhoods. City managers need to carefully analyse the socio-economic potential in the neighbourhoods and devise innovative forms of service provision to reduce dependency on commuting outside neighbourhoods. Furthermore, like the previous type of governance, this one too requires co-ordination of city level socio-economic policies with neighbourhood policies. For example, city level

policies need to be drafted to incentivise the free-market actors to realign the development of big box commercial centres from outskirts to inside the city, close to public transit. At the same time, reducing ‘time poverty’ ‘easing commute’ at city scale may be supported by synchronising the ‘social time-table’ of the city similar to what Paris has put to practice. This type of straegy too, requires creating feedback loops that not only monitor development of services but also quality of services in the neighbourhoods. For example, Portland has created ‘Neighbourhood leakage indicator’ which helps monitor quality of provision of services in the neighbourhoods. Building neighbourhoods based on ‘sustainable-access’ deems necessary to include community planners in accessibility planning, a domain that is generally reserved for land use and transport planners (Solá & Vilhelmson, 2018) since community planners have a better knowledge of local needs of people and their issues.

In short, the Strategy of creating compact neighbourhoods that emphasis on structural action, needs further alignment with the Strategy of proximity services that primarily relies on soft measures, by, • Creating a constant communication and alignment between long term visions of creating compact cities and short-term vision of increasing liveability. • Active mapping of city scale accessibility (the city of 40-50 minutes) and neighbourhood scale proximity (city of 15/20 minutes); as well as • Coordination of top-down actions and bottom-up actions.

An example for this co-ordination of different types of Strategies can be found in Portland city. The city is promoting creation of ‘Ancillary Dwelling Unit’ in suburban (sprawled and segregated) areas that typically consist of low-density single household dwellings with lawns. Through this policy, it has allowed suburban dwellers to add an additional residential room, or a home owned local stores/ office in their private lands. Thus, this policy benefits from citizen-buy-in to attain density, increases self-reliance of these households, and at the same time, adds amenities and services for the neighbourhood community. Thus, designing neighbourhoods based on ‘increasing proximity for its people’ and ‘reducing time poverty’ requires combining the technical capabilities of building compact dense neighbourhoods with aspirations of people, using tools of social innovation and building cities for and with people.

Looking from the current state of cities and issue of reduced access in suburbs, doing so requires investments diverted to suburbs to create compact neighbourhoods and meanwhile provide alternate forms of services as per people’s needs. From the case studies, few learning can be identified regarding the action policy framework and principles of governance to promote accessibility in the city and proximity in the neighbourhoods. Table 5 on the following page gives a summary of derivations from the case-studies.

It may be noted that Portland case study provides a comparatively better example regarding the ‘governance of proximity services’ and ‘governance of building compact neighbourhoods’ combined. Initial findings suggests that Melbourne is only focussing on the governance of ‘building compact neighbourhoods’, and Paris’ measures, due to limitations of asymmetric data, appears to be applicable only in the inner city which is already well developed, thus, the case study is only related to the second type of governance ie. Providing services to people.