Wanted: drivers for cities as engines of growth

The demand for decentralisation and cities as engines of growth is growing in Pakistan; not by the country’s urban population; but by the policy wonks. Isn’t that strange?

Globally, the discourse on conceptualising cities as engines of growth began in the early 80s. Later in Pakistan that torch was lit by former Planning Commission boss Nadeem Ul-Haq and other scholars including Dr Durre-Nayab of PIDE, Islamabad. In recent years, the think tank Prime Institute came out with Metropolitan Competitiveness Index (MCI) in late 2018; this year Prime partnered with UN Habitat with come up with City Economic Visions. And most recently, the Fall 2019 edition of World Bank’s ‘South Asia Economic Focus’ has made decentralisation as its area of focus.

While Pakistan continues to struggle with poor and partial decentralisation resulting into weak local government structures that paves way for problems like the ‘city of fright’, elsewhere in the world, there is a realisation that since economies are becoming complex, locally elected officials who are directly accountable to citizens are better able to turnaround the cities and the lives of those who live in it. (See Karachi, Karachi, Aug 29, 2019)

In a rather interesting recent development, the fDI Intelligence – a division of Financial Times and the biggest repository of data and insights on global FDI after Unctad – flagged the rise of second-tier global cities that are now competing with the top tier cities of the world. Each second-tier city is trying to find its unique place and identity in their attempt to woo global investors.

A reading of fDI Intelligence discussion on cities suggests that when foreign investors consider cities as investment location, they look at the city’s population size, availability of skills in the city, business activity, FDI climate, strong local government leadership, and broader state policy action towards the development of its cities.

Pakistan on the other hand, whose national level political leaders have long been paying lip service to becoming an Asian tiger, connecting with global value chain, using strategic location etcetera, cannot even ensure that data on city wise availability of skills, provincial GDP if not city-GDP are produced periodically. Nor are the country’s provincial leaders willing to let go of their powers in favour of further decentralisation at local level. Few even realise that the country does not even have an urban policy, and save for Punjab’s Urban Unit; other provinces are yet to even have effectively working units that can help toward creating new cities and fix the old ones.  (See Punjab eyes new cities, Apr 4, 2018)

Like the demand for envisioning cities as engines of growth, the demand for cities specific data is also mostly coming from the policy wonks rather than the people themselves. The recent World Bank bemoans the lack of data needed for the design of policies “that can create an environment in which autonomous local communities can compete in integrated markets with equal opportunities”. It echoes what Prime Institute said in the report on MCI: “the study has faced constraints in collecting secondary and primary data. Statistical agencies in Pakistan have not yet paid any attention to the important aspect of data collection at the level of cities.”

Data constrained is one thing, weak and under-resourced metropolitan governance is another. Isn’t it strange that according to Prime’s MCI, Lahore and Karachi are equal to Quetta in terms of infrastructure and livability; likewise Karachi is equal to Peshawar in livability aspects? If the country’s most economically prosperous cities are equal to one of the worst war-on-terror-hit cities of the country, then what hopes can one have for other cities.

Ah! But one should hope for the best, so they say. Well, here is an insightful comment on UK’s Liverpool rise to become a transformed second-tier city that is competing with top cities of the world. “It takes 35 years to be an overnight success, a long time to change a place’s psychology, infrastructure, etc,” Professor Michael Parkinson, board member of the UK’s Regeneration Investment Organisation, was quoted in fDI Intelligence’s recent edition.

In a country where planning wonks have historically viewed the emergence of cities as a threat rather than an opportunity, where the urban society is not creating a demand for strong local government by funding home-grown research on urban affairs, where the media has poor coverage on urban design and administration, where provincial governments want to centralise rather than localise, it may take much longer than 35 years of overnight success.