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Bridging the Public-Private Divide to Create Great Cities

  7 April 2016
 3.00pm – 5.00pm. Registration from 2.30pm, seated by 3.00pm 
 MND Auditorium

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Resources

Lecture Poster (PDF: 276KB)
Lecture Report (PDF: 1.0MB)
Lecture Transcript (PDF: 986KB)

Lecture Videos

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Synopsis

The landscape of cities is rapidly evolving, and how governments and businesses respond to challenges affects how we all live, work and play. Explaining with examples from his vast private and public-sector experience, Gabe Klein will prove that it is possible to overcome the challenges of entrenched bureaucracy and deliver changes to city life — and to do so quickly, if the right “mentality” was adopted such that the public sector can respond to urban challenges with start-up pace and energy, while the private sector can align their profit motives with the city’s greater good in mind.

Lecture Report

“We have to accept the death of some things before we can get excited about the rebirth of things. We have to admit this isn’t working and we can’t build our way out of this problem. It’s not just the public sector that is going to have to accept change. Entire industries are going to go away.”

 

The ways in which people live, work and play are rapidly evolving beyond traditional city designs, says CLC Visiting Fellow, former Chicago Transportation Commissioner, author and entrepreneur Gabe Klein.

 

Citing ideas including car-light societies, driver-less vehicles, 3D printing and renewable energy, he added that the role of governments and businesses is to shepherd these changes towards building sustainable societies.

 

“We as either government officials or business leaders, have a responsibility to be honest with people about the cost-benefit of our choices.”

 

“What motivates many of us is that we love our cities. (But) you don’t need to be an environmental scientist to figure out that things are changing on the earth. We are starting to undo the Goldilocks conditions (optimal environmental factors) that allow us to live on the planet, and we are facing devastating effects of population and the way we choose to live our everyday lives,” Klein added.

 

Klein noted that societies where cars are the dominant mode of transportation pay heavy tolls in traffic fatalities (the number one killer of young people worldwide), diminished public life and health, as well as the outsized land costs of parking spaces.

 

“I think (in the future), we will look back and say: ‘Can you believe that people used to drive cars everywhere and kill each other and park their cars everywhere?’ And we’ll laugh at it.

 

“Innovation (in autonomous vehicles, transportation services) is happening at private sector speed. You’re talking about up to 90% of cars gone within 10-15 years. This is actually a huge opportunity...to get rid of traffic fatalities, transform our streets by getting rid of parking and give people amazing spaces...that have big returns in business, safety and land value.“

 

In this hyper-evolving environment, government infrastructure projects will require more acute levels of consideration, long term thinking and innovative partnership models with the private sector.

 

“When you look to build a new road or highway, is it a stimulus project or is it a needed project? People should always be asking, what is the return on investment, what is cost-benefit and what is the opportunity cost to this project versus another,” says Klein.

 

“We know from prior experience that induced demand is a real thing. When you build capacity, typically within two months that capacity is filled and you have more congestion than before. If you truly want to save money, you invest in the right things; you build the things that you want people to use and do.

 

“Quality of life is what matters to people, and it’s about changing our approach to redesigning around people and safe streets for everybody. Having been in both government and in the private sector, I realised that it’s really about change management, about how you bring all your stakeholders along with you in facilitating change.

 

“I got to launch (bike-sharing start-ups) Capital Bikeshare in DC and Divvy in Chicago, I can tell you that without government leading and making capital investment in the system, it wouldn’t have happened. If public-private partnerships are done properly and embraced by both sides, it’s amazing how well these can work.

 

“We are in a do or die situation right now, and we have got to make the change by choosing policies and technologies that prioritise people.”

 

Written by Alvin Chua. This report first appeared in the May 2016 Better Cities newsletter.

 

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