In this episode, we’re joined by Daniel Pejic of the University of Melbourne’s Connected Cities Lab.
Dan’s work aligns most closely with Goal 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.
Daniel Pejic is a Research Fellow in International Urban Migration and a PhD researcher at University of Melbourne’s Connected Cities Lab as part of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.
The Connected Cities Lab is a laboratory designed to address the challenges city leadership faces, and the information it needs in an interconnected and increasingly urbanised planet.
Dan is currently researching the role of cities as actors in global migration governance and the rescaling of the politics of migration
Transcript
Dominic Billings: Welcome, Dan Pejic. Thanks very much for being with us, Dan. Pleasure. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the Connected Cities Lab at the University of Melbourne.
Daniel Pejic: Connected Cities Lab has been around for a few years in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. And what we do is look at various aspects of city leadership and the role that cities can play to address global challenges. And I guess most of that work is focused internationally. So looking both across cities and across regions and the way that cities can kind of learn from each other and what we can learn from looking comparatively at cities and generating evidence and knowledge in that way. But also looking at the role that cities can play and the emerging role that cities are playing as international leaders and a lot of policy areas. And this is really an emerging and expanding area, which has come about for a few reasons. The world is primarily urban. And by that, I mean, now we now have more than half of the world's population that live in cities. And cities are becoming critical sites. They always have been, but certainly in the modern world, critical sites for the way that we think about economic sustainability, migration, health. Really any issue right now you look at and cities are completely central and critical to that. So we think that city leadership is a really viable and valuable avenue to try to address global challenges, and certainly the SDGs that we're going to talk about today and other things are evidence of that.
Dominic Billings: Michele Acuto, is he the leader of the Connected Cities Lab?
Daniel Pejic: Yeah, that's right. So, he's the director, also Professor of Global Urban Politics at the university.
Dominic Billings: Did he effectively coin the phrase 'city diplomacy'?
Daniel Pejic: He's certainly done a lot of the formative work on that. So, he was previously at University of Oxford and at UCL and he had a City Leadership Lab at the University College London. And they did a lot of work on the international dimensions of city leadership, like we do at the Connected Cities Lab. And him and a few other scholars started looking at this idea of city diplomacy. And by that we mean the role that city governments and their representatives can play in shaping the way that the world works essentially. So, when we think of diplomacy between states, we think about sort diplomats that are representing their countries, flying around to different parts of the world and negotiating agreements. And working together collaboratively on issues. And city diplomacy is similar in some ways. Most large cities around the world now have an international department of some kind and often an international affairs director who will act as a diplomat essentially, for that city, and speak to other cities, international organisations and other groups that they work with, to try and advocate for that city's issues and work collaboratively together on issues. But also, I guess, in our interpretation, city diplomacy can be a little bit broader than just that kind of direct city-to-city relationship. It can be about the fact that different parts of city governments are now increasingly happy to work transnationally on issues just to achieve outcomes for the citizens in those cities, because the issues that they're dealing with - and I think COVID is a good example of that - but certainly a range of other issues that cities are having to deal with nowadays, all have global dimensions. And that's kind of been a result of really increasing globalisation, since the 1970s. And this widespread urbanisation that I've been talking about and will come back to. So because of that, I guess, cities have had no choice but to start to look internationally and engage more internationally to achieve the kind of outcomes and reach the goals they want to reach for their citizens. And we see, I guess, city diplomacy as being a useful avenue through which cities can work collaboratively to achieve those outcomes.
Dominic Billings: I know one of the most conspicuous examples of those kind of city networks and cities working together seems to me to be the C40. Is C40 instigated by Bloomberg?
Daniel Pejic: Yes. So C40 cities goes back a little way but came out a group of cities who came together to try and lead on climate. So, lead on the mitigation of climate change. So, the original thinking was, you have a lot of large cities around the world who are now responsible for a lot of the economic output, but also the carbon emissions. So, cities have an integral place to play in the way that we mitigate climate change. So, Bloomberg Philanthropies, along the way, some other philanthropic groups have been involved in funding, C40 cities, but it's now a group of 96 large cities around the world. And it, I think has been the number one example. There are some other large city network groups as well, but I think it's been very prominent. Also, having someone like Michael Bloomberg as the president of the group has meant that it has achieved a lot of recognition and I guess, achieve a lot of media focus as well. But it's also been quite effective. So, the organisation itself has instigated about 15,000 individual climate actions among its member cities. And there's been a lot written I guess, about C40 and the potential that C40 has, or at least that and other groups working on climate, to take the mantle from nation states that have thus far been really ineffective at coming up with collective agreements and action on climate change. What I would usually say about that, and I've written with Michele and others about this as well, is that we don't think that cities are going to be able to just take over the governance of climate. I think that's not really a feasible thing, but they certainly have a really important role to play, and need to work collaboratively with national governments and international organisations to meet the challenge. I think C40 cities has proved a good avenue of instigating some of that change and creating those connections between cities to learn from each other.
Dominic Billings: You mentioned both yourself and Michele and Anna Kosavac, in discussing the role of city networking and whether it was a passing phase or whether it was actually gaining even more traction. And to me in that article, 'Tracking the Trends and City Networking' as part of the Perry World House in University of Pennsylvania, that the Rockefeller Foundation had ended the program of 100 Resilient Cities. What was the trend behind that?
Daniel Pejic: It came as a surprise to quite a few people because 100 Resilient Cities was one of the largest and well recognised transnational city networks. And the Rockefeller Foundation had put a lot of support and funds behind that program. I think another reason why that program was quite successful is it was building on these ideas of urban resilience so that the capacity of cities to withstand and bounce back from shocks and crises, and we're certainly in the middle of a very big one right now. And one of the reasons 100 Resilient Cities was very effective is it also made resources available to those cities to create their own resilience plans. Melbourne, the city we're in right now, has a resilience plan and resilience officers. Encourage also and provided resources for cities to have their own chief resilience officers or equivalent position. Rockefeller Foundation had said that they were going to fund that particular initiative for a certain amount of time and essentially got to the end of that time, and they decided that they weren't going to renew that commitment in the same way. That organisation is now transformed into a new program, but certainly not on the same scale as before. We've seen with some of these other city networking initiatives as well is there's a lot of them right now. And that paper that you referred to, says we've estimated there's over 300 of these initiatives. We've done some research that looked specifically at a database of 200 and looked at the features and characteristics of those networks. But there are a lot of these networks and they're vying for not a lot of resourcing. And the ones that we've talked about, C40 and 100 Resilient Cities are ones that have been lucky to have quite large, US-based philanthropic funding. A lot of the other networks are very reliant on international organisation funding. States haven't been huge players in the transnational city networking space. So I think a lot of people were surprised with the decision not to continue 100 Resilient Cities, but at the same time, I think it's a reality that when you're at the whim of philanthropic funding, that those priorities can change. You can't expect that philanthropic funding is going to continue forever. And certainly some of the new large-scale city networks that have been developed over the last few years, the idea has been that they would be seeded with philanthropic funding, and then they would diversify those funding streams over time and C40 cities done to some extent. The Mayors Migration Council just another example of a group that started in the last few years that I've done a bit of work with and doing some research on right now is a group has been funded primarily by the Open Society Foundation, along with the Swiss government as well and C40. That's another group that the plan for that group is to become self-sufficient or look for other revenue streams at the end of the Open Society Foundation funding. So yeah, long answer, but essentially, it was a surprise, but at the same time, I think that if these city networks want to have long-term viability and influence, then they need to look at different funding models that are going to work over those timeframes.
Dominic Billings: You mentioned the Mayors Migration Council. Am I correct that your PhD research is focused on the intersection of migration in cities?
Daniel Pejic: Yeah. So, what I'm looking at my PhD research is the city diplomacy that we were talking about earlier. So, looking at the way that city diplomacy has emerged and evolved in the global governance of migration. That's been a new phenomenon. So, I guess most of the large-scale and well-publicised city networks have been focused on climate, sustainability, some extent resilience, and other groups as well. There's some large-scale health networks as well. But international migration has been a newer area, and a lot of this started around the negotiation of the UN Global Compact of Migration, the two agreements that made up that Global Compact. In the lead-up to that, some cities advocated quite strongly that there should have been an urban voice and a place for city leaders to be involved in the negotiations of that agreement. And that made a lot of sense, because most migrants around the world end up going to cities. As increasing responsibilities are being devolved to city governments around the world, we're seeing city governments have to take up more and more responsibility for creating inclusive societies and providing the kind of support services that migrants need to be able to be included and be prosperous in cities. So there's a bit of a disconnect between migration policy, which is primarily governed by national governments and in some places, regional governments as well, but predominantly national governments and the increasing burden or responsibility that's been put on cities to manage the impacts of mass migration. So, my PhD is looking at the way that cities have emerged as actors in that space. So why they've actually started to take a place on the global stage on migration issues. How they've gone about influencing or attempting to influence the way that migration is governed globally. And then what the impacts of that city diplomacy have been.
Dominic Billings: An organisation I wasn't too familiar with is the International Organisation for Migration. Am I correct, is that an official UN body now?
Daniel Pejic: It is, yeah. So it wasn't, for some time it wasn't, but now it's been brought into the United Nations System as the main UN organisation for migration,
Dominic Billings: Would you be able to speak briefly about what the Migration Governance Framework within the IOM is?
Daniel Pejic: Yeah. And the answer to that question is, there isn't one, to an extent. So, migration is governed by a range of different agreements. And it depends on what type of migration you're talking about. So if you're talking about asylum seekers and refugees, you have some international legal frameworks that are created under the UNHCR and you have processes through which asylum seekers can apply for refugee status in countries and international processes for collaboration. So, you have I guess, law in place. When it comes to other types of migration, which far outweigh refugees in terms of numbers, there's just a mixture of frameworks. So, for instance, the International Labour Organisation has some governance dimensions in relation to labour migration. Different parts of migration, for instance, will be governed by agreements around visa systems around a process like that. So, it's a real patchwork of governance structures that exist. And that was one of the main challenges of the Global Compact of Migration, which I should point out is not a legally binding compact in any way. It's a voluntary compact, there's no enforcement mechanism attached to it and the IOM doesn't have any enforcement mechanism. So one of the challenges of trying to come up with a document that states can agree to around the overall governance of migration is that you have a lot of intersecting responsibilities, a lot of intersecting agreements, and no overall overarching governance system when it comes to the movement of people between countries.
Dominic Billings: With those two compacts you mentioned, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees, what's been the uptake with the ratification of that. Has it been broad or patchwork?
Daniel Pejic: There were a number of countries that just didn't participate in the negotiation, the US being the most prominent one for the negotiation. But the commitment to it has been pretty good from the countries who participated in the negotiation of the agreement. But it's important to state that the agreements are voluntary. So it's not difficult to agree to the principles of an international agreement when you know that nobody's actually going to be able to hold you legally to the responsibilities of that particular agreement.
Dominic Billings: I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about one of the projects that the Connected Cities Lab at the Melbourne University is running at the moment, which is the SDG Cities Challenge?
Daniel Pejic: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm not working on this project, I should say, and not across all the details of it. But in general, it's a pretty large-scale initiative that the labs are undertaking, and it's involving a range of local governments, local authorities in our region, and those are touching on a range of facilities. We've got representatives from Philippines, Malaysia, India, Vanuatu, quite a few in Australia, Solomon Islands as well. So it's a range of local governments and the thinking behind the project is essentially to get a group of cities together and get them to commit to and collaborate to achieving some projects that align with the SDGs. And the way that that's being carried out is there's some profiling work and some collaborative work that's happening between those cities so they can learn from each other and also have resources being developed to help those cities to be able to commit and work towards some of the SDG goals. The ultimate, I guess what they're working towards is what we call a Voluntary Local Review. So essentially, around the time of the development of the SDGs, you would know that the nation states will provide to the United Nations reviews of how they're tracking against various SDG markers. And there a few city governments in Japan, and New York City that have been quite active in the space. And they worked together to come up with the idea of Voluntary Local Reviews. So, cities volunteering to do their own stocktake of how they're tracking against SDGs. And to be able to report that in a way that provides the missing information that you're not getting just from the national reviews. So the idea of the SDG Cities Challenges is that these cities would work together, commit to some projects that are going to work towards these SDG goals and then eventually work towards completing their own Voluntary Local Review.
Dominic Billings: And I guess that ties in with an event that Connected Cities Lab has coming up in the coming days which is the Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Change, and Cities Symposium, which is on 30 September to 2 October in Melbourne, which I assume is online because Melbourne's currently in restrictions. Is that correct, Dan?
Daniel Pejic: It is very online. This is a big initiative for the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. So the faculty will put together a symposium annually, I believe, and this one is focused around the SDGs, particularly around climate change and cities, which is obviously an area that that our Lab does quite a bit of work in. So, our Lab is taking the lead with a few other collaborators on this program. And the program for the event is online now. Anybody's able to sign up. There is a registration fee, but people can sign up and take part in the programs, listen to the keynote speeches and other events if they'd like to. So, all that information is on our website, but also on the on the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning website. There’re some great speakers so I think it's going to be bringing together speakers from around the world. One of the keynotes that I'm looking forward to is from the International Affairs director at the City of New York, who has been quite influential in advocating for this Voluntary Local Review process. There's a range of other excellent speakers and will also have the opportunity to throughout it to talk a little bit about the work that the Lab is doing and the SDG Cities Challenge. The cities that are being involved in the in the SDG Cities Challenge are also being worked into the overall symposium programme as well. So, I think everybody's looking forward to it. It's been a lot of work to put it together my understanding, so we'll see how it goes in the online format.
Dominic Billings: I know your research has shifted from the following a little bit, but I know you've published middle of last year in the Scientific American about 'Why Cities Rankings Matter'. Would you be able to speak about a bit of the work that you were doing in terms of city rankings?
Daniel Pejic: Yeah. Absolutely. So, we did a bit of a pilot study where we started looking at comparative city rankings. So, I think most people would be aware of things like The Economist Intelligence Unit's World's Most Liveable City ranking, which Melbourne has done quite well in historically. We worked with a consultancy in London called The Business of Cities who have a large database of comparative city rankings. So, we did some analysis on that database just to look at the way the recent trends in these in these rankings, and we found that the number of them was certainly increasing. We looked a little bit about who was producing these kind of rankings, what areas they were looking at. And then went on to think a little bit about the way that cities were using these rankings and did a few interviews with a few local governments. What we found is that there's an increasing number of these rankings and the types of domains they're looking at are changing. So originally, they were really focused on economic markers. And we've found that they're shifting a lot more rankings are shifting towards what we've called "softer" domains and liveability would be an example of that. And the range of groups that are producing these is an interesting mix. It's primarily driven by private sector actors, particularly out of multinational corporations, and real estate actors and other groups, but about a fifth are being produced by research organisations and think tanks and other groups. So in the academic space, I think these measures are often kind of derided somewhat, and seen as just for the newspaper reporting and just for cities to put a badge and say we are number 'x' in this measure. And what we ended up concluding and have argued in that research is that we think that these are becoming quite a significant source of urban data. And there could be an opportunity to better utilise that data considering that there are significant problems with the way that urban data is collected or not collected and managed and the relationship between that and the SDGs because it's certainly a significant problem in the way that SDG 11 has been tracked and measured.
Dominic Billings: Beautiful. Thank you so much for being with us Dan. A reminder the Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Change and Cities Symposium, as part of the Melbourne School of Design's Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning is on from 30 September to 2 October. That's all online. Thank you so much, Dan. Really appreciate you being with us today.
Daniel Pejic: Pleasure. Thanks so much.