Bücher der Reihe Local and Urban Governance

The book explores and discusses some of the changes, challenges and opportunities confronting local governance in the context of the new urban paradigm associated with the HABITAT III New Urban Agenda, a 20-year strategy for sustainable urbanization, adopted in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador.

The book provides a global perspective of local government response towards the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of a sample of countries in all continents. It examines the responses of local government, as well as the responses local government developed in articulation with other tiers of government and with civil society organizations, and explores the social, economic and policy impacts of the pandemic. The book offers an innovative contribution on the role of local government during the pandemic and discusses lessons for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic had a global impact on public health, in the well-being of citizens, in the economy, on civic life, in the provision of public services, and in the governance of cities and other human settlements, although in an uneven form across countries, cities and local communities. Cities and local governments have been acting decisively to apply the policy measures defined at national level to the specific local conditions. COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the crisis response infrastructures and policies at both national and local levels in these countries as well as in many others across the world. But it also exposed much broader and deeper weaknesses that result from how societies are organized, namely the insecure life a substantial proportion of citizens have, as a result of economic and social policies followed in previous decades, which accentuated the impacts of the lockdown measures on employment, income, housing, among a myriad of other social dimensions. Besides the analysis of how governments, and local government, responded to the public health issues raised by the spread of the virus, the book deals also with the diversity of responses local governments have adopted and implemented in the countries, regions, cities and metropolitan areas. The analysis of these policy responses indicates that previously unthinkable policies can surprisingly be implemented at both national and local levels.

This book deals with the issue of Digital Participatory Platforms (DPPs) for urban governance. It explains the role and potential that ICTs play in the decision-making processes of the Public Administration and citizens' participation. The book also illustrates the main technologies that encourage innovation and social inclusion, with particular focus on use of DPPs in urban regeneration programs and projects. It presents international best practices from local to European level and it describes the process of creation, development and testing of a DPP project with reference to the Italian case. The book is divided into three parts:the first one gives a framework of neighborhood urban and civic engagement through ICTs, studying in depth the role of ICTs in support of Public Administration's processes and citizens participation;the second part investigates the topic of Digital Participatory Platforms (DPPs) with the description of their potentialities, the presentation of some international best practices and a specific focus on the Italian context;the third part draws the conclusions of this path by asking which are the main challenges in the adoption of Digital Participatory Platforms, in order to increase citizen participation and collaboration via technology.

The book explores the key factors affecting the successful implementation of public participation spatial systems in participatory planning as part of the urban governance system. It brings insight from nation-wide research in the Czech Republic and the implications to other countries in the region and beyond. The main aim of the proposed book is to analyse the state-of-the-art of using geoparticipatory tools for citizens' participation in community decision-making process and to suggest the effective implementation of the geoparticipatory tools available in urban governance.This book explores the situation in the Czech Republic as a representative of for Eastern Bloc country, three decades after the political transition, on its way to public participation in local and urban governance. The active involvement of the citizens into the local and urban decision making process via geoparticipatory spatial tools is becoming a popular research field among human geographers, behavioural geographers, GIS scientists, environmental psychologists, policy scientists and many others scientific areas.

The book provides a pioneering overview of the evolution of the local government and urban policy in Cape Verde after independence, offering a multi-scale perspective of local governance in Cape Verde from 1970 - 2020. It examines the process of urban development in the country, and in the capital city in particular, and explores the consequences and challenges for spatial planning, housing, urban heritage, and the environment, namely issues related to climate change in the post-independence period. 

The book addresses in detail local governance in Spain. In recent decades, local governments in Europe have increasingly found themselves under pressure from a multitude of new challenges, such as demographic change, climate change, fiscal austerity policies, digitization, the demand for more citizen participation in local affairs, and the migration crisis in some of them, to name just a few. Consequently, a wave of political and administrative reforms to address these challenges, pressures and problems, has changed local governance in many countries. In part, these changes were the result of reform policies introduced by national and state governments, often triggered by austerity policies, which has become an overwhelming reality for Spanish local governments that have been forced to introduce innovations in local governance. This book aims to give an account of these innovations in local governance in Spain.This book considers the local political-administrative structure in its dimensions, focusing on the analysis of its party system, electoral competition and political behavior in the local arena, as well as on local finances, all of which are determining elements in urban and rural governance processes. On the occasion of the recent crisis unleashed by Covid-19, the book will also deal with local governance in crisis situations. The book will also contextualize local governance processes in Spain in relation to the trends in local governance observed in other European countries.

This book is the first to consider the roles, challenges and governance responses of secondary cities in southern Africa to changing circumstances. Among the challenges are governance under conditions of resource scarcity, managing informality, the effects and responses to climate change and the changing roles of the cities within the national space economy. It fills the gap in the literature on secondary cities with original case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The authors are all African scholars, working and living in the region with intimate knowledge of the settings they describe. The book is critical as it includes such regional case studies of different secondary cities in Southern Africa but also because of it¿s multidisciplinarity: it contains substantive and pertinent issues such as climate change, disaster management, local economic development, and basic services delivery. It considers diverse environments, yet with similar challenges that could provide useful policy and governance proposals for other cities.