Urban connections: international survey of city leadership 2014-2015

DOI

This dataset contains the responses of 292 academic experts asked to review the state of city leadership in 202 cities internationally, addressing a series of queries as to the shape, performance and pressing challenges city leadership confronts in countries around the world.What does ‘city leadership’ entail in an increasingly networked global scenario? How do city leaders respond to global challenges and contribute to global governance? How are they influenced by city- to-city networking? How does city leadership translate into strategic responses to global challenges? Urban Gateways is designed to improve our understanding of how city leadership translates into long-term strategic visions, how it relates and contributes to global governance and how this global action is perceived ‘on the ground’ in cities. Urban Gateways will provide a global overview of the city leadership and strategic plans in both developing and developed countries, highlighting leadership approaches, strategic trends, foresight drivers and major hindrances in the development of strategic urban plans addressing global challenges. The project focuses both on major global cities and second-tier cities to offer not only international comparative assessments but also multi- tiered considerations that de-centre globalist models of international and urban research.

The team began by selecting a target group of 200 cities. The ethos behind these selection criteria was that comparative urban research should aim to incorporate the experiences of a diverse array of cities across both the global North and South. In particular we wished to gather viewpoints that might serve as alternatives to the well-known perspectives of heavily researched so-called ‘global’ and ‘mega’ cities. The team developed an initial list of 200 cities with a roughly equal distribution among regions of the world and city size. The team grouped cities into six regions, based on the regions used by the World Bank. These were East Asia and the Pacific (including Oceania), Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South and Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. One deviation from the World Bank approach was our grouping of North America and Europe. The team also included several ‘outlier’ cities, that were geographically isolated, such as island cities (such as Male in the Maldives) and cities in remote regions of the world (Nuuk in Greenland). The research team then sought to identify at least one expert per city to address a series of questions as to the current shape, challenges and performance of city leadership in each city. Experts were selected on the basis of their academic track record (several recognisable publications) of expertise on a specific city in the pool of 200 (finally at 202 in total) cities surveyed.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-852683
Metadata Access https://datacatalogue.cessda.eu/oai-pmh/v0/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_ddi25&identifier=94b7c284278b0d6e894eed5b2a40fbdefb365c67124c2fe7e02d4138d4f9be6e
Provenance
Creator Acuto, M, University College London; Rapoport, E, Urban Land Institute (formerly of UCL)
Publisher UK Data Service
Publication Year 2017
Funding Reference Economic and Social Research Council
Rights Michele Acuto, University College London
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Numeric; Text
Discipline Social Sciences
Spatial Coverage Global (185 countries); World Wide