How to make a city great

ORIGINAL: McKinsey
September 2013

By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. That could mean great things for economic growth—if the cities handle their expansion wisely. 

Here’s how.

Why cities matter

• Achieving smart growth
• Do more with less
• Build support for change

What makes a great city? It is a pressing question because by 2030, 5 billion people—60 percent of the world’s population—will live in cities, compared with 3.6 billion today, turbocharging the world’s economic growth.
Leaders in developing nations must cope with urbanization on an unprecedented scale, while those in developed ones wrestle with aging infrastructures and stretched budgets. All are fighting to secure or maintain the competitiveness of their cities and the livelihoods of the people who live in them. And all are aware of the environmental legacy they will leave if they fail to find more sustainable, resource-efficient ways of managing these cities.

How to make a city great
Explore six diverse initiatives (Vancouver, Dubai, Boston, Bogotá, Dakar, Singapore) aimed at making cities great places to live and work.







To understand the core processes and benchmarks that can transform cities into superior places to live and work, McKinsey developed and analyzed a comprehensive database of urban economic, social, and environmental performance indicators. The research included interviewing 30 mayors and other leaders in city governments on four continents and synthesizing the findings from more than 80 case studies that sought to understand what city leaders did to improve processes and services from urban planning to financial management and social housing.

The result is How to make a city great (PDF–2.1MB), a new report arguing that leaders who make important strides in improving their cities do three things really well:

• They achieve smart growth. Smart growth identifies and nurtures the very best opportunities for growth, plans ways to cope with its demands, integrates environmental thinking, and ensures that all citizens enjoy a city’s prosperity. Good city leaders also think about regional growth because as a metropolis expands, they will need the cooperation of surrounding municipalities and regional service providers. Integrating the environment into economic decision making is vital to smart growth: cities must invest in infrastructure that reduces emissions, waste production, and water use, as well as in building high-density communities.
• They do more with less. Great cities secure all revenues due, explore investment partnerships, embrace technology, make organizational changes that eliminate overlapping roles, and manage expenses. Successful city leaders have also learned that, if designed and executed well, private–public partnerships can be an essential element of smart growth, delivering lower-cost, higher-quality infrastructure and services.
• They win support for change. Change is not easy, and its momentum can even attract opposition. Successful city leaders build a high-performing team of civil servants, create a working environment where all employees are accountable for their actions, and take every opportunity to forge a stakeholder consensus with the local population and business community. They take steps to recruit and retain top talent, emphasize collaboration, and train civil servants in the use of technology.

Mayors are only too aware that their tenure will be limited. But if longer-term plans are articulated—and gain popular support because of short-term successes—leaders can start a virtuous cycle that sustains and encourages a great urban environment.

Download the full report, How to make a city great (PDF–2.1MB).

Persian Gulf Shark Finning Trade Hits Species Hard

ORIGINAL: Huffington Post
By MICHAEL CASEY
10/19/2012

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Armed with a clip board and wearing bright yellow waders, Rima Jabado looked the part of a government inspector at the Dubai fish market as workers sawed the fins off hundreds of dead sharks from Oman and bagged them for export to Asian restaurants.

But the 33-year-old Lebanese-Canadian doctoral student was not chatting with fisherman on the market's slippery floors and jotting down notes to monitor the lucrative and largely unregulated trade that has decimated stocks of certain sharks, but rather to document what species are being caught in the waters across the Persian Gulf.

"The government will not react unless we give them actual data," said Jabado, as she raced to take genetic samples from the sharks before their carcasses were carted off and fins auctioned to the highest bidder.

"The problem is that I'm the only one doing research. There is not enough being done in the UAE and the region," she said. "We know shark populations are depleting around the world so we are kind of racing against time to see what is going on."

Fishermen across the globe kill as many as 70 million sharks each year for their fins, which can sell for $700 a pound (450 grams), while the soup prized for Chinese banquets and weddings can cost $100 a bowl. The fin trade has devastated several species including hammerheads, oceanic whitetip, blue, threshers and silky and contributed to 181 shark and ray species being listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as threatened with extinction.

The trade is legal, though efforts are being made to ban the practice of "finning" — hacking the fins off of sharks and throwing the rest overboard, often while they are still alive. Four years ago, under international pressure, the UAE joined the growing number of countries banning the practice.

Spain is top among 82 countries that export fins, mostly to Hong Kong and other Asian markets, followed by Singapore and Taiwan, according to Sonja Fordham, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Shark Advocates International. The United Arab Emirates is ranked fourth mostly because it is a regional hub for the trade in sharks coming predominantly from Oman but also from Yemen, Iran and Africa.

The trade thrives in the Gulf, as it does worldwide, shark conservationists said, mainly because there aren't enough people out there like Jabado. The fast-talking Jabado, who favors a white bandanna, black T-shirt and trousers when she is in the field, is the only person in the UAE assessing shark numbers.

Governments in the region have until now largely ignored sharks in favor of more commercial fish species like grouper.

They have almost no data on the numbers and species of sharks that can be found from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Oman, often lack the laws that would curb the trade and don't have the money or the political will to enforce the laws they do have on the books, such as bans on shark fishing.

"In an ideal world what we would have is every population of every shark monitored so we know how many adults there are," said Nick Dulvy, a Canadian researcher who is the co-chair of IUCN's Shark Specialist Group that is tasked with determining which species are endangered.

The challenges were laid bare at a shark conservation workshop in the UAE this month. Governments from across the Gulf sent representatives and all offered testimony of just why their country wasn't doing more to protect sharks.

Kuwait talked of protecting two shark species but admitted enforcement of its ban on shark fishing was weak and that government inspectors and fishermen couldn't even identify them. Saudi Arabia claimed it banned the export of fins in 2008 but had no answers as to why its fins continue to turn up in Hong Kong markets. Oman sent a government team with no experience with sharks while Bahrain and the UAE admitted they lacked sufficient data to determine whether sharks were overfished in their waters.

"Our hands are tied because of insufficient data," Mohammed Tabish, a fisheries specialist with the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water, told the conference. "It's all collected in general form and includes no species specific data which makes it difficult to take the necessary actions for particular species."

Yemen and Somalia, whose sharks routinely turn up in Dubai's market, are typical of countries with bigger problems. Both have thriving shark fisheries — Yemen ranks sixth in exporters to Hong Kong and is one of the few countries that consume sharks domestically.

Yemen has no laws protecting sharks while Somalia lacks the means to enforce the laws it has on the books due to a lack of funds, its long-running civil war and fledging government.

"If you go to the Somalia coast at night, you will see thousands of ships fishing illegally, mostly for sharks and lobster," Ahmed Shaikh Mahmoud Osman, wildlife director for Somalia's Ministry of Fisheries and Environment, said of the boats which come primarily from Asian countries. "We need fishing boats to safeguard the coast. We also need renewal of formal laws to stop criminals and greedy business people who come to our coast and smuggle our resources."

Dulvey, Fordham and Jabado encouraged the region's governments to start collecting data and using it to draw up management plans which can include quotas and outright bans on endangered shark species.

Until now, no governments in the Gulf have quotas on shark fishing nor have any national shark conservation plans. The UAE, Bahrain and Qatar do, however, give protection to sawfish — a shark-like ray species that is the most threatened marine species in the world.

Fordham also said Oman and Yemen could join the UAE in requiring that sharks are landed with their fins attached — rather than processed at sea — which helps with enforcement and makes it easier to collect scientific data.

"Overall a lot more needs to be done to insure sustainability of shark population, especially species that are exceptionally vulnerable," Fordham said.

Oman and Yemen have promised to develop shark conservation plans while Oman and Abu Dhabi have started doing stock assessments of several shark species — the first step in developing a management plan.

For the most part, though, the job of data collection is left to Jabado, who for the past two years has visited fish markets across the UAE 180 times, identifying shark species, sex ratio and abundance among other things. From that, she has concluded there are 30 shark species in the waters off the coast of the UAE and 37 coming in from Oman — about two-thirds which are listed by the IUCN as near threatened or endangered including several hammerheads.

She also has interviewed more than 100 fishermen and spent more than 100 hours on boats tagging sharks in the Persian Gulf. She has only caught five sharks herself in that time, confirming what 82 percent of the Emirati fishermen she interviewed have said: Shark numbers are down and those caught are much smaller.

"They say that 15 years ago, you looked at sunset in Dubai and could see fins," Jabado said. "They used to catch monstrous sharks, sharks bigger than a bus. They don't see those sizes anymore."