As the world urbanizes, will the most successful cities result from top-down planning or bottom-up innovation?

A debate has started on McKinsey's 'What Matters' site.

The question: "As the world urbanizes, will the most successful cities result from top-down planning or bottom-up innovation?"

As a change management student, interested in 'smarter cities', I had to have a go at an answer:

As with management of any major change, I'd argue that the best results are likely to come from a combination of top down and bottom up approaches.

The 'top' will have access to the strategists/architects, funding, resources etc. However, for the project to be a success, it ultimately needs to work for the residents. These residents' insights and proposed solutions to current problems based on local knowledge (i.e. ideas from the 'bottom', including design innovations from the slums and feedback on implementation obstacles) may be invaluable input to a realistic, implementable new strategy - as well as important in generating buy-in and support for adoption of it from the residents.

If the people at the 'top' are the architects (and the financial sponsors of the project e.g. government), then I think another role is necessary; specialist change managers, skilled in research and communication who would liaise with residents and connect the 'top' and 'bottom' to best effect.

Too often (esp. in government), the 'strategy' team is far removed from the realities of implementation, which leads to less than ideal solutions.

Agreeing on a strategic intent / measurement criteria upfront would provide a tangible way to assess the merit of new design and implementation strategies - this would facilitate agreement on which ideas (from the 'top' and/or from the 'bottom') have most merit. Measurement criteria could include specific objectives for each of the triple bottom line measures (Economic, Environmental, Social), incl. things like; energy efficiency, water & waste management, air quality, transportation solutions, community building (e.g. creating social areas for 150 people, if you use Dunbar's number as a guide) etc.

If no measurable criteria is set, how can the work ever be deemed a success? David Gurr, in his comment on the McKinsey question, described Canberra (in Australia) as a "charming and liveable city, with character and style". As a newish resident of Canberra, I agree it is liveable, but disagree that it has charm, character or style (for many reasons I won't bore you with here)! Clearly he and I are judging Canberra based on different criteria.

Following this logic, I imagine the first steps in a large, successful town planning / city design program could include:

1. Hiring a change manager skilled in research, facilitation and communications to liaise between the architects and the residents (i.e. the top and bottom)

2. Collaboratively defining the strategic intent (vision / objective for the city) via inputs from the top and bottom and solidifying this into specific measurable objectives, to be used as criteria to assess the merit of ideas.

3. Working with the architect to define a strategy that meets the strategic intent & specific objectives/criteria, gathering and taking into account the 'bottom up', broad based strategic ideas & inputs from residents.

4. Finalising the strategy/plan, ensuring that implementation obstacles residents raise are taken into consideration.

5. Over time, the change manager could engage with the residents to ensure the implementation of the finalised strategy/plan goes smoothly and the items implemented (whether they are recreational facilities, cable cars etc) are adopted by the residents.

Clearly, this collaborative approach would take much more work than a top down approach that assumes what residents want. My opinion is that a city that is likely to last for many generations is worth that investment.

Interested to hear other's thoughts.