![]() ![]() To give just a few examples, New York has the largest municipal hospital system in the country – with 11 hospitals and more than 100 community health clinics. If you compare the cities with this kind of similarity in mind, New York seems way ahead of London in terms of the authority it exercises. After all, each has an elected Mayor and a separately elected city council or assembly each is city with roughly 7-8 million people in a metropolitan area of roughly 18-20 million. Some people treat the city governments of London and New York as being a lot alike. ![]() But each is dysfunctional in its own way. ![]() Left: New York City by Flickr user Caruba Right: London by Flickr user Jess J.Īll city governments are dysfunctional. Asking this question – and looking comparatively at precedents from outside our city and our country – must underlie how we design, plan and organize for urban change. But we’ve never asked what New York City itself, as embodied by its city government, can really do. Five years later, the topic is even more relevant, with Bloomberg in his third term, the inefficiencies of Albany (and Washington) exacerbated by the financial crisis, New York’s PlaNYC in full effect and London’s replacing the London Plan with a brand new one.Įach week, Urban Omnibus presents an idea that, in some way or another, could make New York City a little bit better. When we complain about urban services – like the rising costs of the subway system or inconsistent opportunities for streetside trash disposal – who do we wish would listen and act? The various branches of city government? City Hall? The Mayor himself? Our current mayor might control more than most – from our city’s public school system to financial news – but what is the city government that he heads actually empowered to do?įive years ago, a collection of international urban experts convened in New York for the first conference of the Urban Age project, a worldwide investigation into the future of cities that has since visited Shanghai, London, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Mumbai and Istanbul. One of these experts is Harvard Law Professor Gerald Frug, who shares with Omnibus readers his 2005 speech comparing the structures and powers of city government in London and New York. ![]()
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