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Global City-Regions Conference At UCLA

LOS ANGELES

All over the world, cities are growing at a phenomenal rate. In just five years, half the world's population will live in urbanized areas -- many of them with populations larger than those of many small countries.

But rapid growth has overwhelmed traditional city systems. Some residents of the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi have to walk for two hours to get drinking water. In Manila, traffic crawls at an average of eight miles per hour. Children in Mexico City use gray crayons when asked to draw the sky.

And urban regions' new role as the engines driving the global economy has created a daunting range of dramatic challenges. In California's Silicon Valley, for example, dazzling economic success has also bred a housing shortage, traffic gridlock, and a growing chasm between the rich and the poor.

Why are cities -- or, more accurately, city-regions -- growing so rapidly and how can working new economic, political and social systems be developed will be the focus of the 1999 Global City-Regions Conference at UCLA between October 21 and 23.

Organized by the School of Public Policy and Social Research, the conference will feature more than 70 international policy makers, scholars, businesspeople and community leaders. Among those attending the convention are Sir Peter Hall of University College, London, Michael Porter of Harvard, Akin Mabogunje of Nigeria and international business consultant Kenichi Ohmae.

Others include Lucien Bouchard, the premier of Quebec; Eberhard Diepgen, mayor of Berlin; Ketso Gordhan, chief executive officer, Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, South Africa; Jens Kramer Mikkelsen, mayor of Copenhagen and mayors of many cities including Sydney and Cuiritba, Brazil.

James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, will be the keynote speaker on Thursday, October 21, at the Getty Center. The remainder of the conference will be held at the Tom Bradley International Center on the UCLA campus.

"For the vast majority of the world's six billion people, the questions we debate and the solutions we consider are not mere abstractions. They will be as real as a four-hour commute or a two-hour walk for a drink of water," said Allen J Scott, UCLA professor of policy studies and geography and conference organizer.

The chief goal of the conference is to change the way people think about city-regions, Scott said.

"Rapid global change has rendered obsolete most of the systems we have developed not just to make cities livable but those we use to govern economic life or how we function as citizens," he said. "We want to find new ways of thinking about these dynamics and to propose new policies to harness their benefits and control their negative effects."

The three-day, interdisciplinary conference -- a mix of lectures, presentations of papers, roundtable discussions, practical workshops and informal discussion -- will focus on four critical areas: economic development, social welfare, the environmental consequences of urbanization, and governance.

Among the questions to be addressed are: