Government or Governance of Urban Innovation? A Tale of Two Cities

The article discusses the relationship between urban innovation and new forms of governance. Although the concept of “gover¬nance” seems to be a panacea for any sort of market or state failure, very often it is ill-defined and/or ideologically loaded. However, there is a growing consensus that the mobilization of social and economic actors in “governmental” roles is an important, if not essential, factor in bringing about innovative policies, at least at the local scale. In our study, we derive from the existing literature on social capital and insti¬tutional development, the hypotheses that the more diverse the actors involved and the tighter their linkages, the better the innovative perfor¬mance will be. In order to test these hypotheses, we have investigated two northern Italian cities, Milan and Turin, that underwent similar chang¬es in the political and institutional sphere in the decade 1993–2002. The research carried out shows that certainly Turin had a better performance in terms of ur¬ban innovation than Milan and that such a re-sult is associated with a more complex network in which different levels of government, and dif¬ferent types of actors, are represented. Also the “tightness” of the network is higher, thus pro¬viding evidence to support the idea that poli¬cy innovation is associated with changes in the structure of governance. However, looking in more detail at the evidence collected, it reveals quite clearly that Milan is much more receptive to the proposals coming from civil society (both from the profit and the non-profit sector) while Turin, like other innovative Italian cities, seems much more dependent upon the leadership of the public institutions. This poses an interest¬ing theoretical problem: How much institution¬al leadership is needed in order to get good gov¬ernance: more or less? Or, is it possible that in order to make a better assessment of the rela¬tionship between innovation, at least urban in¬novation, and the structure of governance, one should make a distinction between short term, in which more “government” means more in¬novation, and the long term in which the con¬trary is true?