This is an international book about place-based leadership and public service innovation. It aims to offer a contribution to debates about public service reform and to provide prompts and suggestions on how to create inclusive cities.

A book with a stance

Five claims are developed in the narrative:

• • Place is important. Public service reform efforts can benefit by starting from an understanding of the experiences of communities living in particular places. This contrasts with approaches that start from abstract ideas about the role, or potential role, of governments, markets and civil society.

• • Civic leadership should build inclusive, sustainable cities – not one or the other. In public policy and academic debates about city planning and urban management there is, all too often, a disconnect between social and environmental policy discourses. Social reformers, striving to advance fairness in society, often neglect the natural world on which we all depend. Environmentalists, on the other hand, while they draw attention to climate change and the need for eco-friendly public policy and practice, have tended to be less successful in focussing on who gains and who loses in the urban political process.

• • Civic leadership should assert the power of place. This book rejects the view that cities and local communities are helpless victims in a global process of economic exploitation designed to serve the needs of capital. Place-less institutions, meaning organisations that make investment decisions without caring about the consequences for people in the places affected, have gained too much influence in modern society. They have eroded the power of local people to shape the quality of life in the areas where they live. The powers of local governments across the world need strengthening if democracy is to prosper.

• • International learning and exchange is vital. Throughout human history cities have provided a supportive setting for all kinds of creative, problemsolving activity. There is great diversity in approaches to city planning and urban governance across the world, but the arrangements for international learning and exchange among cities are under developed. Sharing stories on an international basis about successful efforts to create inclusive cities should be encouraged.

• • Academics can make a useful contribution to urban policy-making and public management.