Public Values for Cities and City Policy

This book provides a framework for understanding the creation of public value in urban environments. The ability of cities to produce value is related to their capacity to generate meaningful resources for city residents and workers that enable them to craft meaningfulness in life and work. Meaningfulness and public value require new ways of leading and developing city governance. This extends to designing inclusive structures and processes for people to grapple with the meanings and values underpinning public value creation. A public value framework demands that city governance goes beyond ordinary government to considerations of how to involve city residents and workers in creating and maintaining the common good. The common good is determined by an inclusive associational life characterized by deliberative processes and opportunities for social contribution. When acting upon their entitlements to make the city, urban residents and workers - as members of diverse civic, public and private organizations - co-create the meanings that facilitate the collective action necessary to translate values into value. The experience of cooperating for the common good produces meanings that people can adopt into a sense that their lives have significance and purpose. This is particularly relevant to understanding how to motivate just and inclusive sustainability transitions, especially as cities recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on cities and urban policy, the main theme of this book is to elaborate on public values for cities and city policies, and to further develop the concept of the meaningful city. This book aims to provide new kinds of tools for city development that can help them co-create resilience against future shocks.

Jari Stenvall is Professor in Public Management at Tampere University, Finland. He has published widely in the area of learning and innovation, change management, trust, organizational reforms, service innovations, and the use of information technology in organizations. Jari Stenvall was appointed by the Finnish Government as a member of the Independent Investigation Team to assess measures taken due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. He is a member of the national team with the purpose to develop Finnish public management.

Ilpo Laitinen is both a Senior Level Director and a Researcher and thus shows the capability of working across the boundaries of academia and the business. He is internationally experienced both in science and management e.g. in public administration and management, smart cities, and innovation management. His areas of research cover the reform and evaluation of public administration and management, change management, innovation management, higher education research, and the utilisation of information technology in organisations. His current and on-going research activities focus on Citizen Centric Smart City (Meaningful Cities) and digitalization of services, service innovation and co-creation of novel services and utilization of big data.

Ruth Yeoman is Associate Professor of Business Ethics at Northumbria University, UK, and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford, UK. Her research examines the application of meaningfulness and mutuality to work, organisations and systems, and she established the Meaningful City research programme at Oxford and Northumbria. She is also the author of Ethics, Meaningfulness and Mutuality (2020).

Marc Thompson is a Senior Fellow in Strategy and Organisation, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Official Fellow, Green Templeton College, Oxford, UK. He is Academic Director of the Master’s Programme, “Consulting and Coaching for Change” which is run jointly with HEC-Paris. He is a Governing Body Fellow and Academic Tutor at Green Templeton College and author of numerous papers and articles on work and organization issues including the recent Oxford Handbook on Meaningful Work (2019). His current research interests include the laboratory phenomenon in the field of social change and innovative intervention models in for organizational change.

Milena Mueller Santos is a Research Associate at Northumbria University, UK. She completed her DPhil in Management Studies at Oxford University, UK. Her research interests are in ethical business, meaningfulness in cities and supply chains, shared value creation and corporate reputation. Milena’s most recent research has been published in the International Journal of Emerging Markets and Human Relations, and she is the co-author of “Reputation and identity conflict in management consulting”, published in Human Relations, which was also awarded the Urwick Prize 2017.