Town Hall Titans
Meet five big city bosses — the mayors of Rome, London, Stockholm, Berlin and Paris — who are tackling the challenges of contemporary urban life with new energy and ideas.
Posted Sunday, May 8, 2005; 1.15 BST
Walter Veltroni really gets around. During a typical working day recently, the mayor of Rome started with a visit to a children's hospital in the morning, attended a groundbreaking ceremony at a center for the homeless in the afternoon, and then dropped in on an outpatient rehabilitation clinic on the other side of town before the day was through. The gangly, bespectacled Veltroni, 49, may look like an economics professor, but some Romans call him the Plumber because of his hands-on approach to governing the Italian capital. Like an actual plumber, though, Veltroni isn't always available when people need him, so he's set up a network of municipal employees and volunteers who make the house calls he's not able to make himself. As part of the Solidarity Pony Express, a new assistance program for senior citizens, some 500 young people hop onto their scooters every day to deliver food, medicine or company to the elderly. In another initiative, about 3,000 mostly retired people fan out across schools and parks to keep a watchful eye on children. "We want to show that in a huge metropolis, you can also be a community," says Veltroni, sitting in his frescoed office at the Palazzo Senatorio, overlooking the ruins of the Forum.
Across Europe, mayors like Veltroni are shaking up the way big cities are run — and as a result are enjoying views national politicians can only dream of. Veltroni's approval ratings, for example, bounce between 60% and 80%, while center-left leader Romano Prodi and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi struggle to reach 50%. Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë consistently tops polls of the French public's favorite elected officials. In Berlin, Klaus Wowereit remains the city's most popular politician, despite tackling a massive debt burden by making dramatic budget cuts. And in Stockholm, Annika Billström has many fans among minority and low-income groups notwithstanding her Social Democratic Party's poor showing. Even London's quarrelsome mayor Ken Livingstone, who's regularly embroiled in spats with the media and was once expelled from his own party, handily won re-election last year despite introducing a controversial $10 congestion charge for cars entering the city center.
The reason for this popularity is simple: mayors matter. Leave the grand visions to presidents and prime ministers; mayors are judged by their ability to pick up the trash, get traffic moving, deal with housing and commercial development, control crime, and convince their constituents — as well as tourists and investors — that their cities are best. Action, not image, is what counts with city dwellers, who now make up three out of every four Europeans. Fiorello LaGuardia, the legendary mayor of New York City from 1934-45, had a saying: There is no Republican, no Democratic, no Socialist way to clean a street or build a sewer, just a right way and a wrong way. These five remarkable mayors embrace a similar philosophy: innovation means more than ideology, pragmatism more than partisanship.
Veltroni, Billström, Livingstone, Wowereit and Delanoë face plenty of challenges in putting their practical innovations to work. They have to find creative ways to restore the sense of community that's often lost in the tangle of big-city life, to provide affordable housing for people on low or middle incomes, to ease road congestion and improve public transport, to manage tight municipal finances while enhancing quality of life. As more mayors across Europe are directly elected, the office is taking on increasing clout and visibility, and gaining powers that were previously the preserve of national governments. "To give vision and focus to a city, you need to invest in one person the authority to run the city," says Peter John, an expert on urban policy at the University of Manchester, England. "As cities become more competitive with each other, they need these figures to lead them." Meet the mayors who are providing Europe's most visionary leadership.
With reporting by Theunis Bates/ London, James Graff, Mikael G. Holter and Jonathan Shenfield/Paris, Jeff Israely/Rome, Ulla Plon/Stockholm and William Boston and Regine Wosnitza/Berlin
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