C i t i e s and P a r t n e r s h i p s
Joint Virtual Roundtable
Tel-Aviv University & the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Speakers
Click the name or image to view bio and abstract
Department of Management Studies and CREST, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Mr. Balaraman Jayaraman
President & CEO, Congruent Solutions
Trustee of FeedmyChennai
BIO
Balaraman Jayaraman (a k a Ballu) was born and brought up in Delhi and, after his schooling in Delhi, did his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering and has a PGDM from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. He has been entrepreneur since 1992, and is now an investor and currently serves as a director on the boards of three companies in the technology space in India in addition to a Fashion Design company in Hong Kong. He is a Charter Member and a past member of the Governing Council of TiE, Chennai, is currently a member of the Regional Council of NASSCOM and the President of the IIM Calcutta Alumni Association Chennai Chapter.
Ballu has been an active and passionate Rotarian since 1989. He was a Director at the Rotary Club of San Francisco West and, after his move back to India, joined Rotary Club of Madras East in 1998. He served as the President of Rotary Club of Madras East during their Silver Jubilee Year.
He is a visiting faculty at the Department of Management Studies in IIT Madras, and is regularly invited to offer guest lectures and workshops at Great Lakes Institute of Management and his alma mater, IIM Calcutta.
ABSTRACT
FeedMyChennai
Mr. Balaraman Jayaraman will speak about his experiences running FeedMyChennai (FMC), a non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure that #NoOneGoesHungry in Chennai. FMC works closely in partnership with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC). When migrant workers were stuck without work or income during the first Covid-19 lockdown in India in 2020, FMC partnered with the GCC to serve over 900,000 meals to migrants and the underprivileged over the course of a month. Mr. Balaraman’s talk will describe how NGOs and cities can work in partnership, without formal contractual obligations to deliver services to citizens. Such arrangements can help us rethink the use of PPPs in the urban context.
Mr. Vikram Kapur
Tourism, Culture and Religious Endowments Department, Government of Tamil Nadu
BIO
Vikram Kapur is a 1988 batch officer of the Indian Administrative Service, born on the Tamil Nadu State Cadre. He had his schooling in Springdales School, New Delhi from where he passed out in 1984 and was ranked 8th in the All India merit list. Thereafter, he graduated in Physics from St. Stephens College, Delhi and did his post-graduation in Public Policy and Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York. During his service, Vikram Kapur has worked in various capacities, including that of District Collector, Dindigul, Executive Director, Tea Board, Government of India, MD & CEO, Tamil Nadu Urban Development Fund, Member Secretary, Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority, Chairman, Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, Principal Secretary, Industries & Energy Departments, Government of Tamil Nadu, Commissioner, Municipal Corporation of Chennai, Managing Director of Chennai Metrowater and Chairman & Managing Director, TANGEDCO & Chairman, TANTRANSCO, the state power utilities of the state of Tamil Nadu. Currently he is posted as Additional Chief Secretary, Tourism, Culture and Religious Endowments Department, Government of Tamil Nadu. He specializes in the areas of urban affairs and power systems.
ABSTRACT
'Soft' PPPs
Public private partnerships (PPP) have been traditionally seen to be contracts between the State agencies and private operators in order to deliver specific civic services, usually provided by the former. While there is a large body of literature on these PPP contracts, there is very little research on another form of PPP – one between the Government and the NGO. These PPPs are usually in the social sector, such as health, education, food and shelter, and may or may not have some form of monetary consideration paid by the Government to the service provider to cover costs. Since there is no profit motive in such PPP arrangements, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that these are better in terms of outcomes. Examples could be urban shelters for the homeless, remedial classes for Government school students, vaccination camps etc. Whether such social “infrastructure” or services tend to be more sustainable, is a subject for further analysis.
Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam
Department of Civil Engineering, IIT-Madras
BIO
Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam is a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT-Madras. Ashwin received his B.Tech in Civil engineering from IIT-Madras and and a M.S and PhD from Stanford University in Construction Engineering and Management. In between he helped start up an internet based company in the USA called All Star Fleet, aimed at providing asset management services for construction companies. Ashwin's research has focused on the planning, management and governance of infrastructure projects. Previous work focused on Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in Infrastructure planning and management, and the the use of digital technology to improve decision making at both project and regional levels. Ashwin is also a co-founder of Okapi Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd and serves as a Director on the Board.
ABSTRACT
Urban Public Private Partnerships - old and new perspectives
City's require partnerships to deliver a variety of urban services. Public-Private partnerships have been well researched, but often focus on large infrastructure projects such highways, ports, airports and so on. The nuances that urban settings represent - a large and complex stakeholder base, the requirements for several services to be delivered as public and not private goods and so on - have not been adequately discussed in this literature. In my talk I discuss some of the challenges that Urban PPPs face as well as innovative arrangements that have been adopted in the urban setting, particularly partnerships that are more voluntary and less commercial in nature, which also display characteristics of flexibility, adaptability and partnerships that are often missing in traditional infrastructure PPPs
Ms. Rani Mandelbaum
David Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University
BIO
Rani Mandelbaum is a PhD student of Urban Planning at The School of Architecture in Tel Aviv University and at DICEA Department in Sapienza University of Rome. She works as an Urban Planning consultant for the Southern district of The Israeli Planning Administration.
ABSTRACT
Who Wants to Play with me? Crisis, Planning and PPP in Israeli TAMA 38
TAMA 38 is the national master plan for strengthening existing structures against earthquakes. The master plan supplements tentative building rights to older buildings, in order to encourage the market to renovate them and, at the same time, to strengthen them against earthquakes in accordance with current regulation. The talk will focus on the partnership between public and private sectors within the TAMA 38 frame, the legitimization for promotion of the master plan as a new planning policy, and on its influence on Israeli urban space and society.
Dr. Ronen Mandelkern
BIO
Dr. Ronen Mandelkern is a political economist who studies economic liberalization and the rise of neoliberalism. He is especially interested in the governmental and ideational aspects of these phenomena: how neoliberalism has transformed the government of democratic countries and which ideas and theories stood behind that transformation. Mandelkern’s studies focus on economic and social policies in Israel and other advanced capitalist democracies, especially following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. Dr. Mandelkern received his BA (PPE: Philosophy, Political Science and Economics) and MA (Political Science) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After completing his PhD in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne (2010-2011) and a Polonsky Fellowship at the Van-Leer Jerusalem Institute (2011-2016). His research has been published in leading journals such as Comparative Political Studies, New Political Economy and World Politics.
ABSTRACT
PPP in public services: concentration instead of competition?
The presumed advantages of competition is probably the most common justification for the contracting-out of public services to private provider. In my talk, I will discuss how competitive tendering might actually give support the dominance of large business corporations in public services provision, thereby enhancing concentration rather than competition.
Prof. Carlos Oliveira Cruz
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal
BIO
Carlos Oliveira Cruz is an Associate Professor of Infrastructure Economics and Management at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal and an invited Professor of Fundação Getúlio Vargas (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). Carlos has been consultant on PPPs and infrastructure procurement to EBRD, OECD, European Commission, among other public and private institutions. He has served in a government cabinet as Advisor to the Portuguese Secretary of State for Transportation and has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
ABSTRACT
PPPs for Urban Infrastructure
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been extensively used in a diverse set of projects, from large national road/railway networks, to local public infrastructure such as waste collection systems, public buildings or metro systems, just to name a few examples. Governments worldwide has been attracted by the ability of leveraging public capital (and expertise) to close gaps in public services delivery, and the last 30 years provide significant evidence on the merits and pitfalls of such model. However, urban PPPs have attracted much less attention when compared with large and “prestige” infrastructure. We intend to discuss the main challenges for urban PPPs and reflect on how to use past lessons of large-scale projects to build more resilient PPPs at the urban scale.
Prof. Juval Portugali
Department of Geography and the Human Environment, Tel Aviv University
BIO
Juval Portugali is a Professor of Human Geography at the Department of Geography and the Human Environment, Tel Aviv University. He is the Head of the City-Center - a research center for cities and urbanism. He is the former head of the Environmental Simulation Laboratory (ESLab) and of the Environment, Society and Planning Graduate Program in Tel Aviv University. He received his B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, M.A. from the Technion and received a London University PhD from The London School of Economics and Political sciences. His research integrates complexity and self-organization theories, environmental-spatial cognition, urban dynamics and planning in modern and ancient periods.
ABSTRACT
Urban planning: A concise history of the relations between the Public, Private and Civil sectors
This talk follows the evolving structure of urban planning from a solely Public-sector planning model-1 where the planned private sector and citizens are external to the planning process, to the current structure — model-2 — where the Private sector and the (newly emerged) Third sector (Civil society) are full-scale participants. It identifies the first step toward model-2 in advocacy planning that drew attention to the need for “public participation in planning”, that is, to involve in the planning process the previously planned Private sector and citizens. It then shows that the decisive step toward model-2 was the process of privatization in association with the processes of globalization and the rising ICT.
Prof. Thillai Rajan
Department of Management Studies and Centre for Research on Start-ups and
Risk Financing (CREST), Indian Institute of Technology Madras
BIO
Thillai Rajan is a Professor in the Department of Management Studies and Centre for Research on Start-ups and Risk Financing (CREST) at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He is also an associate at the Mossavar Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University. His research interests encompass PPPs, Infrastructure financing, Corporate Finance, start-ups, ventures, and SMEs. He has completed 5 systematic review and evidence summary studies on various topics pertaining to infrastructure and PPPs. He has been engaged in creating an Integrated Database on Infrastructure Projects to facilitate research and policy making in Indian infrastructure.
ABSTRACT
Systematic review of top-down and bottom-up approaches for urban PPPs
In the provision of basic infrastructure services, specifically, to the urban poor, we explore the effectiveness of top down and bottom up approaches. Bottom-up approaches in general are characterized by the strong involvement of alternate service providers such as NGO's and CBO's in improving access to electricity, water supply, and sanitation services for the urban poor. While bottom-up approaches are espoused in general, we find that they do not have any statistically significant effect. This trend was consistent for all dimensions of access: connectivity, affordability, adequacy, and effort and time. However, our findings also show that bottom-up approaches may be more effective in some sections such as water and sanitation sectors than in the electricity sector. When bottom-up approaches involve active participation from the community, the results are significantly positive. Innovations to bottom-up approaches that facilitate active community participationcan can be an effective way to increase access to basic services among the urban poor.
Prof. Fernando P. Santos
Informatics Institute, Civic AI Lab, University of Amsterdam
BIO
Fernando Santos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Civic AI Lab (Amsterdam). He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering in 2018, from Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal). Fernando’s research lies at the interface of AI and complex systems: He is interested in understanding collective dynamics in systems composed of many adaptive agents and in designing fair/pro-social AI. Before joining UvA, Fernando was a James S. McDonnell postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Princeton University (Levin Lab). He was a visiting student at Princeton, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and TU Delft.
ABSTRACT
Public, private and civil strategic dynamics in city governance
Cities are a prime example of complex adaptive systems where actors representing multiple sectors must coordinate their actions. Of particular importance are the strategic interactions between representatives from the public (local governments or parliaments), private (companies) and civil (citizens) sectors. Analyzing how such complex interactions unfold over time requires new analytic approaches. In this talk, I will discuss a mathematical framework, grounded on evolutionary game theory, to envisage situations in which each sector is confronted with the dilemma of deciding between maintaining a status quo scenario or shifting towards a new paradigm. I will consider multisector conflicts regarding environmentally friendly policies as an example of application and discuss how such mathematical formalism can, in general, be applied to understand the stability of partnerships involving the private, public and civil sectors.