Exploring the 'Room for Manoeuvre' for 'Drivers of Change': Promoting Sustainable Progress in Urban Areas

Maximising the potentials and contributions of urban areas towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing poverty and improving human development, through depends upon successful innovations and the spread of such positive and productive policies, prac- tices and institutional capacities across the whole spectrum of urban life. What this requires is that all those attempting to bring about such advances - here referred to as 'drivers of change' - can find appropriate ways and means of making such innovations imple-
mentable and sustainable.This has to be attempted in the face of initial scepticism or even opposition to doing things differently on the part of established individuals and institutions; and in the face of particular circumstances which appear to severely limit the resources available for implementing novel ideas.
All 'drivers of change' need to make a balanced appraisal of their position in order to steer a course between advancing unrealistic aspirations and expec- tations on the one hand, and acceptance of conserva- tive or conventional assumptions about any possibili- ties of significant change on the other. This territory of progressive developments that have proved both desir- able and possible, is the one being (and hopefully con- tinuing to be) explored by individuals and groups in cities worldwide such as those that are registered in this compilation.