Cities represent the future of humanity — and that means we must figure out how to make them more livable. Proportion of people living in urbanized areas More than double 1900 to 2000 in the United States and around the world. More than eight out of 10 Americans currently live in cities, as do the majority of people worldwide.
These densely populated spaces have created tremendous opportunities for innovation, economic growth, more efficient infrastructure and transit, and healing arts and culture. But the density that gives cities their power also creates new challenges: cities struggle to build enough housing, pollution abounds and diseases can spread more quickly. Cities must manage large volumes of traffic — automobiles, trains, bikes and pedestrians — that can collide and result in fatal accidents.
Cities around the world are constantly experimenting and developing new ideas on how to solve those problems. The dilemma for policymakers has long been: How do we get good ideas to spread? Municipal leaders sometimes operate under the mistaken belief that they have nothing to learn from their colleagues miles away or around the world. How can we encourage more cross-pollination?
Launched by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City A $50 million global idea sharing project To facilitate the transfer of effective urban policies to allow cities around the world to solve their biggest problems.
It’s called the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange, a curated marketplace of policy ideas for municipal leaders to help cities implement them hands-on. On Tuesday, the project announced the first set of policies that will be added to the exchange, chosen by its staff Evaluation of their effectivenessTheir cost and complexity, and the interest felt among city leaders.
when Exchange of ideas is Not a new idea in policy makersThey risk doing little more than passive warehouses, where ideas are put on a shelf and may never be picked up again. If they cannot be easily adapted to a new setting.
The Bloomberg Group believes that only by incorporating proven interventions and providing technical support for implementation, can their policy-sharing network thrive. The new exchange will provide grants to help with implementation, how-to guidance from officials who have already put these policies in place and technical advice from Bloomberg staff, and will pay city leaders to visit other jurisdictions and see the policies in action.
“Take all the lessons learned from many experiments around the world,” said James Anderson, head of government innovation at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “Creating an infrastructure that doesn’t really exist in the world that takes good ideas, but marries them with critical support to hand them over to those who want them when they want them and help them stand up so they’re alive.”
11 Proven Principles That Can Help Cities
Urban development has long been one of Bloomberg’s top philanthropic priorities, a goal of giving hundreds of millions of dollars since 2011. He supported An urban leadership program at Harvard and focuses on various initiatives US mayor, US cityAnd Cities around the world. He paid special attention to the effort Better adapting cities to climate change and to support Public art projects.
It’s a natural fit for the former New York mayor, who has a keen interest and expertise in the challenges facing cities. While in the office, he said trip to paris and decided to check out a bike share in New York that he saw there; He returned to Bogotá for inspiration Bus is fast transportJumpstarting A new era of public transit improvement That continued beyond his tenure.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is stocking the exchange of ideas with 11 policy interventions to initiate, which city leaders cover a wide range of issues from transportation to air quality to public corruption to infectious disease:
- Installation of low-cost air quality sensors in schools and child health centres
- Renovating public buildings to be more energy-efficient
- Providing school lunches with sustainably produced produce and meat
- Digitizing the process of business licenses and other permits to reduce corruption
- Providing cold storage units for local traders who sell products
- Offering more summer learning programs for kids
- Connecting people in need with neighbors who can help them access help
- Adopting smoking bans and other smoke-free policies in public places
- Shipping containers are being converted into temporary shelters for homeless people
- Piloting reduced speed limits to prevent vehicle accidents
- Inclusion of people who collect waste informally in the public workforce
Some of these ideas aren’t particularly novel — NYC was the first to ban smoking When Bloomberg was mayor in 2003 But the policies are not really the selling point of the exchange.
Instead, the potential value is the knowledge that city officials have gathered in trying to implement policy solutions and the ability to share those experiences with others who want to try them. That’s where the need really lies, Yonah Freemark, principal research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center for Metropolitan Housing and Community Policy, told me. He described attending a meeting in Minnesota that brought together leaders from seven neighboring jurisdictions; Before that day, officials said, they had never met together before.
“My experience is that every city and the people who work for that city think their city is the most unique place in the world,” Freemark said. “There’s nothing they can fundamentally learn from other cities because their specific problems are their own problems.”
The Bloomberg Project hopes to break down those silos. Freemark gave examples of low-cost air quality sensors in schools and other areas frequented by children. There is that policy Already implemented in Lima, Peruand showed A 45-percent improvement in air qualityBloomberg provides an empirical basis for its inclusion in the exchange.
But the real opportunity, Freemark said, is for Lima officials to share with their peers in other countries how they found low-cost sensor manufacturers, giving other cities the actionable information that officials often seek when they want to adapt policies. to their own communities.
“People in other cities may worry about air pollution, but they don’t know who to contact about it. They don’t know who they are [Lima] Have been in contact with,” he said. “That person in Lima is going to let them know who their contact was at Microsoft or whatever company gave them the air sensor and help make that connection. Without that kind of direct contact, that would never happen.”
Josh Humphries, top housing adviser to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who has consulted with multiple cities Construction of houses As for Nonresident, I was told that the package offered by Bloomberg Exchange “probably addresses 80 to 90 percent of the questions that we can talk to one-on-one with 25 different cities.”
The Bloomberg team tried to anticipate problems that could hinder such a project, studying the science of implementation and replication of ideas “to learn about why ideas spread and don’t spread,” Anderson said. Each city must navigate its own administrative maze of funding, procurement, rulemaking and public comment, creating friction to get any new idea off the ground.
Many idea clearinghouses focus primarily on providing policy ideas, Anderson said. The Bloomberg project is equally focused on demand, generating interest in policy ideas among those who will actually implement them and then providing support for their efforts.
Cities of the future face daunting challenges, from planetary (climate change) to painful human (political polarization and corruption). We won’t know whether the Bloomberg Exchange is a well-planned flop or a catalyst for real change until its own evaluation comes out — and that could be years in the future, given the slow pace of urban policy.
“We want to make sure that every city that wants one of these ideas and wants to put it to good use, that we can support them and give them the dedicated resources and support that we think is so fundamental to successful idea replication,” Anderson told me. “We will be watching closely and figuring out how to meet the existing demand.”
