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A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, authors of “The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism,” on the new era of public, private, and civic collaboration.

In the past few decades, Pittsburgh has rebounded from the collapse of its steel industry to become a global leader in robotics. Indianapolis has broadened its sports-based economy (Kurt Vonnegut famously said city residents passed the time by going to the speedway one day a year and playing miniature golf the other 364) to include a robust life sciences industry. Copenhagen has gone from an unemployment rate of 18 percent into one of the world’s wealthiest cities.

Cities have long been seeking out companies to relocate to their business-friendly confines. By dangling tax breaks and other incentives, cities hope to boost the local economy, provide employment, and add to the property tax base. More recently, it seems, companies have been searching for cities that will be amenable to their workers, particularly the younger employees — millennials — who favor walkable urban centers with a healthy mix of nightlife and arts venues as opposed to the suburban house with the yard and the garage for the obligatory car.

Can local leaders solve issues better than politicians and bureaucrats in Washington? I’m not in the habit of posing silly questions, but I’ll bet many of you snickered at that last sentence. Utahns, residents of a unique Western state thousands of miles from Washington, are used to having national leaders dictate tone-deaf solutions to their problems.

Many of America’s cities are struggling. Once-strong communities have experienced post-industrial collapse, rampant unemployment, and brain drain. Crumbling infrastructure, the opioid crisis, and a host of lesser pathologies have contributed to instability and frustration among citizens and leaders.

“New companies and new teams are being formed all the time here, as writers from The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Wired, and many others have noticed,” Mayor Andy Berke wrote last week in “The Berke Bulletin,” a subscription mayoral email blast.

Co-authors Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak join us to discuss The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive In the Age of Populism. The book says power is shifting in the world, downward from national governments to cities and metropolitan communities, and gives examples of local government’s positive impact in several cities, including Chattanooga, Tennessee.

For four decades now cities in the United States have been inventing new institutions and collaborations to get things done, reacting to a sense of crisis and the inadequacy of existing capacities. Philadelphia’s Center City District is a great example.

Urban expert Bruce Katz has noticed a change in how our world is structured. National states and governments no longer hold the central power to fix our modern world. Cities and metropolitan regions, he says, are now in charge of their own futures.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, cities – not nations – are seeing their power grow. That’s according to Bruce Katz, a global urbanization expert at the Brookings Institution. He joins us to talk about how cities can tackle everything from economic disparity to environmental sustainability, which he and co-author Jeremy Nowak write about in “The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism” (Brookings).