I started the New Year last week by attending a multi-day Symposium on Institutional Innovation in Cities at the Bloomberg Center on Cities at Harvard University. The gathering was curated by the remarkable people who power the Harvard Center (notably Jorrit de Jong, Mark Moore, Stacy Richardson, Quinton Mayne and Kimberly Leary) as well as two of the brilliant founders of The Institutional Architecture Lab (Sir Geoff Mulgan and Juha Leppänen).
To guide the discussion, Geoff and Caio Wernick presented a provocative paper entitled “The City as Mesh: options for handling crosscutting tasks in city governments” (Working Paper: The city as mesh — TIAL). As the paper summarized:
“City governments across the world usually organise much of their work through functional hierarchies — departments or secretariats with specialised responsibility transport, housing, sanitation, education, environment and so on.
Those hierarchical structures became the norm in the late 19th century, and they still work well for stable, bounded problems. They ensure clear accountability; a concentration of specialised knowledge; and a means to engage relevant stakeholders. Often, they bring together officials and professionals with a strong shared ethos — whether for policing or education, transport or housing.
But vertical silos have also always created problems. Many priorities don’t fit them neatly. Sometimes departments clash, or dump costs onto each other. They may fail to share vital information.
Part of the aim [of the dossier] is to liberate cities from the constraints of traditional 19th and 20th century pyramids, which still predominate in their everyday work. These administrative models still have their place. But in an era which has seen extraordinary organisational innovation (from TikTok and Google to Nvidia and Wikipedia) as well as the rise of complex new needs and demands, cities which rely too heavily on old models risk being neither sufficiently agile nor sufficiently trusted to thrive.”
As you can tell, this convening and provocation are tightly aligned with our times. The stakes for urban and metropolitan governance could not be higher. Cities and metropolitan areas both concentrate the populations of nations and drive their economies. But the ability of places to shape their own destinies is increasingly circumscribed by anachronistic constitutions (which concentrate governmental power at the national and state levels), the rise of anti-urban populism and a moment that can only be characterized as one of dark chaos and distraction.
Against this backdrop, problem solving has also become more challenging. The issues that dominate the agenda in cities do not fit the vertical silos and stovepipes that often organize governmental responses. Wicked challenges cross disciplinary, sectoral, and jurisdictional lines requiring solutions that are multi-dimensional and implicate multiple actors both within and outside government.
The misalignment of challenge and response takes on new meaning as economies restructure in the aftermath of the pandemic and in the shadow of geo-political tensions. The reshoring of manufacturing, for example, requires a new kind of industrial governance that integrates interventions around the location decisions and workforce, technology, energy and infrastructure demands of major production companies and small-and-medium sized firms. Advancing innovation, in turn, requires close collaboration among industry, universities, entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries. Upgrading the skills of workers requires joined-up efforts between firms, community colleges, skills providers, local governments, philanthropies and others. And so on.
From the outset, the Harvard convening reset the frame for the discussion of urban governance and institutional design. Many of us have been part of convenings and initiatives that try to tackle the perennial challenge of “inter-agency” coordination. I have PTSD from battles as far back as the Clinton Administration when there were initial efforts to drive collaboration between the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, which, at the time, were conveniently located across 7th Street SW in Washington, DC. I visibly remember one participant in these endeavors describing inter- agency coordination as an “unnatural act,” doomed to fail given clashing bureaucratic cultures, fiefdoms, and norms. An entire book could be written about the ebbs and flows and highs and lows of the collaboration between our federal and transportation agencies (e.g., the Sustainable Communities Initiative in the 2010s, the TIFIA expansion in the 2020s), but that’s for another time.
What was different about the Harvard convening was how Geoff reframed the discussion from the outset, asking “How do institutions mobilize capital, intelligence and civic energy” to drive transformative results. This one-word change, “mobilize” versus “coordinate,” helped unlock a vision of governance innovation that is liberating, energizing, and impactful.
The gathering stimulated the following thoughts.
First, horizontal solutions have become a rising tide in the public sector. Josh Humphries and I have written before about the remarkable efforts underway in Atlanta around housing reform (Organizing for Impact: Lessons from Atlanta’s Housing Strike Force – The New Localism). What Mayor Andre Dickens has led is a kind of coercive collaboration where mayoral leadership has forced agencies that deliver or touch housing — public housing authorities for sure, but also school districts, transportation agencies and other governmental entities — to work together not just on general policy shifts but the delivery of actual projects. The elements of the Atlanta model — a multi-agency Strike Force to drive results, a new Atlanta Urban Development Corporation that is placing public assets in the service of housing production, new pools of public, private and civic capital to make financing possible — provide a blueprint for cities across the country. Atlanta demonstrates how cities can work harder for themselves around a common challenge that, in the case of housing, has been dominated by the federal government for too long.
Second, the imperative for horizontal, cross-disciplinary collaboration is not confined to the public sector. Cities differ from federal and state governments for the very reason that they are driven by networks of public, private and civic institutions and leaders. In the past year alone, this newsletter has captured the rise of new examples of network governance —an AI Strike Team in Pittsburgh, an Investment Playbook in Hampton Roads, new funds of private capital organized by Opportunity Alabama and The O.H.I.O. Fund. These examples provide lessons about the workings of radical collaboration rather than the mechanics of “institutional design” and deserve the kind of intensive study and review that enables replication and adaptation.
Third, the focus on public or network innovations in singular cities is necessary but not sufficient. The preponderance of think tank studies and research papers treat cities as “every tub on its own bottom.” It is, of course, fundamental to surface innovations in individual communities, so that they can be codified and adopted or adapted by multiple cities. But it is equally important to assess ways in which special intermediaries can accelerate the spreading of innovations from a first-mover city to a few fast followers to multitudes of adopters and adapters. The challenge in many countries is not the absence of urban innovations — those abound — but the paucity of mechanisms for the rapid diffusion of those innovations.
There is another urgent reason to organize cities in the collective. We are living in a period where societal tensions between the large and the small have markedly grown. The rise of Big Tech and Big Finance dramatically distorts how markets function and cities perform. Prior generations in the US met this challenge by establishing independent federal agencies like the ICC, FTC and SEC, to curb the excesses of concentrated power in the economy. In the absence of federal leadership, coalitions of cities and metropolitan areas must aggregate their market and purchasing power and find new means of influencing an economy dominated by a few large firms.
Fourth, the challenges described here call for transnational collaboration. At a time when blocs of nations and spheres of influence are forming, cities are united by common problems and threats. To Geoff and Caio’s credit, “The City as Mesh” paper includes many examples of public sector innovation outside the usual suspects in the Global North. The convening also surfaced enormous potential for city collaboration across continents. Mar Jiménez, the Commissioner for European Affairs at the Barcelona City Council, described how Barcelona’s Mayor Jaume Collboni has formed Mayors for Housing, an alliance of 17 cities across Europe seeking solutions to the crisis. In the United States, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb have helped catalyze a similar effort, the National Housing Crisis Task Force. The potential for transnational solution sharing is enormous.
Finally, technological innovation makes institutional innovation easier to achieve, diffuse and scale. Geoff and Caio’s paper noted that “Some of the new options make the most of digital technologies which make it much easier to organise horizontally — with shared platforms, data or knowledge, or one stop shops or portals for citizens.” Artificial intelligence, for example, can be used in multiple ways to cohere market information and unveil the hidden powers of public agencies. The Atlanta Urban Development Corporation, described above, is a subsidiary of the city’s public housing authority for the simple reason that Georgia, like many states, bestows incredible powers on housing agencies including the power to provide tax exemptions for affordable housing and the ability to innovate with building code regulations. Imagine if AI could review the statutes of hundreds of public housing authorities to determine how to guide the design and development of public asset corporations. What could have taken months as individual cities seek legal advice on their own can now take days as a collective act of a consortium of cities. The possibility for positive institutional disruption and design is palpable and needs to be realized asap.
I attended the Harvard convening last week knowing that cities face institutional challenges of monumental proportions, which will require an unprecedented burst of innovation and reform. I left armed not only with many practical and applicable ideas but with one burning, overriding question: “How do institutions mobilize capital, intelligence and civic energy?” I will return to that one question many times this year.
Bruce Katz is the Founder of New Localism Associates and a Senior Advisor to the National Housing Crisis Task Force