Co-Creating More Livable Cities

Cities are the hubs of twenty-first-century humanity, with fast-growing populations and a disproportionate impact on the environment. The challenge for city leaders, urban community groups, residents, and other stakeholders is figuring out how to house, employ, transport, educate, and ensure access to opportunities for these growing populations. Innovations in city management, service provision, and use of technology are part of the solution. Even innovative cities, however, can still end up working better for some of their residents than others.

Living Cities brings together the world’s leading financial institutions and foundations to provide loans, grants, and technical support for more than 100 cities across the USA with a focus on creating opportunities for low-income people, especially people of color. The Integration Initiative (TII), launched by Living Cities in 2010, offers cities financial and strategic planning support to tackle their most pressing social issues. This chapter looks at how Living Cities pursues its work, particularly through TII, and the experiences of two cities engaged in the initiative—Baltimore, MD, and New Orleans, LA. Key lessons include a shared definition of success, distributed leadership among collaborators, harnessing all types of capital, and practicing collaboration until it is the “new normal.” The chapter concludes with a brief description of Living Cities’ latest initiative, the City Accelerator, which is designed to determine if municipal innovation can be sustained effectively over time.