“How can you protect your community from failure while being open to new ideas?” Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town answer an essential question.

“The advent and growth of technology have enabled the transformation of traditional membership groups into online communities and platforms like Nourishing Africa to flourish. According to GSMA Intelligence, a source of mobile industry insights, more than half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to 4G network by the end of 2020.” Nourishing Africa is building a vast community of young agri-food entrepreneurs and works hard to secure a stronger, more sustainable, and resilient Africa.

“This project has ended up looking nothing like a written plan would’ve looked. That stodgy plan would’ve tied our hands and not allowed for changes midstream. It would’ve died by committee.“ Deb Brown, small town advocate and community activator, tells the story of a community project taking off before planning could bring it down.

How do we design our towns and cities? Who gets a seat a the table in the planning process? Who is the master behind the master plan? Social Design Collaborative has designed a toolkit reaching out to underrepresented groups to break down what Delhi's Master Plan 2041 has in store for them, and what they can do to get their concerns heard. “Kaun Hai MASTER? Kya Hai PLAN?” (Who is the MASTER? What is the PLAN?) is an interactive tool that spreads awareness on Delhi's master planning process and share people's perspectives.

BlackSpace shares inspirations, experiences, and lessons learned from an exploratory process of co-designing heritage conservation efforts alongside members of Brownsville, one of Brooklyn’s Black enclaves. In this introduction to the playbook exploring the process, BlacSpace points towards a collaborative and inclusive development based on local trust and respect.

Rhode Island has achieved one of the biggest drops in unemployment rates in the U.S. More than 20 new policies and programs aligned to support this growth. Despite substantial progress, a new round of policy and practice innovation is needed to continue the trajectory. Urban scholars Luise Noring and Bruce Katz recommend three main areas of focus, with 17 tangible and feasible suggestions for change.

The innovation centre La Pinada Lab works on two premises. One: Reality is complex, and to develop better solutions to our problems, we must cooperate. Two: When acting on the urban environment, it does not make sense to separate the public and private domains. In this article, the lab explores the role of city councils. It’s a call for local courage and for innovative public-private partnerships.

Some local governments are beginning to recognize that their communities haveuntapped resources as well as unmet needs. They are empowering and partnering withtheir communities through programs such as bottom-up planning, neighborhood matchingfunds, and participatory budgeting. Community activator, Jim Diers, examines the power of genuine partnerships.

Building strong communities is not easy. In “Bowling Alone”, Robert Putnam documents the decline of community life in North America. He blames poverty, suburbanization, television, and more time spent at work. Others have added fear, mobility, globalization and increased professionalization and specialization to the list of culprits. Jim Diers, community activator, reflects on 37 years in community building. He offers simple rules of engagement that still hold true today.

Across the world, cities are grappling with climate change and crafting solutions that aim to reduce carbon emissions and advance innovative, sustainable, and inclusive growth. Urban scholars, Bruce Katz, Luise Noring, and Savvas Verdis, have selected a small group of cities that they find to be first-movers in their regions for sustainable urban solutions.

In this report, Luise Noring presents how Denmark devolved power to municipalities in a successful and replicable manner. Successful devolution in Denmark is largely due to the institutional innovation of KL - Local Government Denmark (KL - Kommunernes Landsforening). This report explores KL - Local Government Denmark’s strategies, while investigating how municipalities gain from increased devolution of political and fiscal power through organising for increased self-governance at local and national levels.

In this case study, Luise Noring and Bruce Katz compare and contrast the Copenhagen model with major regeneration efforts and institutional innovations that are underway in Hamburg (HafenCity), Helsinki (Kalasatama), and Lyon (Lyon Confluence). Each of these case studies shows how cities are leveraging public assets in different contexts, under different circumstances, and in different geographies. The proliferation of disparate approaches offers multiple options for mature and developing cities interested in undertaking transformative interventions.

You may never reflect on the question of why your city centre is important, but there is reason to think about it. You are involved in influencing which city centre you want in the future, through your choices. What is it worth to you – for business, for the environment, for social sustainability, for the visitor, for the investor, and the tax revenues? How is your city centre controlled? Who decides whether it should be nice or ugly and boring?

This paper considers the cases of urban redevelopment at waterfront and brownfield sites in Copenhagen (Denmark) and Hamburg (Germany) to explore how two municipal governments have pursued divergent kinds of entrepreneurial governance, even as they have aimed to create similar kinds of new-build neighbourhoods.

This case study focuses on the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC), a 16-year-old nonprofit corporation that has driven the regeneration of Over-the-Rhine, a formerly distressed community located near the traditional downtown. 3CDC powerfully blends corporate and philanthropic resources, strong professional management, and close cooperation with the public sector. It has a replicable governance structure and a strategic mix of public, private and civic ownership and responsibilities. It has already provided the model for the new Downtown Development Corporation in Erie, Pennsylvania and could be adapted to dozens of other cities.

“As the global recession, climate change, the pandemic to name but a few globally transformative events blow through the world, deep rooted inadequacies and malfunctions of our societies are exacerbated. In fact, such global events reveal good as well as bad societies. These events are compelling cities to rethink how we design, finance and deliver urban redevelopment. The pre-pandemic model was neither inclusive nor sustainable. In Denmark, an alternative model has emerged that uses the disposition of public assets to drive the creation of public wealth.” Urban scholar, Luise Noring, examines new ways to drive urban revival.

Urban scholar, Luise Noring, assesses the effectiveness of different models of public/private sector participation for urban regeneration and land value capture, where the public land owner is required to act in the public interest and the private sector motive is driven by the need to maximize returns.

“This paper explores how the Copenhagen model can revitalize cities and finance large-scale infrastructure by increasing the commercial yield of publicly owned land and buildings without raising taxes. The approach deploys an innovative institutional vehicle—a publicly owned, privately run corporation—to achieve the high-level management and value appreciation of assets more commonly found in the private sector while retaining development profits for public use.” Urban scholars, Luise Noring and Bruce Katz, discuss the Copenhagen model as a tool for urban revitalization.

“We believe the real secret to Copenhagen’s success is process innovation; it’s ability to create a series of public and public/private institutions with the capacity and capital to drive solutions at scale.” Esteemed urban scholars, Luise Noring and Bruce J. Katz, explain the key to Copenhagen’s strenghts in green innovation and highlight seven critical governance and finance lessons for local, national and global policymakers.

In Bruges, Belgium, investments in the physical development of the city are followed by investments in social infrastructure and new partnerships. Ilse Snick tells the story as it happens.

“When we meet, we build depth in our relationships with each other. When we build relationships with each other, we build relationships with people who represent different communities. When we build relationships with different communities, we build a strong sense of belonging and shared civic pride.” Derek Bottom examines the role of meetings in the development of Scottish Dunfermline.

We met Martin Lidegaard, Danish politician and former Secretary of State, for a conversation on the need for a dialogue with the power to reconnect us and develop holistic communities.

In the Swedish town of Västervik, private and public stakeholders joined forces and transformed stagnation and decline into significant progress.

Community wealth building is a people-centred approach to local economic development. It reorganises local economies to be fairer. It stops wealth flowing out of our communities, towns and cities. Instead, it places control of this wealth into the hands of local people, communities, businesses and organisations.

Millions of cities are facing the same challenge: How can we make this place more attractive? In the Scottish town of Dunfermline, we met a Community Planning Partnership, that caught our attention. To our surprise, the leader of it told us that “the more invisible, the partnership and I can be, the better.”

Björn Bergman, CEO of Svenska Stadskärnor (Swedish Association of Towns and Cities) delves into the essential values of town and city centers and the key role of public-private partnerships.