Cities represent the future of humanity — and that means we must figure out how to make them more livable. The share of people who live in urbanized areas more than doubled in the US and across the world from 1900 to 2000. More than eight in 10 Americans live in cities today, as do the majority of people worldwide.
These densely populated places have created tremendous opportunities for innovation, economic growth, more efficient infrastructure and transit, and the curation of arts and culture. But the density that gives cities their power also creates new challenges: Cities have struggled to build enough housing, pollution abounds, and diseases can spread more quickly. Cities must also manage the massive amounts of traffic — automobile, train, bike, and pedestrian — that can clash and result in deadly accidents.
The world’s cities are constantly experimenting and generating new ideas about how to solve those problems. The difficulty for policymakers has long been: How do we get good ideas to spread? Municipal leaders sometimes labor under the mistaken belief that they have nothing to learn from their peers a few miles away or across the globe. How can we encourage more cross-pollination?
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, has launched a $50 million global idea-sharing project to facilitate the migration of effective urban policies to allow cities around the world to address their biggest issues.
It’s called the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange, a curated marketplace of policy ideas for municipal leaders with hands-on support to help cities implement them. On Tuesday, the project announced the first set of policies that would be added to the exchange, selected by its staff based on assessments of their effectiveness, their cost and complexity, and the perceived interest among city leaders.
While ideas exchanges are not a new concept among policymakers, they risk functioning as little more than passive warehouses, where ideas are placed 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 by including only proven interventions and providing technical support for implementation, their policy-sharing network can thrive. The new exchange will provide grants to support implementation, offer how-to guides from the officials who have already put these policies into place and technical advice from Bloomberg staff, and pay for city leaders to visit other jurisdictions and see the policies in action.
The idea is “to take all of the lessons that have been learned from many experiments all over the globe,” said James Anderson, head of government innovation at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “To create an infrastructure that frankly does not exist in the world that takes good ideas, but marries them with the critical supports necessary to get them into the hands of people who want them when they want them and to help them stand them up so that they survive.”
11 proven policies that could help cities
Urban development has long been one of Bloomberg’s top philanthropic priorities,