WICKED CHALLENGES: Future of Cities & Philanthropy series, Part 1
by John Lorinc
Introduction from Stephen Huddart and Jayne Engle, McConnell Foundation
Evidence is mounting that 21st century cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable amidst societal pressures, growing inequality, the climate crisis, and now a global pandemic. In the face of these, and given our efforts and investments in inclusive urban innovation, the McConnell Foundation has embarked on an inquiry to understand more clearly what cities need now to foster positive social, ecological and economic transition. We are exploring whether foundations can help play a more catalytic role in transition, particularly at the level of structural and systemic change.
We invited author John Lorinc to investigate and articulate the wicked challenges cities face (Part 1), and to explore what next-generation philanthropy might look like to contribute more usefully to the challenges (Part 2).
Specifically at McConnell, we’d like to learn how we can most effectively catalyze assets we’ve grown in portfolios across the foundation, including our Cities Portfolio — an ecosystem that includes Cities for People, Civic Capital, RegX and Legitimacities, Future Cities Canada, Civic+Indigenous 7.0, and now Participatory Cities Canada. We’re interested to build with partners a bold and ambitious urban transition scaffolding for the decade ahead, in ways that are participatory, systemic and experimental.
Looking forward, we’ll want to assess how foundations (and McConnell specifically) can contribute positively to turning around these crises, while we recognize the contested role and critiques of conventional philanthropy, as well as its modest scale relative to governments and capital markets. Notwithstanding these, there is an opportunity to access patient capital and take appropriate risks, and to activate key leverage points and change strategies. We seek to explore what next-gen foundations can help to build and catalyze — such as hybrid structures and institutions, creation of new fields, and ecosystems of transition. It will be critical to strengthen democratic legitimacy in these efforts. We welcome thoughts and suggestions from fellow travellers.
Parts 1 and 2 are intended to name some key city challenges, changes needed, and how philanthropic value might help catalyze city transition. We’re developing scenarios for future work and invite interested partners to build bold plans and co-invest with us. Please get in touch if you’d like to contribute: @JayneEngle or jengle@mcconnellfoundation.ca.
WICKED CHALLENGES (Part 1)
Across North America, wildfires caused by a toxic combination of drought and downed wires routinely overwhelm cities from Edmonton and Fort McMurray to San Francisco and Los Angeles, with uncontrolled flames and acrid smoke destroying neighbourhoods and forcing out residents.
In New York City, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which struck in 2012, has echoed through the years, hobbling a vulnerable subway system and helping spur ride-share-induced congestion.[1] Seven years on, the city remains unsure of how it will deal with the next super storm.[2]
Meanwhile, in dozens of cities from Toronto to London and Barcelona, working class or racialized neighbourhoods have turned into conflict zones as gentrification and short-term rentals ratchet up housing costs, forcing out lower-income residents and ordinary retail businesses. In fact, research in Canada’s three largest cities has demonstrated long-term socio-economic `sorting’ at the neighbourhood level, with mixed/middle-income communities yielding over time to a patchwork of rich and poor areas increasingly segregated from one another.[3]
Amidst this growing uncertainty, powerful tech companies have persuaded urban governments to make hefty investments in “smart city” systems, triggering mounting unease about privacy and the potential for human rights abuses created by predictive policing or facial recognition algorithms.
Indeed, an abundance of evidence suggests that 21st century cities have become highly vulnerable to the one-two punch of climate crisis and social polarization. “Cities are moving at a slower pace [while] the challenges they’re facing are radically accelerating,” observes Jean-Noé Landry, executive director of Open North. Highly mobile global capital in particular has exacerbated urban social conflict. As Julian Agyeman, a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, notes, “We’re building cities to invest in, not to live in.”
Yet set against this grim picture are compelling and innovative examples suggesting a different path into our profoundly urbanized future:
- Norwegian architects who have figured out how to design buildings that actually create clean energy[4];
- community land trusts created by grassroots groups that have pushed back against the financialization of housing[5];
- cities, like Copenhagen, that have invested so aggressively in cycling infrastructure that active transportation modes — cycling, walking, etc. –account for almost half of all trips taken[6];
- social enterprises that foster sustainable urban agriculture while connecting low-income communities with quality organic produce.[7]
At a broader scale, a growing number of municipal governments around the world have declared climate emergencies and are stepping up emissions reduction, adaptation and resilience plans. They’re not just achieving these goals through procurement and green development, but also by sharing experiences and insights through climate action networks such as the C-40. Other cities, meanwhile, are reforming long-entrenched land use planning rules that favoured single-family homes and excluded lower cost, higher-density apartments — a regulatory shift that revisits the critical question of who has a right to the city.
The question is, in the coming century, will such measures be sufficient to confront the magnitude of these interconnected crises?
Two Wicked Problems: A Threshold Moment for Global Cities
About a dozen years ago, the world passed a critical milestone. As of 2008, half the Earth’s residents lived in cities, and that number has continued to grow. In developed economies like Canada, the proportion is closer to 80%, and the in-migration to cities will push this figure into the 90% range in coming decades. In other words, the Earth’s future is, in many crucial respects, urban. Given our fractious and uncertain times, it’s well worth noting that the urban condition has become one of the few features of human society that unites most people living in most places.
Cities, however, should be seen not just as the lowest common denominator and zones of mounting dysfunction. Rather, they represent the most important platform for change advanced by neighbourhoods, governments, innovators, businesses, social entrepreneurs and civil society organizations. Getting cities `right’ entails confronting “wicked problems”[8] such as the climate crisis, social polarization and reconciliation. Fortunately, cities also provide the scale for effective action.
Most of these pressures are not new, but the time frame for finding sustainable solutions is narrowing rapidly. The aspirational target for the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is 2030, although recent research suggests they won’t be achieved until the 2070s if we continue at the current pace.[9] The International Panel on Climate Change recently reported that we have about a dozen years to alter the trajectory of global warming before the changes become irreversible. Looking slightly further out, the Paris Accord deadline is 2050. To put these mid-range horizons into context, consider that the useable lifespan of a typical subway car is about 30 to 40 years. Apple’s first Mac computer, in turn, hit the market 35 years ago. The space for action, in other words, is greatly compressed and entirely relatable. These dystopian futures are no longer the stuff of science fiction.
What’s more, the links between climate change and social marginalization have become ever more apparent. No longer can we — meaning governments, investors, civil society groups, and individuals — think about these two so-called wicked problems in isolation from one another.
Millions are already being displaced by sea level rise (SLR), drought and extreme weather. The flow of environmental refugees will only grow as oceans encroach on dense coastal cities, while desertification and rain forest clear-cutting force rural populations to seek refuge in the megacities of the global south. While displacement will affect all residents of such urban regions, it’s predictable that those with means will have a far greater capacity to withstand dislocation.
Even cities less directly exposed to the climate crisis face daunting costs related to storm-related infrastructure damage, flooding, and hydro outages. These cities, moreover, are likely to become destinations for people migrating away from at-risk regions, or countries experiencing political instability, war and repression.[10] As post-WWII history clearly shows, an enormous amount of instability, particularly in the Middle East but also in parts of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, has been caused by geopolitical disputes over corporate and state control of extractive resources from oil to diamonds and pasture lands.
In light of these dynamics, it is incumbent on cities to rapidly accelerate their climate mitigation and adaptation plans while, at the same time, focusing intently on building resilience — both physical and social — at all scales, from the city-wide level down to local communities. For Canadian cities in particular, the resilience imperative also includes our moral and legal obligations related to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, many of whom live in large urban regions, but often in marginalized conditions. While reconciliation means finding ways of ending the social and political isolation afflicting too many Indigenous communities, it also brings important opportunities to anchor urban resilience efforts in traditional Indigenous concepts of multi-generational sustainability and land relationship.
What does change of this scale entail? Certainly, status-quo political decision-making and governance isn’t sufficient, nor is Canada’s existing constitutional arrangement, which marginalize municipal governments and continue to relegate Indigenous communities to the political and economic periphery. Carbon-intensive infrastructure — from road and highway networks to local natural gas distribution networks for home heating — pose a formidable impediment in terms of sunk costs and incumbent advantage. Consequently, urban-focused change must take place in multiple domains, and at a range of scales, including networked, intra-city activism. National governments should develop what University College London economist Mariana Mazzucato calls “mission oriented innovation policies”[11] — comprehensive and highly strategic programs that focus on transitioning national and regional economies from carbon-based consumption to sustainable investment and entrepreneurship.
Besides adopting or strengthening existing policies meant to foster low-carbon transportation and development, cities can also enable regulatory experimentation efforts as a means of fostering new forms of innovation, including technologies developed in the service of improved sustainability. Lastly, local government bodies should be working closely with communities and grass roots organizations to reduce isolation and strengthen social connections as part of a broader goal of building neighbourhood-scale resilience.
Civil society organizations and philanthropic foundations, of course, can and should play a critical role in this coming transformation. Urban regions have long supported all sorts of charities and non-profits, from very local activist groups to social enterprises, service organizations and non-profit housing operators. Yet it’s clear there’s a need for civil society entities to also focus on `eco-system’ approaches and `horizon’ activities: promoting innovation in decision-making and governance, building urban coalitions, propagating ideas across local government, spurring the circular economy and underwriting tactical moves that facilitate desired shifts in investment or labour markets.[12]
These organizations can also spur debate about topics that challenge Canada’s constitutional arrangements and the foundations of neo-liberal economies, e.g., the nature of property ownership and the role of corporations in a period of climate crisis. As Shauna Sylvester, Executive Director of Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, puts it, civil society organizations should aspire to build “a vibrant and intellectually fed community that is looking to the future.”
At the same time, they must also be mindful of the lessons of curtailed philanthropic interventions, e.g., the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision earlier in 2019 to shutter its six-year-old “100 Resilient Cities” program and redirect funding to other, more measurable, investments.[13]
Philanthropic organizations, because they can take the long view, have an opportunity to focus on the overlaps between the formidable social and environmental challenges that are defining cities in this century. The most scalable solutions will flow from actions — regulatory, investment-oriented or grassroots — that recognize the fundamental interconnectedness of urban life. Indeed, the solutions to the crises of our era will be found in the spaces where environmental and social action not only intersect, but reinforce one another.
Wicked Problem One: Cities and the Climate Imperative
In May, 2019, the federal government announced that the City of Montreal had won the $50 million Smart City Challenge in the large urban centre category. Montreal’s proposal[14] focused on two central themes — mobility and food security — but also drew heavily on locally generated project proposals to fill out the details.
The animating philosophy behind the pitch, explains Stéphane Guidoin, director of Montreal’s Urban Innovation Lab, was to tap the energy and insights of local neighbourhoods instead of simply pursuing technology solutions proposed by municipal bureaucrats or vendors. “One of the key ideas,” says Guidoin, “is that people are the solutions to their own problems.”
Montreal’s smart city program, which will be implemented over the coming year, offers a compelling case study in how to link environmental, social justice/inclusion and neighbourhood-scale community engagement goals within the framework of municipal governance. It also demonstrates how technology should be seen as but one of a suite of tools, and one that should only enter the picture once a problem and a framework for addressing it have been established.
When the City embarked on its application, it began by inviting neighbourhoods to propose project ideas, which were then bundled according to core themes. With the food security proposals, Guidoin says his team quickly realized that many small grassroots groups were already working in this space, but often inefficiently. The reason? Individual organizations didn’t have ready access to key assets such as trucks, for distribution, or commercial-grade kitchens, for food prep. In response, the Montreal Smart City plan proposes an online asset sharing “platform” that will allow food security groups to quickly find and book the resources they require. (A business plan is also required.)
The second element of Montreal’s Smart City strategy is the development of a “mobility-as-a-service” (MaaS) platform, similar to systems that have begun to appear in other cities, such as Helsinki’s “Whim” app.[15] The idea is to create a single platform that links a range of transportation services — car and bike share service, transit, taxi and car-pooling. Residents register for a subscription-based account that allows them to seamlessly use all modes. In other cities, MaaS subscription packages are designed to favour low-carbon modes of travel. Guidoin adds that Montreal’s plan is to work with community groups to tailor its MaaS system to reflect the travel habits and assets of neighbourhoods — a strategy that seeks to rapidly scale buy-in by engaging local “champions” while providing Montrealers with the opportunity to drive the design of a new technology-based mobility platform.
In other words, this project has located the zone of overlaps between the two wicked problems facing cities: it aims to advance the case for a more integrated and consumer-friendly sustainable mobility solution, but does so in ways that bring local residents together to solve problems that face most city-dwellers. A win-win, surely.
Perhaps, but with a note of caution. Guidoin says Montreal’s innovation lab, which is managing the Smart City challenge fund, will actively monitor regulatory obstacles to the deployment of its projects and seek to engage other departments in problem-solving. One possible hurdle, based on the experience of Helsinki’s MaaS system: the municipal transit agency’s refusal to allow Whim subscribers to purchase monthly transit passes through the platform (they can only buy single tickets).[16] While Whim has 60,000 active monthly users, its growth so far has been limited by a municipal transit agency that’s not eager to cede market share to an innovation-driven competitor.
On one level, such stories have a familiar ring: local government bureaucracies will always protect their own turf. But in the light of the urgency of the climate adaptation imperative, the culture of municipal government — and its impact on both our built form and the social resiliency of urban neighbourhoods — represents a formidable impediment to innovation and timely change.
There are plenty of similar examples. Most cities don’t adequately price driving and parking — political choices that perpetuate vehicular congestion. As well, in many North American municipalities, more resources typically go towards maintaining the road/highway infrastructure than to the provision of affordable housing.[17] Such decisions bring social opportunity costs: when families have no choice but to finance personal vehicles, they have fewer resources to devote to other aspects of their lives, including basic needs, such as housing and education[18].
While land use and transportation planning in too many cities still favours low-density, energy-inefficient development, there’s some evidence from places like Vancouver that the status-quo is shifting due to a combination of factors (growing resistance to long commutes, falling prices for energy efficient building materials, the deployment of smart grid systems, progressive leadership, etc.). Yet in Canada and most of North America, such examples are the exception, not the norm.
In the Canadian context, there’s a lively but unresolved debate about the degree to which our constitutional structures contribute to municipal inaction. Many urbanists have long argued that, because the British North American Act of 1867 made municipalities wards of the provinces, capable of exercising only the responsibilities itemized in the legislation, our cities lack the jurisdictional heft to respond rapidly, or at the regional level, which is the appropriate scale of action for transforming large systems like mobility or energy distribution.
Others, including current and former municipal officials, take a somewhat different view. “There’s a tremendous amount cities could be doing,” observes former City of Toronto chief planner and mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat, who argues that the case for constitutional reform only becomes compelling politically if municipal governments were making maximum use of the powers they already have. She cites the example of bus rapid transit: there’s nothing structural to stop large Canadian municipalities from building the kinds of extensive BRT networks that exist in some Latin American cities. “We’re not doing that for political reasons.”[19]
Sadhu Johnston, Vancouver city manager, agrees. “Generally, we have the tools to move the dial. It’s a matter of whether there’s political will to do this kind of thing.” In his view, stable federal and provincial funding is critical because access to financial resources allows cities to make the necessary long-term capital investments in transit and affordable housing. But, he adds, the next level of change — measures such as congestion pricing, electric-vehicle-only zones, the deployment of charging stations in residential development — “will require heavy lifting. We need the public demanding it. The low-hanging fruit has been harvested.”
How do attitudes change? There’s little doubt that public concern about climate is beginning to translate into political action.[20] Meanwhile, out-of-control housing prices in large cities has widened the political constituency for affordable housing and land use planning reform, and has also raised pressing economic questions about how urban labour markets can survive if a growing proportion of the population can no longer cover basic living expenses.
Generally, bold political leadership also plays a role. Berlin, for example, is embarking on a long-term plan to re-invest in its transit system, reported to be worth €2 billion annually through 2035.[21] London’s cordon pricing, introduced by former mayor Ken Livingston in 2003, has survived successive administrations. It is estimated to have reduced vehicular traffic into the core by 30%. [22] Sadiq Khan, the current mayor, is reviewing the program with an eye to combining it with other low- and no-emission transportation options to form the core of London’s 2040 goal of having transit, cycling or walking account for 80% of trips. Despite its success, however, London’s model has been slow to spread to other cities.
While visionary mayors can make dramatic changes, we shouldn’t rely on the vagaries of urban politics to deliver the necessary shifts during the compressed timeframe of the accelerating climate crisis.
Political leadership can be augmented or even amplified if municipalities/regional governments engage in regulatory experimentation with the goal of enabling innovation and then providing the conditions in which successful approaches can scale up. But such efforts will require partners external to government.
Many municipalities have traditionally relied on pilot projects, which can be seen as the precursors to regulatory experimentation. Yet to move from one-offs to systemic change, local and regional governments must create the conditions that enable experimentation and innovation.
This approach isn’t new. One Canadian example: the Ontario government in the mid-2000s allowed municipalities to develop a fast-track environmental assessment (EAs) process for transit projects as a means of accelerating the regulatory approvals process.[23]
The innovation in this case derives from the insight that conventional EAs were originally mandated to steer large projects (e.g., forest harvesting) towards the least environmentally burdensome approach. As such, they involved extensive technical and public scrutiny. But with transit projects that will reduce emissions and congestion, advocates argued that there’s a compelling case for a more streamlined approach. Such assessments were initially used at the municipal level, but now extend to regional rail expansion projects.
Similarly, in New York City, former mayor Michael Bloomberg enabled commissioner of transportation Janette Sadik-Khan to rapidly re-configure a series of major Manhattan intersections. The goal: to simultaneously rationalize traffic flow while creating new pedestrian spaces on road allowances that were excessively broad, thereby re-allocating space once designated for cars to non-vehicular uses. The innovation: an unusually speedy process — no extended period of study and consultation — combined with the assumption that passersby will be interested in sitting at tables and chairs on blocked off segments of roadway, most famously Times Square. The gamble worked, and New York’s DOT has systematically transformed intersections across the city. This approach, it’s worth stressing, brings a climate dividend — rebalancing the use of the road network — while creating more communal, social zones in a dense urban environment starved for public space.
A third instance of regulatory innovation in the reconfiguration of road allowance involved the King Street Pilot Project in Toronto.[24] In that case, the City and the TTC proposed providing significant priority to streetcars on a busy core arterial. The city achieved this shift by restricting turns, eliminating street parking and enabling local businesses to build streetside patios in place of curbside parking — an approach that echoes what happened in Manhattan with Sadik-Khan’s work.
Anticipating complaints from retailers and restaurant owners about the decline in vehicular traffic, city officials worked with local businesses to track revenues through point-of-sale Moneris payment devices. The city also quantified other aspects of the project (e.g., transit passenger volumes, vehicle travel times, pedestrian volumes) and publicly reported these on a dashboard of indicators.[25]
The data subsequently demonstrated that the new street configuration had not negatively impacted economic activity. The regulatory innovation here involved both a potentially time-limited trial for a transit priority corridor, but also mechanisms designed to quantify the wider impact, not just on traffic flow. Based on these data, Toronto council not only had the confidence to make permanent the King Street pilot project; it had also created a compelling approvals template that can be scaled to other areas where surface transit vehicles will benefit from priority lanes.
A similar experiment is underway in Boston’s port area, involving trials with electric autonomous vehicles (AV), says Matthew Claudel, head of civic innovation at MIT’s DesignX program. Through a closely structured collaboration between the city, the state, MIT and several AV manufacturers, the project aims to test shared AVs. The proponents must hit a series of pre-determined benchmarks in order to win approval in 2020. They must also share data and consult the public. The project, he observes, “is a good example of a well-structured experiment.”
But Claudel adds that so-called “permissionless innovation” — i.e., projects or technologies, such as Uber or AirbNb, that act on urban systems yet do so from outside established regulatory frameworks — deliver not just disruptive results, but important insights. He cites the example of a series of recent pop-ups and place-making projects in Montreal that sought to disrupt the process of the commodification of public space. Many defied existing regulations governing the use of public space. Ironically, Claudel notes, the pop-ups were so successful that they accelerated, rather than halted, the commercialization of these spaces.
Attempts to innovate in the urban context, in fact, can be understood as the synthesis of four steps — design, diffusion, deliberation and regulation. The market excels at the first two, and government is better at the latter two, Claudel points out. Yet he resists the assumption — embraced by many critics of neo-liberalism — that only the state should be deciding what is acceptable or not in the public or urban realm. “It really comes down to the question of how civic value is arbitrated.”
Beyond the philosophical debate of whether the state should play an active or reactive/passive role in driving regulatory innovation, an even broader question is how to combine disparate or loosely connected experiments into a cohesive and directed framework. As mentioned above, UCL economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued for shifting national innovation/economic development discourses away from a sectoral/market-building orientation to an explicitly mission-driven outlook that targets complex public interest priorities such as climate, social inclusion and the U.N.’s SDGs. Missions can “galvanize production, distribution and consumption patterns,” she asserts. “It’s not about de-risking and leveling the playing field but tilting the playing field in the direction of the desired goals,” she writes.
Mazzucato rejects the critique about governments not being able to choose winners and points to the foundational role that public institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, NASA and DARPA have played in the development of giant global industries, from consumer electronics and telecommunications to pharmaceuticals and biomedicine. A more recent example: Germany’s “Energiwende”[26] plan to transform the country’s entire energy system to energy efficient renewables while abandoning fossil fuels by 2050.
Such mission-directed strategies involve not only top-down goal-setting (“moonshots”), but also a systemic outlook that includes: partnerships with the private sector, other orders of government and civil society; focused investment in R&D and commercialization; regulatory innovation and the identification of “bottlenecks”; and a tolerance for failure in the service of enhanced understanding of the nature of public policy. It also turns on an all-of-government approach. Climate change, Mazzucato observes, “cannot be fought by the energy sector alone. It will also require changes in transport and nutrition, as well as many other areas.”
The Canadian government could certainly choose to embrace and then pursue a mission-oriented approach to the climate crisis and social inequality in our cities. And, as Mazzucato advises, such strategies necessitate a multi-pronged approach. But what’s also clear is that if our decision-makers adopt this worldview with both national priorities, Canada’s reconciliation mandate — which must also be regarded as a mission — represents a critical opportunity to bind these goals while grounding them in Indigenous notions of sustainability and inclusion.
A recent example provides a compelling illustration of what’s possible. In Vancouver, the Squamish Nation has long owned a fallow, T-shaped property in Kitsilano, around the base of the Burrard Street Bridge (the land was once part of a Senkw village). The Nation recently unveiled plans to develop, with Westbank, a dense complex of eleven high-rise rental apartments, with the tallest reaching 56 storeys. The project will provide more affordable housing in a notoriously unaffordable city, generate economic activity and sustainable revenues for the Squamish, and add both density and green space in a low-rise neighbourhood. [27]
Interestingly, because the land is not subject to City of Vancouver zoning bylaws, the Squamish and Westbank were able to disregard one particular regulation — the mandatory provision of a minimum number of underground parking spaces. Such rules tend to put more cars on the street and drive up per-unit costs in condo apartments by as much as $100,000. However, the Squamish and Westbank understand that many people looking for housing in Vancouver now choose not to drive or own a car, and rely instead on transit or active transportation.
One could even view this project as an example of regulatory experimentation — in this case, what happens when developers have options that, if exercised, have the effect of creating more inclusive, lower-carbon communities. “Freed of old rules, the Squamish have come up with something new,” opined The Globe and Mail in an editorial. “In this era of society seeking to battle climate change, the rebuilding of Senakw for the next century is one answer.”[28]
Wicked Problem Two: Including Inclusion in 21st Century Cities
At the other end of Canada, Pamela Glode-Desrochers, executive director of the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre (MNFC), is attempting another sort of experiment in reducing social isolation. In need of a new building, the Friendship Centre has put forward ambitious plans to develop a modern structure on a piece of municipally-owned land near Citadel Hill, a site bound to the history of colonization. The Friendship Centre, which offers over three-dozen programs, is in the midst of talks with the Halifax Regional Municipality. “We recognize we have a unique opportunity to do something different,” she says, adding of the local Mi’kmaw population, “It’s a very hidden community. I want to pull it out and hold it up high.”
The architecture of the proposed 70,000 sq.-ft building, the renderings for which were made public last year,[29] will reflect Indigenous design principles — curved lines, natural or local materials, open spaces, and renewable energy sources. The federal and provincial governments will provide the bulk of the capital. Glode-Desrochers says the search for a new site has been underway for almost 20 years. But her conception of the project isn’t merely to replace an older building. She envisions the development as a means of breaking down social barriers between Halifax’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents by developing a space that is open to the wider public and not merely regarded as a hub for social services. “Convincing a national historic park to partner with an Indigenous organization will be huge,” she says. “We’re pushing the limit of how we can engage the community.”
While Globe-Desrochers’ vision of the new MNFC situates a new building as a vehicle for reconciliation and improved connections among urban communities, it can also be seen as a way of creating a new form of resilience in one particular city. In fact, many municipalities now talk about resilience, and even appoint chief resilience officers.[30] While the term may seem like a buzzword, it should be understood as shorthand for describing the type of community engagement that will become ever more important in a period of climate crisis and social upheaval.
Social cohesion (i.e., inclusion, equality, diversity) is strongly tied to other social goods, such as improved population health and also sustainable living.[31] In many cities, the best examples of post-war social cohesion were found in dense but low-rise working or middle-class areas, including enclaves dominated by one ethno-cultural group. In hindsight, we also know these places were physically sustainable communities because of their density, walkability and proximity to transit.
But those characteristics no longer hold true in many urban neighbourhoods, even as the need for resilience and social cohesion has grown. In cities besieged by extreme weather, social connections can be critical in times of emergency, and often mean the difference between life and death for isolated or vulnerable people.[32]
Yet resilience and engagement are also crucial in a period when large numbers of newcomers are settling in “arrival” neighbourhoods and require settlement services, housing and other supports.[33] Gentrification, by contrast, has served to segregate and sort urban communities along economic and racial lines. Costly housing has forced lower-income families to the periphery, where there is less transit and greater reliance on high-carbon infrastructure and private vehicles. Lastly, when downtown neighbourhoods are becoming, of necessity, denser and more vertical, with fewer common public spaces, the channels by which local residents come to know one another has changed profoundly. The upshot is that resilience has become both more necessary yet more difficult at the same time.
The challenge, therefore, is that local government, neighbourhoods, grassroots organizations and civil society actually need to create innovative ideas for new types of community engagement and social connection — approaches, it must be said, that extend well beyond the shouting and anonymity of social media. Inclusiveness increasingly represents a defining condition, says Julian Agyeman. “Who can belong in cities will determine what our cities become.”
One example: the Participatory City Foundation, a two-year-old charity based in the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham that operates the “Every One Every Day” initiative. Based in five formerly vacant storefronts in a diverse, low-income area that has seen abrupt population, demographic and labour market shifts in recent years, Participatory City’s aim has been to create a new sort of ecosystem for community involvement, with frequently isolated residents being enticed to take advantage of the spaces to test ideas, develop small businesses and forge connections with other neighbours.
Participatory City could be described as a new breed of community non-profit, and, at scale, a new form of social infrastructure geared at building resilience in urban communities that find themselves at risk of rapid change. It is not in the service delivery business, nor is it advocacy oriented. The project may assist in the creation of social enterprises and grass roots groups, but it is not, in and of itself, a social enterprise in the classic sense. Its funding comes from a range of sources, including local government and philanthropic organizations, linked, through a global advisory board, to international foundations, academics and other innovative community development organizations across Europe and the Americas. With a mandate to self-evaluate and draw on experiences from elsewhere, the Participatory City community development model could soon be replicated in other cities.
On the ground, the organization itself provides infrastructure and supports (workshops, business services, access to commercial kitchens and small-scale manufacturing, child care, etc.) at low or no cost. As the Foundation’s Year Two program evaluation notes,[34], Every One Every Day participants reported an improved sense of “individual agency” and outcomes such as a great sense of being welcomed and included, increased activity and sense of trust, and creative growth.
“People come in with their own ideas,” says chief executive Tessy Britton, noting that part of the objective is to provide existing residents with the economic heft and social networks they’ll need to survive the inevitable wave of gentrification heading towards that part of London. But, Britton adds, the venture is also seen as a five-year R&D project that could be scaled and replicated elsewhere based on the lessons the group learns about the dynamics of neighbourhood co-creation.
While these sorts of initiatives are fundamentally about inclusive community building and resilience, they also deliver a sustainability dividend. The residents of such neighbourhoods are more engaged in generating local economic activity, from owner-operated businesses to community-food initiatives. As discussed above, this project can be seen as a highly localized solution to both wicked problems.
* * *
While rapidly changing urban neighbourhoods represent both the locus of vulnerability as well as a stage for potential action and resilience, it’s not at all clear how change happens, especially given the challenges imposed by an accelerating climate crisis.
Governments are constrained by legacy rules and inadequate resources. Markets, by contrast, move swiftly and efficiently, but the seemingly inexorable logic of capital allocation has produced many of the wicked problems we now face. Organic, inclusive grassroots action occurs at an appealingly human scale, but is perhaps too haphazard to address the scale of the dilemmas we currently confront.
As with many important human endeavours throughout history, the space between these three poles has produced vitally important breakthroughs and innovations in the realms of science and technology, culture and social action. The broader philosophical question is how, if at all, should we stoke the engine of progressive innovation?
Coming next:
WHAT CAN FOUNDATIONS DO BETTER?
Future of Cities & Philanthropy series: Part 2
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[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/uber-lyft-traffic-congestion-ride-hailing-cities-drivers-vmt/595393/
[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/09/09/new-york-ready-next-superstorm/
[3] http://neighbourhoodchange.ca/
[4] https://www.corporateknights.com/channels/built-environment/powerhouse-produces-energy-needs-giving-back-community-15722857/
[5] http://rabble.ca/columnists/2019/04/community-land-trusts-model-community-led-land-stewardship
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/world/europe/biking-copenhagen.html
[8] https://nnsi.northwestern.edu/social-impact/wicked-problems-what-are-they-and-why-are-they-of-interest-to-nnsi-researchers/
[9] A September, 2019, report from the Social Progress Imperative found that the slow pace of progress in most of the world’s developing nations means the SDGs won’t be achieved until 2073. https://socialprogress.blog/2019/09/18/announcing-the-2019-social-progress-index/
[10] According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over 70 million people, an unprecedented number, were forcibly displaced as of 2018, and the rate of return for refugees is at an historic low. https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/
[11] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/research/mission-oriented-innovation-policy
[12] A good example: Bloomberg Philanthropies American Cities Climate Challenge funds a workplace development program in Los Angeles aimed at helping blue collar workers, especially from racialized or newcomer communities, acquire the technical skills that are increasingly in demand in the energy efficiency sector, which is expanding rapidly as developers, landlords and municipalities adopt green build https://data.bloomberglp.com/dotorg/sites/2/2019/10/American-Cities-Climate-Challenge-Climate-Action-Playbook.pdfing systems.
[13] Resilient Cities provided municipalities with grants to hire chief resilience officers and develop resilience strategies. In Canada, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver all participated. https://www.citylab.com/environment/2019/06/climate-change-resilience-cities-rockefeller-foundation/589861/
[14] https://laburbain.montreal.ca/en/smart-cities-challenge
[16] https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2018/10/helsinkis-maas-app-whim-is-it-really-mobilitys-great-hope/573841/
[17] For example, the City of Toronto’s 2018 capital budget allocation for transportation services, excluding transit, was five times more than the amount earmarked in the same fiscal year for shelter, support and housing. https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/9573-2019_Staff-Recommended_BudgetOverview.pdf
[18] A 2015 evaluation of locational costs by Pembina Institute revealed the additional cost-of-living outlays associated with suburban/exurban housing choices. https://www.pembina.org/reports/location-matters.pdf
[19] Interestingly, Toronto Transit Commission officials in December, 2019, announced a proposal to bus-only lanes on five busy arterials. The plan, which as of this writing has yet to pass city council, received Mayor John Tory’s backing. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/12/05/ttc-has-plan-to-make-service-on-busiest-routes-faster-more-reliable.html
[20] Over 70% of Canadians who cast votes in the 2019 federal election backed parties that support a national carbon tax. A March, 2019, Abacus Data poll showed that 57% of respondents were extremely or very concerned about climate change. https://abacusdata.ca/tag/carbon-tax/
[21] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/02/berlin-subway-bus-streetcar-transit-master-plan/583747/
[22] https://theconversation.com/london-congestion-charge-what-worked-what-didnt-what-next-92478
[23] https://www.metrolinxengage.com/en/content/transit-project-assessment-process-tpap
[24] https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/planning-development/planning-studies-initiatives/king-street-pilot/
[25] https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/8fb5-TS_King-Street-Annual-Dashboard_Final.pdf
[26] http://www.energiewende-global.com/en/
[27] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-squamish-nations-planned-development-on-reserve-land-in-vancouver/
[28] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-an-indigenous-developer-ignored-vancouvers-zoning-rules-and-all/
[29] https://www.thestar.com/halifax/2018/04/19/mikmaw-native-friendship-centre-invites-halifax-to-come-with-us-on-journey-to-create-new-space.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=star_web_ymbii
[30] A now discontinued Rockefeller Foundation program provided funding for the hiring of chief resilience officers.
[31] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4174898/
[32] During heat waves, such as the one that hit Chicago in 1995, elderly, isolated or physically vulnerable individuals are more likely to survive if they have connections of local organizations or concerned neighbours. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2015/05/11/112873/social-cohesion-the-secret-weapon-in-the-fight-for-equitable-climate-resilience/
