Encouraging Innovation and Creativity in City Hall
6 questions with urban expert Maurice Cox
We recently hosted a conversation with Maurice Cox, a celebrated architect and urban leader whose innovative work has brought together design, planning and politics in a career that spans multiple public, private and elected positions. Among other roles, Cox served as commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development under Mayor Lori Lightfoot and director of planning and development for the City of Detroit under Mayor Mike Duggan.
The conversation on encouraging creativity in city government was moderated by Alexa Bush, program officer with the Kresge Foundation’s Detroit Program and former Urban Design Director-East Region at the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell us about your career trajectory. How did your work as a professor lead to your career at city hall?
Maurice Cox: I learned early in my career as an architect and professor that networks are vitally important. I wanted to make change in my neighborhood, Ridge Street, a predominantly African American and low-income neighborhood in Charlottesville, Va. Moving from new homeowner to neighborhood organizer, I eventually became the president of my neighborhood association.
I wanted my community to have access to the same rich resources as other parts of the city, so I worked from the outside, trying to influence local policy by speaking truth to power — trying to get the city council to listen to me. But I quickly learned that working from the outside only gets you so far. I experienced everything from being dismissed when I gave public testimony at a city council meeting to encountering people who felt that the low-income neighborhoods I spoke for did not matter as much.
So I did an unlikely thing for a university professor. I ran for city council. I realized I needed to be in the decision-making role if I really wanted to make city hall responsive to neighborhood concerns. I became a city councilor and, eventually, the mayor of the city.
From the inside, I discovered that many government systems were not set up to be responsive to citizens who were thinking long-term or trying to be strategic. Government is set up to deliver services in siloes and for crisis management. So part of my work has been creating planning frameworks that are responsive to residents, driven by residents’ visions and capable of being implemented across multiple city departments.
That brings me forward to Detroit and Chicago. The first thing I was asked to do in Detroit was to create a planning department centered on the needs of residents who planned to stay in the city. Detroit was coming out of bankruptcy. The city had already gone through a long, deliberative process called Detroit Future City, and they understood they had to do things differently. It was an incredible moment of reinvention that allowed me to create a model for an interdisciplinary planning department that didn’t just have planners, but also architects, urban designers, preservationists and landscape architects.
Detroit had an enormous quantity of land, so we knew we had to acknowledge the landscape as a restorative resource for the city. For Reimagining the Civic Commons, we were working in a quarter-square-mile area of a neighborhood with hundreds of vacant lots and a hundred vacant homes. We developed a “homes and gardens strategy” that was both preservation-based and land-based. At the center of the strategy was a new central park created out of 27 vacant parcels.
In Chicago, it was a different task and a different challenge. Most people of color live on the South and West sides, historically disinvested areas that many developers do not think of as sources of economic regeneration despite having most of the city’s vacant developable land. So the question was: How do we break out of a development mindset that suggests only downtown is important? How do we show that all neighborhoods have the potential for economic regeneration?
To respond to this challenge, we developed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s signature economic development initiative, INVEST South/West, as a framework to catalyze reinvestment, and I created a new planning and design bureau that worked exclusively in neighborhoods. We redrew the map of the city, creating seven regions. Each region had an interdisciplinary planning team of about five people led by an architect, urban designer or landscape architect. Because the teams work exclusively in their region, they become a conduit for community ideas and the first point of contact for community organizations. Now community groups have a team inside of city hall working with them on their projects, from year one to year five and beyond. That was the restructuring necessary to deliver on the long-term promise of transformative, community-envisioned projects.
Q: You articulated a really strong, proactive point of view on city government, but often cities are more reactive and responsive. How did you create a more proactive role for local government?
MC: This is the struggle. How do you carve out more time to be proactive, to think longer term and keep the daily crises at bay? One effective approach is to not try and reinvent the wheel but instead use existing tools and bend them toward more equitable outcomes.
Government has a set of tools it uses to procure services, solicit proposals, and create civic spaces like parks or greenways. One example is the request for proposals. Often cities use this tool to solicit developers’ interest in redeveloping large, publicly owned areas. These projects usually involve very splashy proposals, consuming acres of land and requiring new infrastructure and a very long-haul commitment across multiple mayoral administrations.
When I came to Chicago, I thought, instead of development projects being multi-acre sites adjacent to downtown, could we use the RFP tool to help communities shape the development they want to see in their neighborhoods? Could development projects focus on a series of smaller parcels along neighborhood main streets? And, before we invite developers to show up, could we work with the community to define the development vision they want?
We flipped the RFP process on its head. Over three years, we released 18 of these RFPs, and developers showed up exactly as we asked them to. A majority of teams were led by developers of color, and the teams knew the areas they would be working in and understood the community’s vision. To date, this strategy has produced $400 million in incremental development along neighborhood commercial corridors in transit-served locations. Remember, this wasn’t some new-fangled tool we invented. It was a tool the government already had. It just hadn’t been used as a tool to create equitable development outcomes.
A neighborhood-driven partnership can more easily be forged with a neighborhood-focused planner. If your organization is working in a specific neighborhood geography, request that the city hire a planner to serve your area. It’s a very concrete ask that constituent groups can make of their local government.
Q: How can folks find or activate champions inside city hall? And how do you find partners that are interested in longer-term, strategic work?
MC: Your projects need champions across sectors, in communities and institutions. At some point your project will need the civic heft of government, and you want to invite government in as soon as possible. It doesn’t have to be the mayor. It could be one city councilor or department head who loves your idea.
Identify the folks who have to change their behavior for significant progress to be made on your project. Who are the specific people in the mayor’s office, the planning department, the redevelopment authority or the foundation community that you will need? Make a list, then start a proactive dialogue by introducing yourself and your project to them. This is how you’ll find your champion. By sharing your vision.
I think the partners interested in the long term are often people in planning departments or redevelopment arms who stay in place as administrations change. Planning by nature is a deliberative process, driven by a vision that will take a longer time to execute. The champion inside government is often someone who is sticking around.
New mayors are another great opportunity. They usually come in with a vision articulated in a transition document, and they’re interested in executing on that vision and expanding their base. They want folks within their orbit who can deliver real projects. So if you have a project, get an appointment with someone on the mayor’s team to explain the project and how you’re achieving it with a broad coalition of people. I think you’ll find your political leaders are open to people who bring them good ideas already in the works. They can adopt these ideas, take some ownership as well as some credit — and help you realize your vision.
Mayors are on a very short four-year timeline. They’ve got one political cycle to show progress on the promises they’ve made. If you can’t start with the mayor, work with a deputy mayor or a department head instead. Whatever they’re able to produce, I guarantee you the framework for it’s already out there.
In Detroit, coming out of bankruptcy, the mayor needed big, audacious ideas. The mayor certainly didn’t come up with the Joe Louis Greenway, which is a 27-mile loop knitting 20 neighborhoods together for the first time. A group of local environmentalists, conservationists and trailway enthusiasts had been advocating for years for the idea of a greenway made of fragments of abandoned rail lines. When some of my planning colleagues and I arrived in City Hall, we realized the potential of this greenway — it could become a vehicle to bring Detroit neighborhoods together in a new way.
The desire to expand the coalition to include more people drove us to reconsider the name. Advocates had been calling it the Inner Circle Greenway, but it only captured the public’s imagination when we changed its name to the Joe Louis Greenway, in honor of one of Detroit’s African American athletic heroes. Suddenly native Detroiters felt a sense of ownership, that this greenway could be reimagined to embody the very culture of Detroit. The naming of a project transforms who feels included and who feels a sense of belonging.
Q: Having been inside and outside of City Hall, how do you think about tailoring the introduction of a project to give yourself better odds? How do you frame it as something that solves a problem or think about it through the lens of the person you’re talking to?
MC: Thinking again about Detroit’s Joe Louis Greenway, many people think of greenways solely as recreational amenities for neighborhoods. Some people even tag them as vehicles for gentrification that increase property values. But greenways are also important tools for economic regeneration.
The Joe Louis Greenway follows a loop around Detroit and passes through industrial areas and blighted areas, including areas where 40% of the residents don’t own a car. That stat helped us to understand that the greenway would be a primary source of transportation and mobility for Detroiters without cars, not simply a recreational path. Clarifying this type of community benefit helped gain supporters in the community and among policymakers and funders.
It’s also important to consider what you can contribute to the vision. Being visible, present, and willing to help starts with making oneself available.
Designers have a powerful set of tools to help folks in the community envision what the future might be like. Coming out of COVID in Chicago, an informal group of designers calling themselves ARC (All Reimagining Chicago) reached out to me and said they wanted to help the city reimagine how neighborhoods might open up again. They lent their services pro bono to neighborhood non-profits along commercial corridors and, together, we co-created a program called POPCourts!, or public open plazas. A core idea behind POPCourts! was to envision and build the improvements to public space quickly, about six months from conception to implementation. We ended up funding ten of these projects using American Rescue Plan (ARPA) dollars.
The designers who initially approached me made themselves available as a labor of love to their city. Having proven the success of the first POPCourt!, the city was able to scale up the program, creating paid contracts that these designers could compete for, and which they won. It all started with them being ready and willing to help.
Finally, if you are operating in the public realm, you are operating within the realm of politics. Your project might be design-oriented, it might be community- or program-oriented, but if it’s happening in public, it’s happening in the political arena. That means you may experience political wins as well as setbacks on the long road toward realizing your vision. And that’s why you need partners, allies and coalitions outside of the narrow focus of the project.
Q: On each project, you’ve talked about centering residents proximate to the project and focusing on a particular geography instead of trying to do everything everywhere. How do you encourage cities to work in that way?
MC: I feel strongly that we must do more than ask communities to show up to meetings and give us their ideas. What’s in it for them? We must give them an equity stake in the process.
In Chicago, the Englewood Agro-Eco District, when completed, will be the largest neighborhood-based urban agriculture district and greenway in the country. The greenway stretches for about 1.7 miles and sits on a natural berm. Residents have been walking on it for years, and recently a local group of growers called Grow Greater Englewood started farming adjacent to the greenway — and they realized it could be a center of jobs and economic activity.
This community-driven project became a true partnership when the city worked out an arrangement to share power with the community. The Planning Department is currently working through the questions of zoning and land use that only we can untangle because, presently, agricultural land uses are not even allowed. The City is also the only entity that can access federal funding to design and construct the greenway.
Given those restraints, how could the City share its power? Instead of bringing in the professional landscape architects and reinforcing an impression that the project was being taken away from the community, we worked out an arrangement whereby the network of community organizations that had nurtured the project for years became consultants to the technical consultant team, with responsibilities including community engagement and visioning. To manage these processes, the community organizations received $250,000 of a $700,000 commission. This represented an unprecedented sharing of the financial and decision-making power with the community.
That same group, Grow Greater Englewood, is now the recipient of $3.8 million from the Bezos Earth Fund. Because they had a significant role in managing that process and were able to build their capacity, a national foundation also invested in them. Now those same community organizations feel empowered to envision other forms of ownership such as community land trusts. They will eventually own significant acreage of job-producing enterprises adjacent to this greenway.
Centering on residents proximate to a project also means focusing on a walkable geography. If you can’t walk to the investment or see it in relationship to the next investment, your strategy might be too diffused. People walk in their neighborhoods, so that’s the appropriate framework for a catalytic investment.
With POPCourts!, one of the first plazas in our open plaza series was in the neighborhood of Austin, on the far West Side. It had been a corner vacant lot. But working together, the Westside Health Authority, a local nonprofit group and Lamar Johnson Collaborative, a group of architects and landscape architects, transformed the space with street paint, murals, Astroturf and a basketball hoop. The same nonprofit partner that owned the vacant commercial building the mural was painted on partnered with the design team and received a City grant to create a community hub and cafe. Another entrepreneur opened another shop across from the plaza. And a block away, within sight of this initial investment, an ambitious adaptive reuse of an Art Deco bank and new housing project is underway — a $40 million investment.
All of this is happening within a walkable distance from that initial $250,000 investment in a corner vacant lot turned public plaza. The POPCourt! has created a multiplier effect and has mobilized millions of dollars of investment nearby.
This example has encouraged us to look for opportunities adjacent to other POPCourts!, to see what other economic benefits can result when collocating investment. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get out of the car and walk the geography around your initial investment. We call these micro districts. We used them extensively in Detroit and Chicago, and they work. You should use them as well.
Q: How do you make sure new or redesigned public spaces are accessible and welcoming to a diverse range of community members, including nearby residents?
MC: I love the act of walking — not just creating a place but being mindful of how people walk to that place. The Detroit Riverfront just opened one of its last stretches. It now has over 3.5 miles of continuous walking and biking trails along the Detroit River. But I remember when a lot of people who lived just north of this riverfront had to cross a nine-lane highway to get there.
Some residents live in owner-occupied townhomes, while others live in subsidized rental housing. They all had to walk through trash- and glass-littered parking lots to get to this world-class riverfront only a quarter mile from their homes. When we realized that these residents, including many who were engaged in the riverfront community process, couldn’t access the riverfront, the City prioritized the points of access, first.
The fix was to immediately reduce the roadway to just five lanes and install protected bike lanes with on-street parking. It was a radical change, but we convinced the traffic engineers and the mayor to let us do it as a temporary tactical experiment. The changes to the roadway stayed in place, and now the strategy of putting Detroit’s roads on a diet has been repeated multiple times in every neighborhood framework across the city. Meanwhile, greenways have been created such as the Dennis W. Archer Greenway on the east side and the Southwest Greenway on the west side. All of these are off-site improvements that connect neighborhoods to the asset. So that now nearby residents can walk from their homes to the riverfront.
These types of improvements speak to the benefits of widening our lens a little beyond our project boundaries. We should always think about adjacencies. We should always think about who has access.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
