Introduction
The 21st century belongs to cities. For the first time in human history, more than half of humans live in cities: by 2050, 70% of people will be urbanites. People who live in cities have higher incomes, better health outcomes, and more social opportunities.
In the face of unprecedented growth, cities today face an array of challenges. Long-term stresses like changing economic models and aging infrastructure, as well as short-term shocks like intensifying natural disasters and terrorism, pose ongoing risks for cities. Despite the urgency, many cities lack the resources they need to serve their exploding populations. In many cities around the world, infrastructure and social fabrics are at their breaking points.
Because of the unique challenges of working with cities, the tech industry has so far done little to step into the gap. Silicon Valley, despite a stated desire to solve the world’s thorniest problems, has largely avoided urban resilience challenges. While political coverage tends to focus on national governments, today the biggest change agents are at the city level. With trillions of dollars to spend globally, cities represent an untapped revenue source. Cities’ unique lens of place gives them a particularly strong understanding of how technology can solve otherwise thorny issues in ways that higher-level national governments cannot.
Whether or not cities are ready, technology is rapidly reshaping the urban environment. From smartphones to dockless scooters, citizens lived experiences in cities are changing quickly: in the next decade, big data, AI, autonomous vehicles, and other technologies have the potential to further remake citizens’ relationships with the cities in which they live. Yet most cities, large and small, lack vision for how technology could help them rethink their thorniest problems. To best serve their citizens, cities today must learn how to incorporate technological change into their own strategies for meeting societal goals.
You don’t choose to be a mayor to be elected or re-elected. You choose to be a mayor because you finally get to play the video game. It’s a very different office. It’s not like a governor or a president tries to turn an aircraft carrier in a swimming pool. You can actually get things done, and there’s more of an interest in having successes than in losing an election.
— 2018 City participant
The disconnect between cities and tech has created a paradox: as people have begun to expect more from their gadgets, they expect less from their governments. Technology has impacted almost every aspect of modern life, in almost every city on earth. The disconnect is palpable: high speed cellular networks are omnipresent, even in countries that have difficulty providing clean water to their citizens. Cars may soon drive themselves, while many public transportation systems are slower than they were fifty years ago. Part of the issue is that startups haven’t found an effective engagement model for partnering with cities. Startups are necessarily single-minded, focusing directly on building a minimum viable product that solves a problem. This model often convinces startups to work around slow-moving governments, or any other structures that get in their way. Most famously, many startups in the shared transportation industry have taken a “ask for forgiveness, not for permission” approach, ignoring inconvenient government and regulation. They aim to build citizen acceptance quickly, believing that once a technology catches on with voters, cities won’t dare to ban it.
Embedded in this approach are the startups’ assumptions that cities are unable to partner with or even understand new technologies, and that they usually prefer to protect incumbent industries rather than finding new ways to serve citizens. While this assumption is understandable, the Minimum Viable Product model allows issues to fester, leading to inevitable backlash: witness cities’ recent efforts to reduce the number of rideshare vehicles on the street, years after the industry’s widespread acceptance.
Many startups think that regulations are either outdated and did not contemplate the technologies they’re trying to introduce, or the regulations are heavily influenced by competitors and are intended to stifle competition and new players in the market. They also have had negative experiences navigating often unwieldy government bureaucracy.
— 2017 VC participant
[As a mayor, I worry that partnering with startups] is a big expense that will cost a whole lot of money, get you bad press, and get you beat at the election.
— 2017 City participant
It is possible for governments and the technology industry to work together: the U.S. Federal government, for example, played a foundational role in the creation of Silicon Valley. But in order to partner, cities and startups need new models for collaboration, and new success stories to look to and emulate. that’s why The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) in partnership with 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) launched CityXChange, a unique global program dedicated to helping cities better partner with the tech community to improve urban resilience. RF and 100RC envision CityXChange as developing a “third way” for civic innovation, creating pathways for innovators and cities to partner and achieve mutual objectives.
There is no algorithm for governing
– 2018 Tech participant
We present the CityXChange playbook as 100 Resilient Cities’ ever-growing collection of strategies and tactics that cities can use to overcome the significant barriers they face to partnership. We hope the lessons and insights found here will be relevant and valuable for cities and innovators interested in building productive partnerships across sectors and help to catalyze the next generation of resilience technologies.
The CityXChange Summit
The 2017 and 2018 CityXChange Summits have convened collectively participants from over a dozen countries, and including startup founders, leaders from twenty global cities, investors and other thought-leaders. Through a combination of plenary panel discussions, tech demos and breakout working groups, participants have worked to generate a deeper understanding of the core barriers to city/tech collaborations, while creating new structures to overcome those barriers and forge new partnerships.
The core of the CityXChange program is the CityXChange working group, which gives participating cities the opportunity to work closely with tech industry participants to address the real, specific challenges they face. During the working groups, participants took part in a structured conversation, designed to help cities diagnose a specific resilience challenge they face, brainstorm specific solutions to core resilience challenges, and then identify pathways to implementing those solutions. In 2017, the working groups focused on developing new communications and partnership pathways for cities and startups around a broad range of challenges cities face. The 2018 working groups built on 2017’s success by matching cities with startups and thought leaders with expertise relevant to the cities’ most pressing resilience challenges, thus building a foundation for specific actions and partnerships.
The CityXChange Methodology
- Defining the Problem: CityXChange working groups begin with each city presenting on a specific, pressing resilience challenge. groups then worked to understand the deeper causes, impacts, and interdependences of those challenges. this helped each working group create a new understanding and definition of each problem, and the value.
- Problem to Pitch: Cities work to develop a startup-style pitch to explain to the tech community how much economic and social value they can unlock by partnering to resolve resilience issues. this process helps cities to frame their problems using the language of the startup community.
- Pitch to Solution: Participants explore the economic opportunities in depth to identify which resilience challenges have technology solutions, then develop technology-driven collaborations for the problems identified in their pitches.
- Solution to Opportunity: Cities and tech leaders work together to anticipate barriers to potential collaboration, while identifying sustainable models for solving the cities’ resilience challenges.
