Over the past two decades, a confluence of changing market demands and demographic preferences have led to a revaluation of urban places—and a corresponding shift in the geography of innovation. This trend has resulted in a clustering of firms, intermediaries, and workers—often near universities, medical centers, or other anchors—in dense innovation districts. Local economic development leaders are now exploring ways to support this evolution as a means of fostering job creation, economic opportunity, and revitalization in their communities.

In “Assessing your innovation district: A how to guide,” we provide guidance for how public, private, and institutional leaders stakeholders can undertake the first key step in that process: assessing their innovation ecosystem. Such an “audit” provides critical intelligence on an area’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, which can inform a unified vision, a clear set of goals, and customized strategies for reaching them.

Developed with our colleagues at Brookings, Project for Public Spaces, and Mass Economics, and road tested through on-the-ground work in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma City, the guide lays out a framework to help leaders identify an area or areas in their region with strong potential for innovative growth and development and/or evaluate an area already recognized as an emerging innovation district. The guide is centered around five big questions local “auditors” need to explore:

1) Where are your region’s highest concentrations of innovation assets?
Companies today need to be able to interact with researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs, as well as with other firms, to define new products and identify new markets. Density and proximity are paramount in facilitating this type of interaction. Local leaders therefore need to look across their urban landscape to determine what area or areas have a critical mass of well-connected innovation assets from which a district can grow and develop.

2) Is the district leveraging and aligning its distinctive advantages to grow and strengthen firms’ innovation capacity?
Successful innovation districts have the collective ability to translate ideas into new products and services that improve the quality of life in their city and region, and, potentially, have a positive impact on people and places across the globe. This can take many forms and originate from several types of institutions—from research hospitals to engineering schools to technology startups, among others. To assess a district’s innovation capacity, local leaders need to understand their innovation ecosystem’s inputs (e.g. research strengths), outputs (e.g. start up activity), and levels of connectivity among actors and assets.

3) Does the district have an inclusive, diverse, and opportunity-rich environment?
A healthy innovation district comprises a diversity of people and provides economic opportunity for workers with a range of skills and education levels. And many emerging districts are within or adjacent to areas of economic distress, offering the opportunity to meaningfully engage nearby residents in district growth. But this won’t happen by accident: Leaders must assess existing measures of diversity and inclusion and develop intentional strategies to ensure that all residents have a chance to benefit from, and are an integral part of, district development.

4) Does the district have physical and social assets that attract a diversity of firms and people, increase interactions, and accelerate innovation outcomes?
Dense, walkable, and highly connected areas help nurture the increasingly collaborative and open culture of innovation. These places include the kinds of spaces, in both the public and private realms, that bring a diversity of firms, institutions, and workers together in both formal and informal ways; that grow and strengthen social networks; and that offer the kind of vibrant environments where people want to spend time. In short, stakeholders should recognize (and thus evaluate) quality of place—connectivity, proximity, and the presence of dynamic, inclusive spaces—as central to a district’s economic proposition.

5) Does the district have the leadership necessary to succeed?
Regardless of their economic, physical, or human capital strengths, burgeoning innovation districts will not reach their full potential without capable leadership. District leaders can play a variety of roles in fostering a new culture of collaboration and collective impact, whether by serving as champions of a district vision, conveners that mobilize stakeholders to engage, or catalysts of action. While leadership structures will vary, districts can’t succeed unless leaders of key organizations—anchor research institutions, nonprofits, intermediaries, and/or private firms—make a shared, sustained commitment to drive change.

While the starting points for different districts will vary, knowing the right questions—and tailoring them to the local context and capacities—will help district leaders conduct an analysis most appropriate for their individual needs. Indeed, no two places will use this guide the same way, and we expect that the process itself will evolve over time to consider new measures, and be undertaken in novel and innovative ways by new groups of stakeholders working within districts and across them. As they do, communities will hopefully learn from each other in a virtuous feedback loop that gets sharper and more effective at every turn.

Download the full guide >>

      

“Assessing your innovation district: A how-to guide,” is a tool for public and private leaders to audit the assets that comprise their local innovation ecosystem. The guide is designed to reveal how to best target resources toward innovative and inclusive economic development tailored to an area’s unique strengths and challenges.

Over the past two decades, a confluence of changing market demands and demographic preferences have led to a revaluation of urban places—and a concomitant shift in the geography of the growing innovation economy. This evolution can be seen in the increased clustering—often around universities, medical centers, and other anchors—of firms, intermediaries, and innovative workers in dense urban districts or “hubs.” City—and increasingly suburban—stakeholders have taken notice; many are exploring ways to support this growth as a means of fostering job creation, economic opportunity, and revitalization in their communities.

The guide outlines a five-part integrated framework for conducting an innovation ecosystem asset audit. Developed through research and on-the-ground observations in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma City on the key elements that constitute a healthy innovation ecosystem, the framework is centered on a set of key questions:

1. Critical mass: Where are your region’s highest concentrations of innovation assets?

2. Innovation capacity: Is the district leveraging and aligning its distinctive advantages to grow and strengthen firms’ innovation capacity?

3. Diversity and inclusion: Does the district have an inclusive, diverse, and opportunity-rich environment?

4. Quality of place: Does the district have physical and social assets that attract a diversity of firms and people, increase interactions, and accelerate innovation outcomes?

5. Leadership: Does the district have the leadership necessary to succeed?

These framework elements are explored further in the guide. Separate sections describe the importance of each element to the creation of a healthy innovation ecosystem, suggesting the kinds of questions “auditors” will want to ask, and providing sample methods and data that can be used to answer them. The guide concludes with advice on the types of indicators that innovation district stakeholders might track to gauge their district’s success, along with suggestions for how additional measures might be utilized in the future to further fuel district growth and development.

      

Bill Finan, director of the Brookings Institution Press, discusses “The New Localism: How Cities can Thrive in the Age of Populism” with authors Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak. In their book and in the interview, Katz and Nowak explain why cities and the communities that surround them are best suited to address many of the economic, social, and environmental challenges facing the world today.

Also in this episode, Molly Reynolds explains what impact President Trump’s State of the Union address may have on his legislative agenda—specifically on immigration, infrastructure, and health care—in her regular “What’s Happening in Congress” segment.

Related content:

The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism

The Untapped Wealth of American Cities

Mayoral Powers in the Age of New Localism

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Thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo with assistance from Mark Hoelscher, and to producer Brennan Hoban. Additional support comes from Chris McKenna, Jessica Pavone, Eric Abalahin, Rebecca Viser, our intern Steven Lee, and from David Nassar.

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on Apple Podcasts, send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

The Brookings Cafeteria is a part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

      

This November, residents of more than 30 U.S. cities voted to elect their top leader. Whether four-term veterans like Cleveland’s Frank Jackson or first-time politicians like Helena’s Wilmot Collins, U.S. mayors are now more than ever on the front lines of major global and societal change. The world’s challenges are on their doorsteps—refugee integration, climate change adaptation, economic transition—yet the federal government has withdrawn and many state governments are actively opposing cities’ agendas. What do these new leaders need to do to succeed in a climate that is at worst hostile and at best indifferent to pressing urban priorities?

Mayors must first recognize that we are in the midst of a paradigmatic shift in urban governance and problem solving that is catching up to an established fact on the ground: Cities are networks of public, private, and civic institutions that power the economy and shape critical aspects of urban life. This “new localism” is pragmatic and solution-oriented, and by design includes exemplary leadership across sectors and segments of society. Yet mayors, as the top political and executive office in cities, have a special responsibility to set the vision and activate their networks to design, finance, and deliver everything from basic services to transformative infrastructure projects.

For such an important office, we know frustratingly little about the specific mechanics that make mayors effective. A new Brookings Institution report, “Leading Beyond Limits: Mayoral Powers in the Age of New Localism” examined the sources and uses of mayoral powers and the capacities they need to lead and govern. Though cities and governance contexts vary tremendously around the world, there are plenty of common challenges—fragmented governance environments, the need for increasingly technical skill sets to address complex problems—and some broader recommendations that could strengthen mayoral leadership in cities everywhere.

First, though they vary, mayors have to exercise the formal powers they do have—to plan, tax, and zone—to the fullest extent possible. For example, New York City’s High Line would not have been possible without the Bloomberg administration’s creative maneuver to rezone the area to assign air rights to existing property owners and create a new investment market that valued density and development. Recognizing and realizing this opportunity depended on highly sophisticated staff in the mayor’s office, and a willingness to experiment on a high-risk, high-reward project.

Second, mayors have to demonstrate extraordinary network leadership to expand their reach and impact beyond the limits of their formal powers. Successful mayors are able to articulate a clear vision and recruit a range of public and private sector partners to implement city improvement strategies. For example, though he did not have direct control over all the actors in the Louisville region’s education and workforce development sectors, Mayor Greg Fischer championed the goal of seamless education and training pathways for his residents and drew in a diverse array of supporters and backers of this vision. The resulting Cradle to Career initiative is a well-documented model of the coordinated approach to city problem-solving that is a hallmark of the new localism. Though each of the four strategies—kindergarten readiness, elementary and secondary education, college completion, and workforce-oriented skills training—is run by a different organization, Fischer and his team play key roles convening, coordinating, and holding the partners collectively accountable for results.

Third, mayors need to focus the full force of their formal powers and their networks toward identifying and maximizing the value of public assets. It will be impossible to meet the needs of residents today or prepare for the future without a significant increase in local resources. U.S. mayors may need to look outward for the best examples of institutional innovation in this arena, even as they develop their own models. For example, Copenhagen created a new publicly owned, privately managed corporation to capture and distribute the value of land from the redevelopment of its port and harbor. This vehicle helped insulate the process from politics and allowed Copenhagen to finance a massive investment in public transport infrastructure with the proceeds. The Swedish finance experts Dag Detter and Stefan Folster argue that the use of similar models, combined with a key move to develop city balance sheets that closely track the value of public assets, could yield billions of dollars to fund infrastructure, education, and other critical needs.

There is much more to know, and much more to do if we are to equip today’s city leaders for the challenges on their doorsteps. Mayors need help to build the capacities and connections to supporting institutions that can boost their ability to perform as successfully networked leaders. They need help identifying the financial instruments and organizational vehicles—such as publicly owned, privately managed corporations—that will help fund city projects when federal and state resources cannot be guaranteed. We all need a better store of knowledge about mayoral powers and city powers and the ways they are changing, including national data sources that track local government changes over time and measure quality and effectiveness of city governance.

Today’s mayors—veteran and novice alike—need to be able to lead beyond the limits of their formal powers, even as they organize themselves to advocate for powers matched to the scale of the challenges they face and the outsized contribution they make to state, national, and global economies. In this time of big governance shifts, cities in the United States and around the world need to learn quickly from examples of institutional adaptation and change.

      

Almost immediately after the Trump administration withdrew from the Global Compact on Migration earlier this month, American mayors responded by requesting their seat at the table.

Leaders of 18 U.S. cities, from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee to San Jose, joined a petition signed by more than 130 mayors from around the world. They asked co-facilitators Mexico and Switzerland to give cities a formal role in negotiations over the Compact, which will begin in February.

The Migration Compact is part of a U.N.-led effort to craft a more coordinated and humane approach for dealing with record levels of migration and displacement. Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, cited sovereignty concerns as justification for withdrawing.

This misses the point. The New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants, which laid out the framework for two Global Compacts in 2018, is a non-binding political declaration. The same is true for the Migration Compact itself. More than anything else, it is statement of principles.

Setting visa policy and determining the number of migrants and refugees a country will admit is clearly the sovereign right of its national government. However, it is local governments that are often responsible for managing the consequences of those decisions. That’s why it’s essential that cities have a meaningful opportunity to engage in migration governance discussions.

“Cities are at the heart of migration,” the mayors note in the petition, which was convened by a network of cities called Metropolis. “They are places of origin, transit and arrival, and are the main destination for migrants.”

The same is true for refugees. Local authorities bear significant responsibility for addressing the needs of newcomers, both refugees and migrants, as well as the communities that host them.

In a separate letter the same week, mayors of 16 major global cities asked the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for a greater voice in the second process laid out in the New York Declaration, the consultations over a 2018 Global Compact on Refugees.

Noting that around 60 percent of the world’s refugees live in urban areas, the mayors argued that the Refugee Compact should be informed by the experiences and innovations of municipalities, in order to “enhance its effectiveness as well as its legitimacy.”

Among the cities petitioning for a voice in both the Refugee and Migration Compacts is Providence, Rhode Island.

Providence is an incredibly diverse city made up of many unique neighborhoods, each with their own identity and culture. Rhode Island has one of the highest proportions of foreign-born people of any state in the U.S. at 13.5 percent. Between 150 and 200 new refugees are resettled in the state each year.

The city is taking steps to ensure that all residents feel supported and welcomed. In the past year, Providence has created a Newcomer Center in its school district to provide educational, social and emotional support to newly arrived students, including immigrants and refugees.

This past year, Providence funded a new municipal ID program, similar to those in other inclusive cities, so that residents have access to identification regardless of their immigration status. The city is also pursuing inclusive urban planning and programming, which is crucial to meeting the needs of the entire community.

It’s important that Providence continues to be a leader on these issues, so that refugees both here at home and throughout the country feel this support.

Beyond principles, the goal of the Global Compacts is to move toward solutions. It is an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and successes. By including local as well as international and national leaders in Compact discussions, we have the chance to learn what is and isn’t working on the ground. 

Giving mayors a seat at the table could help spread best practices far and wide. Many of the innovations taking place in our cities have not yet been well replicated or scaled. Yet cities are well positioned to build partnerships with the private sector, civil society organizations, including diaspora groups, and other municipalities, so that good ideas are implemented and shared.

U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley reportedly disagreed with the administration’s decision to withdraw, arguing that the U.S. would have a better chance at influencing the outcome of the negotiations if it participated in them. Given the current administration’s stance on migration and refugees, perhaps the silver lining is that now they won’t be able to do so.

With the abdication of U.S. leadership on the global stage, it’s now time for local American leaders to be heard.

      

When it comes to science policy, we should take President Trump at his word.

On Friday, the Trump administration prohibited officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from using seven words and phrases within 2018 budget documents: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based”. 

Public outrage flared up against the Orwellian-style censorship, but the depressing reality is that this is the logical next step in the president’s anti-science policy agenda. Trump wields the bully pulpit by way of provocations that serve as dog whistles to his anti-science base, while suggesting to the rest of us “this is just Twitter, not legislation.” The rhetorical tactic works. It’s strangely calming to write off Trump’s words as just midnight musing. The alternative—that he means everything he says and only a lack of political mandate has kept sweeping policy from enactment—is harder to swallow.

But words matter, especially when they telegraph policy changes. This isn’t even the first time Trump has banned language as a precursor to policy action: just three months prior to leaving the Paris Agreement, the Energy Department’s Office of International Climate and Clean Energy forbid the phrase “climate change.”

The CDC was formed in 1946 to address the malaria epidemic in the southern region of the United States. Today, it is the U.S. federal agency tasked with protecting public health through control and prevention of disease. The president’s interference is not only a clear-and-present danger to freedom of the scientific community to do their jobs, but also another signal of Trump’s interest in dismantling the nation’s scientific infrastructure.

Even with its limited ability to enact legislation, this administration has already proven to be the most anti-science executive branch in modern history. At almost every turn, Trump has chosen to sideline scientists, leave vacant scientific appointments, reduce or eliminate federal independent scientific boards, and appoint anti-science individuals to powerful positions. For example, the president has taken longer to appoint a science adviser than any other modern president. Every president since Eisenhower has appointed the power position to “offer scientific and technical advice on areas of national concern.” While the position is vacant, Trump’s EPA Administrator is an open climate denier.

It’s chilling to have a president that would ban the phrases “science-based” and “evidence-based”. But the implications for an administration that has yet to find its legislative stride is terrifying. If the president was able to push through his 2018 budget proposal, for example, it would have reduced federal funding for research and development by a mind-boggling $43 billion—one-third of the total the country invests each year. Such a move would reduce the nation’s investment, as a share of GDP, to roughly that of Egypt and Malaysia.

Trump’s inability thus far to enact his anti-science priorities has translated into haphazard executive actions that invoke temporary outrage. But if the scientific community, and its advocates, wait until the president has the political clout to actually pass legislation or meaningfully influence the federal budget, it will be too late.

For those that think evidence is the only basis for decision-making and science ought to be the final arbiter for agencies like the CDC, Trump’s silencing of these phrases speak volumes to his ultimate agenda, and should not be ignored. 

      

Across the world, cities are grappling with climate change. While half of the world’s population now lives in cities, more than 70 percent of carbon emissions originate in cities. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the UN’s 2016 Sustainable Development Goals, and the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany have all recognized that cities will need to be a key part of the world’s response to climate change.

While, in many cases, the solutions for cities are clear, the challenge lies in deploying them at scale across cities with radically different regimes of government and governance. Major interventions in the transport, buildings and energy sectors, in particular, will be necessary. Transport and buildings constitute the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions in cities and cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy, primarily through non-renewable sources. But many technologies for radically changing this reality—state-of-the-art mass transit, energy efficiency, distributed renewable energy—already exist.

Moving from identifying a solution to implementing it requires a better understanding of how cities are governed, not just in general but at the project scale. To that end, we selected three cities—Hamburg, Manchester and Pittsburgh—and analyzed a series of emblematic projects in transit, energy efficient building, and decentralized renewable energy. For each, we identified who designed, planned, financed, delivered and managed the project, across the public, private and civic sectors as well as different levels of government and geography.

We found that the delivery of similar projects differs markedly across the three selected cities. Hamburg’s, a German city-state with substantial fiscal powers, is able to plan for the long term as well as drive investment forward across the transport, energy and buildings sectors through a rich network of publicly-owned subsidiaries. In Manchester, the profound power exercised by the central government—and London as a premier global city—revealed substantial involvement of the private sector, specifically international firms. Finally, Pittsburgh shows the power of networks, where both strategic planning and project governance are steered by coalitions of public, private, and civic entities, with an outsize role for private philanthropy.

These differing leadership models result in distinct strategies for moving toward sustainability. Hamburg, like Copenhagen and other Northern European cities, benefits from a strong tax base and is creating a new model for leveraging public assets to finance the large-scale regeneration of urban districts. Manchester’s push for devolution to metropolitan governments in the UK promises more integrated solutions at the sector and regional scale. And Pittsburgh shows the potential of nimble, fast innovation since philanthropies and local organizations are inventing new models and spurring progress in the face of federal and state government drift.

Each model has its plusses and minuses. More local ownership and control of solutions may naturally create greater community benefits: more jobs for local workers and small businesses, greater tax capture by local jurisdictions, greater value capture for public re-investment. There are also efficiency effects from simplifying and routinizing the different elements of the project cycle and lowering transaction costs. Philanthropic projects are able to tolerate risk and experimentation more than public or private capital may allow.

With cities now a critical driver of global climate solutions, we need more practical lessons and solutions that can be applied in the United States, Europe and ultimately beyond to Africa, Asia and Latin America where urban growth is primarily occurring. Cities provide a natural experiment since they undertake the same projects with radically different stakeholders and approaches. This enables us to assess benefits and drawbacks, identify best practices that might be ripe for adaptation and replication and move closer to norms of behaviour and financing that can be easily routinized. The path to sustainable urbanization, in short, lies in granular application as much as grand policy.

      

Over the weekend, the Trump administration withdrew from the process of developing a new Global Compact on Migration, designed to lay out a strategy for addressing that subject. The objective was to reach agreement by the time world leaders meet at their annual gathering in New York next September. The United States had been involved in the process since it was launched, via the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, at the United Nations last year.

While the administration’s decision is a regrettable abdication of leadership, the good news is that American cities are stepping up to join with their global peers and chart a stronger course for refugee policy. This week, Amman, Athens, Chicago, New York City, Paris, and Los Angeles along with eleven other cities from around the world submitted a letter to the High Commissioner for Refugees calling for a greater voice in that process.

The letter cites ideas submitted to the UN Refugee Agency, which is heading up the Refugee Compact process, by Brookings fellow Jessica Brandt, together with the International Rescue Committee and 100 Resilient Cities – Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, in October of this year.

Those ideas include encouraging UNHCR to:

• Open up discussions on refugee policy and operations to municipalities from around the world that are receiving refugees.
• Ensure that the experiences of municipalities with substantial refugee populations inform the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework.
• Create mechanisms to source and share innovative approaches to refugee reception and integration directly from and with cities.
• Engage regularly with municipal authorities.

Here is a copy of the letter:

List of Signatories:

Yousef Shawarbeh, Amman, Jordan
Giorgos Kaminis, Athens, Greece
Kasim Reed, Atlanta, USA
Ada Colau Ballano, Barcelona, Spain
Marvin Rees, Bristol, United Kingdom
Rahm Emanuel, Chicago, USA
Muriel Bowser, District of Columbia, USA
Mike Rawlings, Dallas, USA
Ann-Sofie Hermansson, Gothenburg, Sweden
Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles, USA
Giuseppe Sala, Milan, Italy
Valérie Plante, Montreal, Canada
Bill de Blasio, New York City, USA
Anne Hidalgo, Paris, France
James Kenney, Philadelphia, USA
Jorge Elorza, Providence, USA
Immigrant Rights Commission, San Francisco, USA