Ideas for Cities: Citizen Branding
Citizen Branding Cities could be responsible for helping citizens understand and communicate their own story and talent effectively. They could provide services that function as a cross between talent agency and media agency. Every citizen would receive this service to help recognize, package, celebrate, and accelerate his or... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Opportunity Match-making
Opportunity Match-making Cities could host a technology platform and monthly meeting to enable people with ideas to share and get feedback from the community. Members of the community could voice their opinions and the city would seek to make connections between citizen entrepreneurs, neighborhoods, and investors. The city... Categories: Cities, Technology
Ideas for Cities: Incubation Infrastructure
Incubation Infrastructure Cities could partner with property owners and incentivize them to ensure clean and safe homes, streets, and workspaces with logical standards for an entrepreneurial community at reasonable, all-inclusive market rates. Homes and workspaces would be outfitted with wifi, telephones, and a computers—the... Categories: Cities
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Ideas for Cities: Edible Schoolyard
Edible Schoolyard Cities should provide service opportunities and training for all ages to instill confidence, self-reliance, and pride. One of these programs could be an Edible Schoolyard that is cared for by students and led by professional farmers and volunteers. It would provide 100 percent of the school meals to the...Ideas for Cities: Lending Circles
Lending Circles Cities could provides a platform for connecting people with ideas and ambition to city business angels, venture capitalists, community micro-finance organizations, and self-forming lending circles. The lending circles could support each other as they take turns helping to get one of their cohorts to achieve...Ideas for Cities: Can-do Culture
Can-do Culture Cities must nurture the capitalistic, materialistic, ambitious, passionate, honest, authentic, and practical people that are its citizens. The city should become an interconnected series of creative petri dishes, inspiring individuals to invest in themselves and the community through a variety of endeavors that... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Always-on Service
Always-on Service Cities could provide a call center to answer any question of concern at any time, similar to New York City's 311 service. The service could also makes house calls for appropriate citizen concerns beyond 911, fire, ambulance, and police responses, such as technology support and crisis management. This is... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Google Analytics for Government
Google Analytics for Government Cities could make the success of governance measurable and known. Rather than waiting for the next election to recognize and promote results (or lack thereof), cities could do it transparently. City stats, charts, and powerful infographics would provide a call-to-action for citizens. This is... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Ped Shed over Drive Shed
Ped Shed over Drive Shed Cities could close and re-purpose or retrofit parking garages to create incentives for walking or riding bikes, mixed with unique spaces for work, play, art, learning, farming, and other sustainable, entertaining, and productive experiences. This is part 19 of a continuing brainstorm on the future... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Citizen Recruiters
Citizen Recruiters Every single citizen should be engaged in the city, valued, and respected. Citizen Recruiters are analogous to military recruiters who go out and get people “in the game.” They would issue a personal invitation to be involved, and help the recruits navigate the system to find the right opportunities to... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Prosper.org
Prosper.org The Ingenuity Ringmaster (blessed and supported by the city) would commit to a problem worth solving, and citizen innovators would submit ideas, and then the city would create a portfolio of projects with design criteria and guidance. Leveraging a micro-financing engine, citizens could vote with their dollars to... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Ingenuity Ringmaster
Ingenuity Ringmaster This official would set the tone for inhabitants through open leadership and a malleable infrastructure, encouraging opportunities for risk-taking, seeding innovation, suggesting process and projects, and rewarding innovators by supporting imagination and invention. This is the coach that blows burning... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Free-agent Portfolio
Free-agent Portfolio Every citizen should be an entrepreneur and a free-agent. From the time you graduate junior high school, citizens would collect learning credits and acquired skills in a portfolio for every kind of demonstrable learning—from engineering and skateboarding to car sales negotiation and waitress skills. All... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Talent Districts
Talent Districts Cities could convert some neighborhoods into learning districts for personal, professional, and entrepreneurial development. They could provide a curriculum for development supported by the infrastructure (buildings, technology, services, mentoring, and community) within the district, and further provide... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Decentralized Design Hubs and Work Centers
Decentralized Design Hubs and Work Centers Neighborhoods could function as local “offices” by creating workplaces for citizens. Employers would therefore support and encourage employees to work in these hubs rather than driving or commuting to an employer-owned workspace. The employer instead “subscribes” to the pool of design... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Pedicab Infrastructure
Pedicab infrastructure Some streets could be zoned for pedicabs (and bicycles) only. Themed pedicabs would make alternate transportation more fun, and would make this method of commuting a “destination” instead of simply a mode. It would also provide healthy work for the employees. Pedicab themes could be anything from music,... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Wide-walks
Wide-walks Cities should narrow streets to make room for wider sidewalks, which would provide spill-out space for businesses and restaurants; green space for landscaping, urban farming, and picnicking; jogging and bike paths; and noise reduction through elimination of “noise canyons.” Cities could also create a walking rewards... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Street Activity Stimulation
Street Activity Stimulation Cities could mandate street-level space that was open to the public. Every building would dedicate their ground floors to retail or activities that invite citizens in, which would avoid activity vacuums along city streets. This would foster greater opportunity for small businesses through greater... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Learning Jobs
Learning Jobs Cities could enable job descriptions to grow or expand to convert low-wage, low-value work into high-wage, high value work. For example, a “garbage collector” could become a “waste management consultant”—beyond the menial work typically associated with the job description, they would learn to be street-scapers,... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Google Analytics for Learning
Google Analytics for Learning Cities should measure the impact of learning more closely, because education reduces unemployment and poverty and creates a greater culture of ingenuity—producing jobs and individual entrepreneurs. The city and its citizens should use better analytics to make it clear why investments... Categories: Cities
Tags: Education, Technology
Ideas for Cities: Served to Serving
Served to Serving Cities should enable people who traditionally need social services to provide other services. By understanding the needs of a community and matching needs with capable talent, cities could provide an opportunity for productivity, pride, and dignity through service, and solve many challenges in the... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Mentor Matchmaker
Mentor Matchmaker A matchmaking algorithm and profiling system could connect people as cohorts in learning, as well as with mentors, tutors, curriculum options, and learning and career/apprenticeship opportunities. Almost anyone can be a mentor. A 3rd grader can mentor a 1st grader, a 20-year-old can mentor an 80-year-old.... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: In-field Accreditation
In-field accreditation Old models of established university accreditation do not represent a city's values for decentralized learning. Cities would establish new and frequent feedback loops for evaluation to allow every citizen student to track progress and achieve recognizable, meaningful credentials. These credentials would... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Tech Missions
Tech Missions Technology evangelists and coaches could function as a mobile “genius bar,” going out to every neighborhood via exploration buses and provided technologically enabled training and support 24/7. This is an active campaign (or "mission") to achieve the highest technology aptitude in the world.... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Talent Recruiters
Talent Recruiters As a reminder to citizens, cities would staff a team of talent developers who invite "people at risk" to adopt a learning program and work with them to design a curriculum and apprenticeship program. Learning would be accessible, ample, and affordable; these recruiters get people to join in. This is... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Learning Rewards
Learning Rewards Employers who donate products and services that could be used as rewards for citizens engaged in a city learning environment—or those who provide apprenticeships, career discovery opportunities, training, or time for employees to study—enjoy improved tax rates and a better relationship with the city.... Categories: Cities
Ideas for Cities: Pop-up Education
A month ago a diverse collection of professionals—from graphic designers to mayors—gathered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to discuss the future of cities. Under the banner of Velocity, a conference organized by CEOs for Cities, the group spent the better part of three days trying to figure out what makes cities great, and how... Categories: Cities
