Civitas Novus - Bringing Urban Innovation to Scale

Improving cities’ ability to be more innovative is essential for addressing the complex challenges that cities face in the rapidly changing world. Rapid urbanization, climate change and pandemics require paradigm shifts in the way cities are envisioned, lived, planned and managed. For twelve years, the Guangzhou Award for Urban Innovation, along with the works of partners such as the University of Pennsylvania, UCLG and Metropolis have demonstrated that most innovations happening in cities and regions are the result of a crisis or of an externally funded or mandated project. In many cases, once the crisis has been overcome or the project has been completed, there is a strong tendency to go back to “business as usual”. Cities are not engaging with innovation as an ecosystem of new, even paradigm-breaking competencies that will transform “business-as-usual” to become more resilient. As a result, the lessons learned, be it in the form of new working methods and new ways of allocating resources, are buried back into the existing bureaucracy and are difficult to mainstream and bring to scale.

The event will consist of a panel discussion with partners to share their experiences advocating for urban innovation around the world. The Penn Institute for Urban Research (PennIUR) and the Guangzhou Institute for Urban Innovation (GIUI) will discuss their open-source methodology to help cities explore their local urban innovation ecosystem holistically and collaboratively, based on the analysis of over 1,000 good and best practices in urban innovation. The methodology can be clustered into five main topics: Rethinking urban; Valuing innovation; Flow of ideas; Shifting paradigms; Implementing innovation.

Two experts from partner organizations UPenn and Lincoln Institute for Land Policy will discuss insights on their efforts to promote and engage cities in innovation, including lessons learned on making lasting structural changes to support innovation.

This event will include 5 minutes of opening remarks, followed by a 10-minute presentation of the methodology and a 25-minute panel discussion with partners and cities who are making significant innovation efforts in their cities. This will be followed by a 15-minute Q&A with the audience and a 5-minute closing. The entire panel will be gender balanced.