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.

       

The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work.

In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation.

This new locus of power—this new localism—is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern societies: economic competitiveness, social inclusion and opportunity; a renewed public life; the challenge of diversity; and the imperative of environmental sustainability. Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on.

New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction.

In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales.

Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision.

As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

       

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.

       

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.

       

In their new book “The New Localism: How cities can thrive in the age of populism,” urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Katz and Nowak tell stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision. As Katz and Nowak show us in “The New Localism,” “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

On Wednesday, December 6, Bruce Katz will discuss “The New Localism” during a special conversation with co-author Jeremy Nowak and New York Times columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winning author Tom Friedman.

After the session, Katz and Nowak will take questions from the audience, followed by a book signing. Books purchased at the event will be 20 percent off.

We hope you will join us either in person or through our live webcast. Online viewers may send in questions on Twitter using #NewLocalism.

       

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

       

Although problem solvers congregate at the city and metropolitan scale, few chronicle their big challenges and successes. Dan Doctoroff, currently CEO of Google’s Sidewalk Labs, is a notable exception. He came to Brookings last week to discuss his new book, Greater than ever: New York’s big comeback. Written ten years after leaving his position as Mike Bloomberg’s deputy mayor of economic development, the book is a riveting recollection of how New York City pushed forward in the aftermath of 9/11.

It is also a handbook for other leaders who embrace New Localism—the reality that power is shifting down to cities, and horizontally across the networks of public, private and civic leaders that naturally govern them. Doctoroff’s memoir emphasizes the importance of rethinking how we solve problems in our cities and, in the process, create new norms of urban growth, governance, and finance in a locally-led world.

Growth

“In order to be a progressive city, a city must be prosperous. In order to be a prosperous city, a city must grow.” Doctoroff opened by sharing his virtuous cycle of growth: a city must experience growth to be prosperous and a growing city indicates leaders are taking effective actions to leverage their community’s distinctive assets and advantages.

Doctoroff went on to say that leaders must ensure they are accommodating growth effectively, in New York City’s case that meant population growth and the need for more affordable housing. To set the platform for growth, the Bloomberg administration introduced a historic $3 billion commitment to building sixty-five thousand units of affordable housing across the city during their initial three months in office.

Doctoroff argues that the most important metric of a city’s health is population growth, stating that the cycle of growth continues when more people choose New York over other places to live. To support this growth, the Bloomberg administration invested directly in agencies responsible for quality of life. Over three terms in office, spending increased 54 percent from a $42 billion operating budget in 2003 to $70 billion in 2014. New investments in safety, education, health, transportation, housing, and more were made, improving the quality of life for all New Yorkers, while feeding the virtuous cycle of growth.

Governance

“Getting things done was three times harder for every state agency involved; 10 times harder for every federal agency involved; and infinitely harder if the [NY/NJ] Port Authority was involved.” During his talk, he used his failed effort to pass congestion pricing as an example of the lack of state support for the city. While popular among city residents and with the potential to fund critical infrastructure projects, an overly interventionist state legislature put an end to it. However, Doctoroff did note that his team made every effort to involve the community in its projects, specifically citing the rezoning process for the Highline as an example. What Doctoroff calls his “theorem of getting things done in government” shows the importance of cities using the powers that they have to get stuff done.

Doctoroff needed new tools to govern and tackle the many challenges he faced when he entered office, especially when it came to the development of land. To combat an acute housing problem, lack of land or property upon which to create affordable housing, and the city’s lack of funding, Doctoroff and his team embarked on the largest rezoning effort since the code was last updated in 1961. At that time there were 847,000 manufacturing jobs in the city. In 2002, the number of manufacturing jobs had fallen to about 140,000.

Ultimately, over twelve years the Bloomberg administration would propose 140 separate zoning actions, covering 40 percent of the city. This led to the creation of new tools to facilitate the acquisition and development of land. Examples include the reform of brownfield remediation laws; creation of a revolving credit facility to help small developers acquire property for affordable housing; and the use of inclusionary zoning.

Finance

“There is money for every city lying all over the place, you just have to go find it and be creative. We found it in the air, we found it in future taxes, we found it in the value of the sidewalks and in the value of the streets.” Bloomberg’s administration knew they wouldn’t succeed if they couldn’t find ways to finance major projects in the city—and help wasn’t coming from the state or feds. To advance the Highline on Manhattan’s West Side, they were able to create money out of thin air. By creating air rights for properties under the railway, up-zoning land along the future park, and formalizing a market to buy and sell the air rights between the respective owners, the city was able to bring all parties involved to the table without public dollars. The result has been massive redevelopment around a new public space that is now frequented by more than eight million people each year, winning numerous awards for environmental design.

Another example cited by Doctoroff is Hudson Yards, a large development project built above 28 acres of railyards and financed through the creation of the nation’s largest Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district. TIF allows cities to capture the increase in local property tax revenues from new development within a defined geographic area for a specific period of time without approval of the other taxing jurisdictions. It is a tool that cities, counties, economic development authorities (EDAs), port authorities, and housing and redevelopment agencies (HRAs) can use to spur private development.

We know that cities have public assets such as airports, parking lots, and convention centers at their disposal; it is just a matter of putting them to use and leveraging their earning potential to reinvest in the community and local needs. I have written that governments do not, for the most part, manage their public wealth well, failing to leverage the market potential and value of the assets they own. This builds on the work of Dag Detter and Stefan Folster in their book The Public Wealth of Cities where Dan Doctoroff recently wrote the foreword emphasizing that public wealth is valuable to us all. In the case of New York, Doctoroff shows how smart public finance decisions allowed the city to successfully leverage these assets.

Great conversation with @DanDoctoroff as he shared his theorem on spurring action in government: https://t.co/6u5ePOsk7F #NewLocalism pic.twitter.com/v8Suws5kR8

— Bruce Katz (@bruce_katz) November 3, 2017

       

Since the end of August, more than half a million Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority in Burma (Myanmar), have fled violence in that country and crossed the border into Bangladesh in what the United Nations is calling the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world today. Meanwhile, millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees displaced by civil war continue to be dispersed to towns and cities throughout the region and in Europe.

Against this backdrop, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi spoke last month during the General Assembly in New York to talk about a new approach for dealing with refugees, one in which those forced to flee their homes are integrated more permanently into urban areas rather than isolated in camps. “Inclusion is the name of the game,” Grandi said. Under this new model, “Cities are frontline players in dealing with refugees.”

It’s an important truth: Local authorities are critical to addressing the needs of the displaced.

Today, roughly 60 percent of the world’s 22 million refugees reside in cities rather than in camps, according to UNHCR. Internally displaced people also tend to make their way to urban areas.

In addition, many of the elements critical to an effective emergency response, as well as to long-term integration, are designed, delivered, and financed at the local level. Those elements include housing, healthcare, education, skills training, and social services of every sort.

This is important because displacement is not getting just more urban in nature—it’s increasingly prolonged.

During the early 1990s, the average length of displacement was nine years. Today, it is roughly twenty. At the end of last year, more than 11 million refugees—two-thirds of the global total—were in a protracted situation. Taken together, these shifts have caused a profound change in the protection needs of the displaced.

Sustainable interventions build on existing city systems and take into account the needs of the entire community, including host populations. Local authorities are uniquely positioned to contribute to that effort. For that reason, the humanitarian community should engage them in discussions on policy and operations.

Fortunately, Grandi also indicated in New York that the agency he heads is prepared to do so: “UNHCR is ready to step up its engagement with mayors around the world.”

That’s welcome news, especially since UNHCR has an opportunity to make good on that commitment through the process of drawing up a new global agreement on refugees, now underway. Launched a year ago, when world leaders convened the Summit for Refugees and Migrants, it will conclude at their annual meeting one year from now.

In the year that remains, more should be done to engage local leaders in the negotiation process. Here are a few ideas, which we submitted to UNHCR last week, together with the International Rescue Committee and 100 Resilient Cities—Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, for how that might happen.

First, cities need a seat at the table. In particular, local authorities should be given an opportunity to contribute to, and then provide feedback on the draft of the Global Compact on Refugees that UNHCR has committed to prepare by February 2018. This feedback process could take place alongside the process of formal consultations, which is set to take place between February and July of next year.

Second, UNHCR should incorporate towns and cities with sizeable refugee populations into the testing and development of its new approach. The Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) will be rolled out in eleven countries. In those settings, it appears that camp-based or rural refugee populations predominate. As a result, findings from the pilots may not be fully relevant to addressing today’s reality: a majority of refugees reside in towns and cities. That should change.

Third, UNHCR should encourage UN Member States to engage in meaningful collaboration with municipal authorities by facilitating the flow of technical expertise and resources to towns and cities, creating a formal consultation mechanism between city leaders and other decision-makers, and by disentangling financial flows to enable much needed resources to reach local practitioners.

Finally, the international humanitarian community should develop ways to source innovative approaches to refugee integration directly from cities. Capturing good practices, then sharing them widely, could speed the replication and scaling of proven solutions.

As the crisis in Syria lingers and another erupts in Burma and Bangladesh, implementing policies and practices that meet the needs of refugees is imperative. With a growing number of the displaced turning to cities for safety, municipal leaders need to participate in the relevant global discussions—including those taking place over the course of the next year. UNHCR has said it is willing to engage city authorities. We are committed to helping the agency to implement that vision.

       

Prior to accepting that role, he served as a deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding for the City of New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, leading the city’s post 9/11 economic resurgence. This included advancing the most ambitious land-use transformation in the city’s modern history; the largest affordable housing program ever launched by an American city; and the formation of new central business districts and industrial business zones.  Doctoroff also led the creation of PlaNYC, a 127-point plan with designs focused on making New York the first environmentally sustainable 21st century city and achieving a 30 percent reduction in global warming emissions by 2030.

On Tuesday, October 31, the Centennial Scholar Initiative hosted a book event featuring Doctoroff as he discussed his recently published book, “Greater Than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback.” This memoir documents his experience navigating exhaustive zoning laws, plans, and politics as he worked to re-imagine, reassess, and reinvent New York City in the years following September 11th.

After the session, Doctoroff took questions from the audience.

       

Barcelona is the latest European city to find itself at the epicenter of multiple political fervors and fevers: nationalism, secessionism, and populism. Unlike Brexit, Catalonia’s long standing efforts to gain independence from Spain has not been defined by one vote but by growing political hostilities between the national and provincial governments.

The latest moves by the central government to circumscribe regional autonomy and to remove Catalon’s separatist president from power represent an escalation of tensions which is certain to engender more political instability and market uncertainty.

As this story unfolds, it is important to differentiate the stakes of Barcelona from the broader region of Catalonia.