Government Of, For and With the People: The Smartest Cities are Those that Listen to their Citizens

On February 22nd, the leaders in five cities in Africa — Accra (Ghana), Bahir Dar (Ethiopia), Kampala (Uganda), Kano (Nigeria), and Mutare (Zimbabwe) — announced the 12 winners to the Africa Multi-City Challenge. These cities with support of the United Nations Development Programme and The Governance Lab (our organization) turned to their collective citizens for help in tackling three big challenges: improving waste generation and management, building urban resilience in slums and informal settlements, and growing and supporting their informal economies. Those winners, selected from almost 300 detailed and practical proposals for solving these problems, such as the “Zero Bola Project,” which seeks to eliminate waste dumps in Kano over a span of five years, using engineered landfills designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50%.

Just a few months prior, five cities in northern Mexico (Hermosillo, Reynosa, San Nicolás, San Pedro, and Torreón) rolled out a similar challenge. More than 5,600 participants comprising citizens, students, NGOs, and other civil society organizations registered to participate, contributing a total of 237 proposals.

With the majority of the world’s population predicted to live in urban metropolises by 2050 according to the United Nations, the smartest cities are those who are using their most valuable resource for tackling urban challenges: their residents. Often it is their own civil servants and the residents of their community who can evaluate where problems are actually occurring and come up with the most effective solutions. Done right, citizen engagement helps to tap into that collective experience and expertise, and mobilize it to design and implement workable solutions.

Read the full article on The Governance Lab

Authors: Beth Simone Noveck, Dane Gambrell, and Sam DeJohn

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