Top Down Democratic Decline vs. Bottom Up Civic Renewal: Eight Working Hypotheses

Books like The New Localism by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak offer examples of how cities are creating economic turnarounds by building partnerships between universities, local organizations, industries, and governments in a way that’s deeply optimistic and promising,

I discovered that there were people the world over asking questions, large and small, about how things could be otherwise in schools, in neighbourhoods, in our relationship to nature, in our approach to health care, in how we spend our time and attention, even using it as the basis for reimagining the economic and democratic realities of their citi

I outlined three enormous challenges for the Digital Age: rising inequality, massive environmental degradation, and the risks arising from major geopolitical change. These daunting challenges could overload our political institutions and provoke a devastating conflict. Such has been the pattern of the past. Surely the prime task of our age is to re

The aim of all of these was to shift the culture so that citizens felt a shared responsibility for their city, while expanding their sense of what might be possible after a long period of depressed fatalism.