Why you’ll be hearing a lot less about ‘smart cities’
Growing backlash against big technology companies, combined with the pandemic, has led to diminishing enthusiasm for a term that once dominated the conversation around the future of cities.
Government / Budgets
Budgets
Austin is funding homelessness services by defunding police
Faced with a homelessness crisis and a commitment to fund alternatives to policing, the city council voted to create new supportive housing that operates with money diverted from the police budget.
Is there a way to pandemic-proof public transportation funding?
Covid-19 exposed a number of flaws in the way most cities pay for mass transit. There are changes that transport agencies can make to be better prepared for a crisis.
US states need federal assistance regardless of which party they vote for
Republicans are renewing claims that federal aid to states will amount to red states bailing out blue ones. Covid-era budget data shows that's not the case.
A city leaders’ guide to Joe Biden’s policy agenda
From public transportation to affordable housing to infrastructure, the new US president has outlined a wide range of initiatives that will profoundly affect how cities recover from the pandemic – and beyond.
White Papers
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State and local aid will be contested under a Joe Biden presidency, too
As the president-elect's stimulus plans emerge, local leaders shouldn't get too excited for direct, flexible aid to bolster their flagging revenues.
How Paris’s participatory budget is reinvigorating democracy
Participatory budgeting allows residents to propose projects and vote on how they want to allocate a significant amount of municipal spending.
What the election of two senators from Georgia means for US cities
The results of Tuesday's run-off races have major implications for the fiscal future of local governments across the country.
Even with stimulus, US mass transit faces a death spiral
The fear is that service cuts today could reduce the constituency for public transportation later. In this looming disaster, the US is an outlier among the world’s wealthy nations.
China’s Gilded Age shows how corruption infects bureaucracies and economies
The professor and author Yuen Yuen Ang outlines four types of government corruption and the ways they can harm or assist economic growth.
Reality will temper Biden’s grand ambitions for passenger rail
Staggering construction costs, the prioritisation of job creation and Republican obstruction may clobber the aspirations of "Amtrak Joe".
How Los Angeles County voters secured a budget for prison alternatives
Proponents see Measure J as a means of achieving racial and economic justice through fiscal policy and hope the model can be replicated in other cities.
Cleveland is still suffering from the last recession. It can’t afford another.
Austerity feeds on the US's unique form of urban decline. To understand how, just look to Northeast Ohio.
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