EngagingCities

A growing movement sees community foundations invest in local financial institutions and development projects, empowering entrepreneurship in the underserved communities that need it most.

There is a little extra green space for people to enjoy in the heart of the city this summer, thanks to a Downtown Winnipeg BIZ pop-up park pilot project.

In a culture that no longer teaches civility or citizenship, police have a greater burden than ever.

By Patrice Mitchell The Backstory   The King Street Transit Pilot rolled out in November 2017 to free streetcars from mixed traffic and prioritize the 72,000 daily transit riders along this ro…

I was recently invited to speak at the European Youth Event in Strasbourg, an event that sees almost 10,000 young people pour into the European Parliament for a whole weekend. I shared my thoughts on…

This post discusses the role that the private sector can and should play in ensuring open data reaches its fullest potential in the public arena.

Global philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network, in partnership with venture development firm Village Capital, hosted India's first-ever civic technology event - the Civic Tech Connect 2018- focused on bringing together investors and entrepreneurs to build India's civic tech ecosystem.

Ethan Zuckerman: “I am concerned that we’ve not had a robust conversation about what we want social media to do for us. We know what social media does for platform companies like Facebook and Twitter: it generates enormous masses of user-generated content that can be monetized with advertising, and reams of behavioral data that make …

Learn how dozens of smart cities applications can perform in different types of urban settings, including a snapshot of technology deployment in 50 cities around the world.

London has set out a vision to transform core services for the digital age. The city wants to reform its disparate governing bodies so they can share data better and collaborate more effectively on service design. The Smarter London Together roadmap, a plan to make the British capital the “world’s smartest city” published on 11 June, announces a common set of standards and design principle

Data Day event highlights organizations’ data-driven change efforts.

With a dramatic increase in the use of drones among public safety agencies, the varying use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) ranges widely across the country. From traffic and crowd control to whale rescue and pest control, state and local smart city planners are discovering the benefits of drone technology, while facing privacy and security challenges.

This week is National Gardening Week, and at first glance, you might think gardening has little to do with local government. There are initiatives like community gardens. However, that can serve an important culture and economic role for local governments. 

Chi Hack Night has become a national model for sustainable and successful volunteer civic technology projects.

This interview with Eric Gordon, Professor, Department of Visual and Media Arts, Emerson College; Founding Executive Director, Engagement Lab, is the fifteenth in the Center for Urban Innovation's Listening to Inclusive Innovators series.

Schools that traded history and government for more science and technology are rethinking the calculation, hoping to create a new generation of activists.

Two studies show where bike-share ridership in the U.S. might be headed.

Utilizing the IoT and edge computing can help governments prepare for and mitigate natural disasters.

In exclusive interviews, former directors tell how the world's first innovation lab ended

How do we shift our mindsets? How do we think about our urban historical past? Mayors, thought leaders, and practitioners weigh in.

Starbucks’s new policy brands the stores as a "third place." But the most effective third places come from the community.

Civic tech startups are sprouting up with increasing frequency. But what makes a quality civic tech startup? Connecting citizens and governments; improving public services; amplifying the public's voice; and increasing transparency and accountability, are all key.

This January, we kicked off City Bureau’s City Scrapers Project, an open-source coding community that collects, standardizes and shares information on local public meetings (i.e., City Council…

Technological literacy is key to turn a city into a smart city which is well connected, sustainable and resilient.

“It’s like actual people who have been oppressed or marginalized and really have no access to the dominant economy at all, are just like, ‘Ok then. We’re going to create our our autonomous economy and system of governance,’” she says. “Which is, I feel, how it should be … absolute direct democracy to the point of people making the decisions and implementing them directly.”