The Problem with Mass-Produced ‘Urban Solutions’

There are lanyards on the necks of attendees, each bearing their names and their “spirit city.” There are booths hosted by founders of tech startups eager to share their “innovation showcases.” There are staff tweaking table settings and mood lighting for an exclusive banquet that will bring influential urban leaders together, akin to the World Economic Forum in Davos, hoping for the conference to play out like the “Davos of cities.”

What everyone’s chasing and sharing at these international gatherings: urban solutions.

This mandate seemed overly broad to Rachel Bok, who found herself in this world of conferences and workshops during her years as a graduate student in geography. The players at these conferences wanted to fix just about every urban problem, from housing affordability to climate change to loneliness.

They are hosted by deep-pocketed multinationals like Shell and philanthropic organizations like Bloomberg and Rockefeller, but also global groups like the United Nations and the World Bank. They’ve attracted financial institutions, consultancies, think tanks and corporations — tech giants in particular — each with their own visions of how cities should be shaped.

“I was curious where the atmospheric optimism was coming from,” said Bok. “Cities seem to be in worse shape than ever thanks to entrenched neoliberalism, inequality and austerity.”

Regardless, participants had strong faith in the potential of cities as centres of global change and places to be capitalized upon.

These ideas have also been boosted by the likes of pro-growth thinkers who have become celebrities for their books and ideas, such as Richard Florida and Edward Glaeser, who is both a Harvard professor and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

They also dovetail with reports from the United Nations. If you live in a big city, you will likely have heard your elected officials spout speaking points from those reports of how we live in an “urban age,” with more than half of the world’s population residing in urban centres.

Ironically, many of the people leading conversations in the world of urban solutions represent companies to consultancies, and aren’t involved in the day-to-day work of running a city. But according to attendees Bok spoke with, that’s a good thing. In their words, “Cities don’t know what their problems are.”

If your city is aspiring to be world class, your mayor and other civic officials will likely be at these global gatherings, looking to pick up ideas that have worked elsewhere.

But it’s a world without much scrutiny, noted Bok, even though taxpayers are sending their politicians into this global network to strike partnerships, attract investment and reimagine their futures.

For her PhD dissertation at the University of British Columbia, Bok decided to investigate the moneyed world of conferences and contracting that has sprung up around urban solutions — and whether they’re actually solving anything at all.

High-flying cities

At first, Bok was irritated when attending policy conferences and hearing people use the term “solutions” in vague ways. She soon realized that the people congregating in cities around the world to share so-called urban solutions comprised a crowd that deserved to be studied, especially when there’s so much at stake for citizens.

“I decided to look at what I call the industry of urban solutions,” she said. “In particular, ‘solutions’ being mass produced without much thought for what was happening in cities.”

Bok deeply embedded herself into the industry for a behind-the-scenes look at players setting agendas for cities.

She spent 17 months from 2018 to 2020 working full time for two organizations in London and Singapore that delivered urban solutions. Each was a mix of a think tank, a consultancy and an organizer of intercity events.

Bok graduated with her doctorate earlier this year. Her dissertation, titled “A Global Ethnography of the Urban Solutions Industry,” is currently embargoed as she adapts it for publication in scholarly journals.

The Tyee has read the work and spoken with Bok about her insider and scholarly eye on the international, intercity industry. There are a number of disorienting sections due to the incredibly vague, feel-good language employed by those in the business of solutions. Readers will share Bok’s frustration in her attempts to pry detailed answers from interviewees.

Her doctoral project was an ethnography, and this was disclosed to the colleagues that she worked alongside and spent time with after hours at yoga, indoor climbing and wine and tea tastings. They joked that she was like famed primatologist Jane Goodall, studying “corporate creatures” instead of chimps.

Being part of this world meant a lot of air travel. Bok attended 11 high-profile conferences, the largest of them being Bloomberg Philanthropies’ CityLab in Detroit, the World Cities Summit in Singapore and UN-Habitat’s Asia Pacific Urban Forum in Penang, Malaysia. Others took place in London, Munich, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

Some of the topics at those events in recent years include: how cities can benefit from “smart” infrastructure like internet-connected street lamps; how partnering and sharing data with tech firms can generate new solutions to urban problems; how decarbonizing can be economically beneficial; how public art makes cities safer; and how social housing residents can be paired with financial coaches.

Who benefits most from this industry? Bok finds that it’s the suppliers of the solutions rather than cities and citizens.

The interurban industry

There is no single global headquarters dedicated to urban solutions.

That has resulted in low-barrier entry for groups from banks and credit card companies like Mastercard to have a say in policy-making, Bok noted.

It’s the same with workers in this space. Some come from traditional professions like architecture and engineering, and others are from a diversity of backgrounds from tech, health psychology, church stewardship and theme park management.

“If you Google ‘urban solutions,’ you will see a whole hodgepodge of consultancies. You don’t know how credible they are. You just know that they are there,” she said. “With poverty and climate solutions, you do need specialized knowledge to get into those fields.”

On the stage at events, Bok noted that inspiration and showmanship seemed to take priority, with presenters and organizers shying away from appearing too academic, too technical or too grim.

“The emphasis is always on storytelling, big stories of big cities with inspiring stories to share,” said Bok. “What makes it inspiring, of course, is very much a value judgment. It privileges big cities and city mayors or leaders that are very good at marketing themselves, very well versed in the practice of storytelling.”

A journalist renowned for their work on sea-level rise, for example, was found to be “de-inspirational.” “You feel like you’re going to kill yourself after the talk!” Bok recalled of her colleagues’ reactions.

Absent from events were serious discussions of power relations or capitalism, she noted.

The urban solutions industry seems to prioritize “off the shelf” solutions that can be “repeated” from city to city, said Bok, despite the fact that scholarship says that policies will inevitably “mutate” whenever they are adapted for a new place.

For example, Singapore’s impressive public housing supply is often celebrated, but would be impossible to implement without authoritarian one-party state governance. Solutions can’t be widely shared without considering local context, cautioned Bok.

There is also a presumption that it’s unproblematic for the private sector to partner with cities on solutions. One example Bok highlighted was a Google initiative called Station, which would provide free Wi-Fi to developing cities in Asia. World Bank representatives facilitated meetings between Google and representatives of cities, but after less than a year of intense marketing, the project folded. It was also revealed that Google would need to piggyback off of public infrastructure in order to provide the free Wi-Fi, with the company admitting that it was “difficult... to scale and be sustainable, especially for our partners.”

There is also mention of the launch of the City Solutions Living Lab founded by Shell, the world’s second-largest gas and oil company, which aims to “originate opportunities with city stakeholders through co-visioning workshops that identify pathways towards a lower-carbon future” followed by innovating “a suite of solutions with commercially viable business models.”

But at the conference attached to the lab, Shell disinvited a climate scientist posing questions about climate breakdown and the harm of fossil fuels.

Consultancies like to think of themselves as “neutral conveners,” said Bok.

“But what do they mean by ‘neutral’ when they’re explicitly trying to link certain cities with corporations?”

‘Solution-y’ solutions?

The industry is populated by “creatives,” “innovators” and “heads of service design.” They’re striving for “empowerment” and “resilience” and looking to form partnerships that are always described as “strategic,” Bok notes in her work.

The word “solutions” seems to lack concrete meaning, and her dissertation saw her wading through other vocabulary like “hackathons,” “sprints,” “acceleration,” “nudges,” “thought leadership” and “change-making.”

One interviewee who uses the term “solutions” frequently in her speeches reacted almost defensively when Bok asked her exactly what it meant. The interviewee turned the question back onto Bok, before saying, “It can be anything under the sun, you know.”

Some of the vocabulary is bolstered by organizations hoping to take the lead and frame conversation around cities.

“In the early to mid-2010s, ‘sustainability’ was in vogue and it kind of still is,” said Bok. “But a few years later, the Rockefeller Foundation burst onto the scene with its 100 Resilient Cities initiative. Suddenly, the term ‘resilience’ was all that anyone could talk about.”

Rockefeller stresses the importance of “reflectiveness,” “resourcefulness,” “robustness,” “redundancy,” “flexibility,” “inclusiveness” and “integration” when it talks about cities, to help them “bounce back” from “shocks” (unpredictable events) and “stresses” (accumulating problems). It’s language that the foundation uses for other problems like climate change.

Vancouverites might remember that the Rockefeller Foundation funded a two-year position at the city for a “chief resilience officer” back in 2017.

Gregor Robertson, the mayor at the time, said the role was “about really ensuring that there are no gaps, that our lowest common denominator is raised up and we don’t suffer from weaknesses that are exposed under great stress.”

All of this is optimistic language that sounds good at a conference. Maybe too good.

“There was a normalization of what people in the industry referred to as ‘best practice’ without any sense of irony at all,” said Bok. “If everything’s a ‘best practice,’ then what’s actually the best? I think that is taken for granted by people who are part of this industry.”

The vagueness, she said, is intentional and strategic. If an idea appears to be common sense, who can disagree with it? After all, who wouldn’t want their city to be “smarter” or more “resilient”?

World-class aspirations

Big events in the urban solutions industry aren’t always open to locals, and Bok said it’s in the interest of citizens to pay attention to how their city is being represented.

“It’s shedding some light on what is actually happening when your mayor leaves town and [you’re] asking for some kind of accountability. What are they hoping to achieve? How does it benefit the city if they keep hanging out with Michael Bloomberg? It’s taxpayers’ money that is funding these junkets so they should know what’s going on, what their officials think are the big concerns and how they are articulating that to other people considered to be on their level. It translates to what happens in the built environment and the networks that their city is in.”

The industry is changing the role of a local mayor to be a more global individual.

“They have to have a certain persona,” said Bok. “They have to have a story. They have to be able to talk about their city in a way that is captivating to be taken seriously beyond the city itself. They have concerns apart from what is actually happening in their city. So they are attuned to this international stage.”

Vancouverites will remember the years of Gregor Robertson when the municipal government chased after numerous titles to become the “greenest city” in the world.

Robertson has since left local politics, taking on roles like the special envoy for cities with the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships that’s part of COP28. But Ken Sim, the current mayor, shares the drive of making Vancouver “world class” with a renewed sense of “swagger.”

“This is a classic stance of posturing to make it look as though the city is open to the world,” said Bok, referencing geographers like David Harvey and Harvey Molotch.

“It’s part of what attracts international capital. These are very traditional concerns in the literature: things like place branding, entrepreneurialism and the political economy of place — these things haven’t gone away.”

Ultimately, the urban solutions industry pushes cities to lean on private and philanthropic partners for change.

“Industry actors fundamentally believe they know more than cities do about the challenges they are facing,” said Bok. “It’s interesting, it’s perplexing and it deserves a lot more attention in the literature.”

Already, the industry has transformed what it means to be a big city in a big world.

“Some people say the worst thing about that being incorporated into capitalism is not being incorporated into it; I feel like almost every city has to play that game a little.”