The City learns and innovates 10 /10

The City We Need is a “laboratory” for experimenting with alternative scenarios for the future. It creates collaborative learning and discovery opportunities to revisit and redefine urban paradigms and social contracts for sustainable futures.

The City We Need recognizes that cities are changing, which calls for continuous learning and reflection and more flexible planning and decision making. This includes new and innovative approaches to social, economic and environmental governance. It also calls for new and innovative approaches to municipal administration and fiscal and financial management.

The City We Need is not afraid to open itself to new ideas, experiments and innovations, engaging all stakeholder groups and working in close collaboration with other cities and communities.

The City We Need harnesses the full potential of technologies to improve efficiency and effectiveness in its operations and to reduce its carbon footprint. These technologies introduce new channels of communication, new forms of work and new business models and enterprises. They multiply the means by which all inhabitants can participate in and interact with planning, decisionmaking and project implementation.

The New Urban Agenda should recognize the importance of overcoming the digital divide to enable all of its inhabitants to take advantage of the city as an open platform and a collaborative space. This openness contributes to improved understanding and trust among inhabitants, policy makers and the private sector. It allows both inhabitants and government entities access to information across sectors and traditional silos to develop new models and paradigms for managing water, waste, energy, mobility and food.

The City We Need uses systems thinking to understand urban complexity and the sources of unintended policy consequences. It experiments with new approaches to science and the production of evidence, including action-based research, crowd-sourced data-gathering and analysis, interactive policy dialogue and studies, collaborative research involving trans-disciplinary engagement with stakeholders.

http://fidic.org/sites/default/files/The%20City%20We%20Need%20TCWN%202.0_ADOPTED.pdf