State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Restoring Trust in the Responsive City

Data-Smart City Solutions: “Local” matters now as never before. Prominent voices across the academic and policy communities are drawing attention to role municipal government plays in shaping better outcomes for residents of urban communities. Recent groundbreaking research by Stanford economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues on inequality in cities emphasizes the importance a person’s zip code plays in shaping his or her future economic opportunity.[1] Various scholars, including Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution, Jennifer Bradley of the Aspen Institute, and Benjamin Barber of the Global Parliament of Mayors rightly point to cities as the most promising vehicles of change on the most intractable problems facing civil society today.[2] So what’s getting in their way?

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