The mayors of the top three cities in this year’s Sustainable Cities Index – Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen – are all women, but the trend is not unique to famously progressive Scandinavia; from Bogotá to Mexico City to Accra to Tokyo, female mayors around the world are distinguishing themselves as climate leaders. Indeed, 50% of the top 10 cities in the index are led by women. C40, the network of cities founded in 2005 by then London mayor Ken Livingstone to collectively promote climate action, has spawned a subgroup of female mayors. In 2014, they numbered four; three years later, they were 15, and their number continues to grow.

There’s no single explanation for this swell in female municipal leadership, and it’s risky to attribute certain qualities or strengths to women as a whole. Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek points out that while men are typically judged on their ability to deliver business results, women are expected to be caring and nurturing advocates for the weak and vulnerable, and for Mother Earth. To rise through the ranks in municipal politics, women have to prove their mettle in all areas, or, as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has put it, “work 10 times harder than men.”

If any generalization can be made, then, it would be that by the time women land in the mayoral seat, they’ve learned how to fight. “You have to be unafraid,” says Gondek, whose first act upon being elected mayor of Canada’s oil and gas capital last November was to declare a climate emergency. Gondek felt the public statement was vital to Calgary’s future prosperity, framing it not in opposition to the oil and gas industry, but in keeping with a “transition and transformation” that has long since been underway but not yet become part of her city’s narrative.

It was a bold move for Calgary’s first female mayor, but this is something “first female mayors” are known for. When she was first elected in 2014, Hidalgo immediately and unabashedly tried to rid Paris’s centre of most cars, which she blamed for many of the city’s ills: air pollution, loud traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. In a highly symbolic move, she had the highway that ran along the left bank of the Seine converted into 4.5 hectares of pedestrian-only greenspace. She also announced a ban on all diesel cars by 2024 and petrol cars by 2030, while vowing to make Paris a cyclist’s dream by creating an additional 1,000 kilometres of permanent bike lanes and removing 72% of existing parking spots.

The moves provoked fierce opposition – and an unsuccessful legal challenge – from conservative and motorist groups. In a 2019 interview, Hidalgo attributed the “violence” of the reaction in part to her gender. “Being a woman that wants to reduce the number of cars meant that I upset lots of men,” she said, adding that two-thirds of public transport users are women.

To rise through the ranks in municipal politics, women have to prove their mettle in all areas, or, as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has put it, “work 10 times harder than men.”

But the benefits of Hidalgo’s vision quickly became clear. Re-elected in 2020 for a second term, Hidalgo expanded the scope of her plans, packaging the ideas of Franco-Colombian systems theorist Carlos Moreno into the proposition of the “ville du quart d’heure,” or 15-minute city. Very much in the tradition of famed urbanist Jane Jacobs, the objective of this hyper-localism is to make it possible for city dwellers, wherever they live, to access the essentials of life – work, school, recreation, food, medical services – within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of their homes. The concept has quickly gained currency in cities around the world.

Following Hidalgo’s lead, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante made the 15-minute city a central plank of her campaign for re-election last November, presenting the proximity to libraries and recreational and cultural facilities as an antidote to youth disengagement and rising gun violence. C40 has built its blueprint for post-pandemic urban recovery around the 15-minute city.

It’s a recurring theme with bold ideas; once implemented and experienced, they don’t seem so bold after all. Women mayors seem to understand this. In 2002, Annika Billström, the first female mayor of Stockholm, committed what was expected to be political suicide by proposing a congestion charge on all vehicles entering the inner city. Built on an archipelago and accessed largely by bridges, Stockholm was facing serious traffic problems, with two-thirds of workers in the downtown core commuting from the suburbs. Billström’s congestion-charge proposal was met with outrage, so she suggested that it be put to a referendum, but not before the city had tried it out. Over the course of a seven-month trial in which cars were charged roughly US$3 every time they crossed an electronic cordon into the downtown core, traffic volumes dropped by a fifth, travel times were significantly reduced, and a quarter of work commuters switched to public transit.

When the trial period ended, Stockholm reverted to its old ways, but Stockholmers viewed them differently. They realized the merits of fast roads over free roads. In the 2006 referendum, a majority voted in favour of the charge, and public support for it has only grown since then.

Three of the four mayors to succeed Billström in Stockholm have been women, and the city, which was named the European Commission’s first European Green Capital in 2010, continues to excel in its environmental and climate performance. Under Karin Wanngård, who served as mayor from 2014 to 2018, the city set itself a target of being not only carbon neutral but fossil-fuel free by 2040, five years earlier than the Swedish national goal. It also established higher standards for energy-efficient buildings than in the rest of the country.

Like many mayors, Wanngård understood the importance of the role model. Using her bike to get around in all seasons and proudly displaying her preference for second-hand clothes, she presented sustainability as an opportunity rather than an exercise in enforced belt-cinching. This can-do attitude is critical, as is the determination to use cities to demonstrate to other levels of government what is possible.

The Swedish capital has a tradition of collaborating formally with the private sector to achieve its goals. Established in 2007, the Stockholm Climate Pact is a network of businesses and organizations that work with the city’s leadership to develop and implement climate strategies. Anna König Jerlmyr, Stockholm’s mayor since 2018, is harnessing this cooperation in the “electrification pact” – an all-out effort to boost electric vehicle infrastructure and electrical capacity. By 2030, Stockholm aims for all parking spots in the inner city to be equipped with chargers and for all traffic there to be emission-free.

König Jerlmyr believes the city’s 2040 goal is well within reach.

Women mayors find inspiration in each other. Asked about exciting ongoing urban initiatives, König Jerlmyr points across the globe to Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr has launched a project to plant one million trees on the denuded hills surrounding the capital city to mitigate flooding and landslides , while creating rural jobs to stem urban migration.

The project reflects the kind of lateral thinking that is required to address climate change, in both the Global South, where women mayors in Accra (Mayor Elizabeth K. T. Sackey), Mexico City (Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo) and Bogotá (Mayor Claudia López Hernández) are leading bold sustainability initiatives, and cities in the north. “I’ve always been after the triple bottom line,” says Calgary’s Gondek, referring to the triad of social, economic and environmental factors that inform good policy. “You have to blend priorities.”

Beate Weber-Schuerholz, the first female mayor of the southern German city of Heidelberg, who served in the position for 16 years beginning in 1990, believes this is something women do particularly well. “Women rarely have the chance to ascend the ladder directly,” she says, referring to the balancing act of family and career. “The steps they go up are very broad.”

She believes this shared experience makes women more inclined to compare notes – to learn from, rather than compete with, each other – and equips them well to confront the cross-cutting challenge of climate change, at once highly technical and deeply human.

Meet five women mayors blazing a greener trail

Anna König Jerlmyr
Stockholm, Sweden

Anna König Jerlmyr wants Stockholm to become the world’s first climate-positive city by 2040 and fossil-fuel free by 2030. To do so, she is looking to completely electrify the city’s transit system and take advantage of emerging carbon capture and storage technology.

Jyoti Gondek
Calgary, Alberta

One of Jyoti Gondek’s first orders of business after she was elected in 2021 was to pass a motion in city council declaring a climate emergency. In her campaign to become Calgary’s first female mayor, Gondek made climate change and resilience a key priority for the oil and gas capital of Canada.

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo

Mexico City, Mexico

As a former environmental engineer, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (Mexico City’s first female mayor, elected in 2018) focuses her efforts on reducing vehicle emissions and expanding the city’s public transit. Her ambitious plans also include tackling the water crisis.

Valérie Plante

Montreal, Quebec

First elected in 2017 (and re-elected in 2021), Valérie Plante has led Montreal’s campaign to slash emissions by 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. She also plans to implement a zero-emission zone in downtown Montreal by 2030, plant 500,000 trees and electrify public transport.

Anne Hidalgo
Paris, France

Anne Hidalgo has led a transformation of the streets and public squares of Paris to make them more friendly to walking and cycling since she was elected in 2014. Her administration has shut off car access on one side of the river Seine and spent €150 million building 300 kilometres of bike lanes.

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As go our cities, so goes our world.

With more than half the world’s people living in cities, and urbanization only accelerating, more focus is rightly coming to the role (and performance) of cities on climate, water, air quality, biodiversity and a host of related social, health and economic outcomes.

A city can achieve sustainability goals even if its nation does not, but no nation, nor the world, will achieve its sustainability goals if our cities don’t clean up after themselves.

I believed this instinctively when I first ran for Edmonton City Council 15 years ago, but now there is so much more comparable data to work with, and more reason than ever to demand better habitats for ourselves. Almost everyone, regardless of their politics, can agree that they want clean air, stable energy prices, a healthy community and resilience in the face of crisis and change. I’ve tested this argument from many different angles, including Edmonton’s citizen assembly on climate and energy transition a decade ago, where citizens from diverse demographics and political alignments arrived at overwhelming consensus to endorse strong environmental action. In my experience, people can agree that they want their community to be better for their kids and grandkids.

As with most challenges, however, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Mayors and city councils have been sounding the alarm on climate in North America and abroad since the 1990s. The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities have long provided training and standardized assessment tools and helped to coordinate advocacy – creating capacity to move quickly as senior governments pull regulatory levers for stronger building codes, broader electrification and carbon pricing.

Despite widespread good intentions (more than 11,000 cities have signed the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy) there are some real barriers to progress. After chairing Canada’s Big City Mayors’ Caucus for five years, and having collaborated on climate and biodiversity with mayors from around the world, I’ve learned that the story is similar most everywhere: power is fragmented, sometimes across complex layers of government. Plus, the general scarcity of revenues for cities, and widespread prohibitions on deficit spending, create sharp resource constraints and can reinforce short-termism. However, these limitations also drive creative problem-solving and novel partnerships.

Consensus for transformational change, where it is found, tends to be built from the ground up from people demanding better in their neighbourhoods. Denmark didn’t tell Copenhagen to approach sustainability as an intentional whole-of-city design exercise; it emerged as a solution to congestion and livability challenges felt on the ground. Danish culture may have made it easier, but the will coalesced around communities demanding change. Clearly, though, it helps when values are tightly aligned, as they are among Nordic cities clustered at the top of Corporate Knights’ inaugural Sustainable Cities Index, with Stockholm in first place.

Fortunately, at least in our democracies, the capacity to channel bottom-up resolve is one of the very reasons we have local governments, and one of the reasons why cities tend to be reliably progressive, even in conservative-leaning states or provinces. The will to lead, to think longer-term, to defy polarization, are hallmarks of local democracies that are more important than ever. Unlike our national and provincial politics – which are easily infected with binaries and zero-sum thinking – most city councils, at least in Canada, are non-partisan, fluid coalitions, just like the publics they proximately represent. Even in partisan city governments in the United States, citizens actually meet their elected officials at the grocery store or school drop-off and can come down to town hall and still raise the level of debate through citizen engagement. We’ve never needed these consensus-building structures more than now.

As with most challenges, however, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Mayors and city councils have been sounding the alarm on climate in North America and abroad since the 1990s.

This point was driven home to me in 2016 when I attended COP22, the UN climate summit in Marrakesh, Morocco. Following the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, the meeting was focused on implementation, including the mobilization of “non-state actors” such as cities and the business community. However, days before the conference started, that year’s U.S. presidential election outcome cast real doubt over the nascent climate consensus. The mood, particularly among American scientific and diplomatic officials, was dire. But toward the end of the conference, we found hope in the reminder of how many non-state actors were still committed, including cities from around the world.

Read the full report.

A few months later, then-president Donald Trump pronounced, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” while triggering the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto fired back (after pointing out that 80% of Pittsburgh had voted for Clinton), proclaiming, “As the mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy [and our] future.” The We Are Still In climate mayors group was soon more than 400 strong and represented a majority of the population and economy of the United States, driving implementation of fleet electrification, renewable energy systems, political solidarity and much-needed hope.

In this time of extraordinary political volatility, our cities matter more than ever. Which is why it is important to shine a light on what’s working, how cities compare – and where there’s room for improvement.

It’s difficult to compare fast-growing cities in the Global South with old cities in Europe or sprawling cities in North America or megacities in China, but there are some basic standards around water and air that provide key benchmarks, which explains why cities with poor air or inconsistent potable water rank lower.

Sometimes the contrasts are striking even within a country. For instance, I remember travelling to China on a trade mission and visiting coastal cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou (34 and 48), with the newest, vastest infrastructure I’d ever seen, shrouded by some of the worst air quality I’ve ever experienced, and also visiting smaller inland cities where people were burning coal in open stoves for cooking next door to brand new skyscrapers.

On this point, there are novel and relevant metrics in the Sustainable Cities Index. One I’m particularly pleased to see included is consumption-based carbon accounting, which factors in the impacts of production and supply chains, especially for cities with high rates of consumption. I would often hear complaints in Alberta about proliferating smokestacks in China during coal phase-out and carbon-pollution pricing debates – but a lot of those smokestacks are pumping out pollutants because of how much we buy from other parts of the world, and we need to account more fully for the globalized environmental implications of our own vast consumer demand.

In a time of extraordinary political volatility, our cities matter more than ever.

Consumption-based carbon accounting was something we called for in the Edmonton Declaration of 2018, emerging from the first ever Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference on Cities and Climate, hosted in my city. High consumption rates associated with high disposable income, along with high car dependence and sprawl, are factors in Edmonton’s (21) and Calgary’s (22) lower ranking among the Canadian cohort.

Another essential measure in the Sustainable Cities Index is resiliency, since most cities aren’t adapting quickly enough to the rise in devastating floods, blistering heat waves and other climate-related catastrophes. For some cities in low-lying coastal areas, their very existence is threatened. The state of preparedness varies radically, from cities with well-documented resiliency cultures rooted in historic disasters (16th-place San Francisco’s history of earthquakes, for example). Sadly, in any greenhouse gas emissions scenario, these climate risks are going nowhere but up for several generations.

There is as much art as science in rankings and indices. Having celebrated as mayor when my city placed well, and also responded defensively when we didn’t, there are many possible interpretations. But the real art is identifying patterns and trends, like long-time leadership in Curitiba, Brazil (14), rewarding sustained leadership in northern Europe and on the west coast of North America, and motivating action from those in a position to drive needed change in some of the largest economies in the world (Houston, 39, São Paulo, 42, and Shanghai, 49).

We don’t need all our cities to look the same. In fact, innovation and competition among them is one of the things that will get us where we need to go. And some of the greatest innovations will come from cities in the Global South who can learn from, and leap past, the mistakes that established cities have made. At their essence, all cities are multipliers of human potential; that’s why we created them and why they are so extraordinary. Now, more than ever, we need them to do their magic for sustainability and human thriving.

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This wasn’t the first time that energy efficiency experts had challenged the EPC rating system. Earlier in 2021, the national government had concluded that an EPC grade didn’t predict how larger buildings actually performed in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The United Kingdom’s EPC labelling system is hardly unique. Since the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of developers have opted to build their projects according to elaborate checklists and performance thresholds prescribed by green building organizations. Some, however, have not aged well. Just 12 years ago, a New York developer erected a US$1.8-billion office building, One Bryant Park, praised for its sustainability features and its LEED Platinum rating. Today, the owner faces steep fines because the building’s carbon emissions exceed the cap established by a 2019 New York City bylaw known as Local Law 97.

These clashes reveal two important shifts in the narrative about the carbon footprint of buildings: one is that some green labels don’t really deliver the goods; the second is that local building and energy codes, which traditionally established minimal standards, are playing a much more important role in driving carbon reduction in buildings, which account for about 40% of all greenhouse gases.

Since the early 1990s, the world of voluntary certification has functioned like a marketplace of aspiration. A range of organizations offer seals of approval for a fee. Developers have to jump through hoops that run the gamut from technical air tightness measures and storm water management to fuzzier categories, such as wellness and “ecosystem services.”

The oldest is BREEAM, which originated in the United Kingdom. It commands the largest market share in Europe (560,000 buildings are BREEAM certified) and is seen as the common ancestor for many later certification schemes, including LEED, which has been administered since 1993 by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). As of 2019, the USGBC had issued 100,000 LEED building certifications for commercial projects. Passive House, prevalent in northern Europe, has a narrower mandate focusing on energy performance.

The number of building certification standards has proliferated. A 2017 study published in Building and Environment estimated there are now about 600 green rating systems globally. Developers seek out such certifications not just because they yield greener buildings, but also because those buildings are more marketable, and profitable. In North America, academics and environmentalists have criticized LEED’s approach because developers could game it out, running up their score by adding cosmetic features (e.g., bike parking) that don’t really improve a building’s carbon footprint.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology offered a bracing conclusion: “A decade of research suggests that LEED-certified buildings, on average, achieve little or no primary energy savings relative to other similar buildings,” the authors  wrote. “Evidence suggests that any reduction in site energy is typically achieved through increased electric use and corresponding off-site energy loss.”

But in the past few years, some governments have stepped into this breach by cranking up their sleepy old building codes as a means of driving decarbonization.

“A decade of research suggests that LEED-certified buildings, on average, achieve little or no primary energy savings relative to other similar buildings.”

–Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology

The City of Toronto and the province of British Columbia, for example, have both adopted what are known as “step codes” – tiered building regulations that set out increasingly stringent energy/carbon performance standards. For private builders, the first-tier requirements are mandatory, and the system works like an escalator: at regular intervals, the second (voluntary) tier becomes the basic mandatory tier, and so on. The fourth and latest version of the Toronto Green Standard went into effect in May.

Under New York’s Local Law 97, property owners whose buildings have more than 25,000 square feet of floor space are required to meet energy efficiency targets and reduce emissions by 20% by 2024 or face fines; even more stringent caps come into effect by 2030.

San Francisco in 2020 banned the use of natural gas in all new buildings, joining New York City and a growing number of municipalities that have taken the same step. California this year amended its own building energy code to require all new homes to be fitted out with solar panels, phase out refrigerants, and establish new standards for heat pumps and electricity storage systems to ease pressure on the grid.

For years, environmentalists have argued that tougher building codes could reduce emissions, and this future seems to have finally arrived, at least in some places. But it raises an interesting question about all those certifications: in a world of tougher codes, will these ecolabels still be necessary?

Thomas Moore, a senior consultant with Steven Winter Associates, a New York–based green building services firm, says the choice of certification is highly dependent on the type of project. For companies or institutions that plan to own a structure for a long time, he says, the best choice is Passive House, which emphasizes airtight building envelopes, high-performance windows and extensive insulation, all of which is meant to minimize heat loss and thus reduce energy consumption by as much as 90%.

“People in New York City with projects that achieved high LEED ratings are now being told that there’s a new law on carbon emissions that wasn’t accounted for 10 or 20 years ago and [they] will get a fine.”

–Yetsuh Frank, managing director of Building Energy Exchange

Passive House certification, moreover, has to be earned through verification of the completed project’s actual energy performance, not via checklists of features that generate points, as is the case with LEED (i.e., a LEED Platinum building must score over 80, whereas LEED Certified is 40 to 49). “If you’re a long-term investor and will hold on to a building for 50 years,” Moore says, “then Passive House aligns very well.” Some point to the fact that one way to achieve Passive House certification is to use a lot of petrochemical-based insulation, which drives up embodied carbon. But life-cycle analysis will be mandatory by the end of the decade.

Toronto now accepts Passive House–grade energy modelling results as a means of demonstrating compliance with the Toronto Green Standard. By 2030, they’ll no longer be optional. New York, by contrast, took a more hard-edged approach with Local Law 97, which has firm 2025 deadlines and real fines. By 2024, New York will also have an all-electric building regulation.

These new building codes represent a sea-change, says architect Yetsuh Frank, managing director of Building Energy Exchange, a non-profit that seeks to educate building owners on decarbonization. “People in New York City with projects that achieved high LEED ratings are now being told that there’s a new law on carbon emissions that wasn’t accounted for 10 or 20 years ago and [they] will get a fine.” He points out that by emphasizing the stick as much as the carrot, New York legislators have forced property managers and their bankers to pay more attention to the risk exposure associated with failing to update older buildings.

Moore is also seeing more projects where the developer is layering on certifications; that is, using not just LEED or Passive House, but others that measure related aspects of a building’s performance, like healthy indoor environments. “That’s what buyers care about,” he says, pointing out that certification systems like Well and Passive House are highly complementary.

All of this activity offers more proof that we simply have to find ways to make buildings that generate fewer emissions and don’t make their inhabitants sick; neither are nice-to-haves. Indeed, it may be that the voluntary building-certification systems that evolved over the past three decades will eventually become obsolete. The sooner we get to that day, the better.

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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“I believe that a movement of academics, students and city governments can make some pretty profound and needed change,” says David Miller, former chairman of C40, a global network of mayors tackling the climate crisis. “It’s a very exciting moment.” The former Toronto mayor now leads C40’s Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy.

The imperative to act is not lost on the world’s urban leaders. Cities worldwide consume 78% of the world’s energy and produce more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations, but are also potential change-makers in the global campaign for a sustainable future.

Positioned to assist cities in their emerging role are campus-based urban researchers and students.

About 45 universities worldwide have these specialized centres, estimates Karen Chapple, appointed last year as the inaugural director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. “There is something about the urban institute as a living laboratory which is quite unique, so in that way we have a shared ethos across all 45 [centres],” she says.

Three institutes – the LSE Cities centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and U of T’s School of Cities – illustrate the trend for academics to work with cities to solve complex issues like climate, migration and social inequity.

“Cities today are on the front line of profound man-made disasters,” says LSE Cities director Ricky Burdett. “Mayors have to respond in a very quick way … their exposure to dramatic change has never been as tangible as it is now.”

LSE Cities, one of the oldest institutes, began its activities in 1999 and became a research centre in 2010, combining interdisciplinary research, teaching and outreach. For example, its Master of Science in City Design and Social Science enrols students from various academic disciplines who work on specific projects in London from the perspective of sustainability, architecture and design.

Cities today are on the front line of profound man-made disasters. Mayors have to respond in a very quick way … their exposure to dramatic change has never been as tangible as it is now.

–LSE Cities director Ricky Burdett

In 2016, LSE Cities added an Executive Master of Science in Cities, with in-person and virtual learning over 18 months, for mid-career urban professionals (including C40 mayors) who are committed to leading large-scale efforts to address climate action through an evidence-based approach. Economic inequality and the climate crisis are top concerns, says program co-director Savvas Verdis. “Cities are very good at crystalizing these challenges that are global in nature into very local problems,” he says. “Mayors are, unfortunately, being asked to do a lot of the fire-fighting.”

Among its diverse activities, LSE Cities offers an academic course for city leaders to craft child-friendly policies. In addition, Burdett and other faculty members directly advise cities, including a recent consultation with Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa on its rapid urbanization challenges.

Collaboration defines many of the global programs. In 2021, Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, announced a US$150-million commitment to expand the Bloomberg Harvard [University] City Leadership Initiative, a training program for mayors established in 2016. The donation also supports a university-wide cities centre for leadership and governance and endowed faculty appointments The Bloomberg Harvard program provides an all-expenses-paid executive education experience for 40 mayors annually from around the world.

“All global problems have a local impact, and we cannot afford to wait for national or international bodies to come up with the solutions,” says Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities and faculty co-chair of the Bloomberg Harvard program. “The problems are so urgent that you are held accountable by local residents; there are levers that local leaders can use that they are not always aware of.”

Mike Savage, mayor of Halifax Regional Municipality, was one of three Canadian mayors in the 2018 class. “A lot of that stuff that we learned informed the way we have governed since we have gotten back to our cities,” he says. One lesson he learned was how to develop a public narrative as a tool to engage stakeholders on city priorities, such as Halifax’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

I hope current leaders will feel better equipped to tackle problems that seem insurmountable.

–Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities

In the year-long experience, with several days of in-class learning followed by virtual seminars, mayors must identify a local problem to solve. For Savage, it was how to bring big infrastructure projects to fruition with public support. He and two senior city officials had access to Harvard faculty, who advised on policy implementation, and the assistance of a Bloomberg Harvard–sponsored graduate student on a three-month summer fellowship with the city.

With such support, says de Jong, “I hope current leaders will feel better equipped to tackle problems that seem insurmountable.”

The Bloomberg Harvard program also looks to recruit future civic leaders, with a new two-year, paid fellowship for recent graduates to work with mayors on their priorities. “We hope to create a talent pipeline of students who had not thought about going into city government,” says de Jong.

Like its counterparts, U of T’s School of Cities emphasizes knowledge dissemination and urban problem-solving. But it differs from others in having no dedicated faculty. Instead, the School of Cities funds researchers from multiple disciplines. For its first grant, it mobilized 45 academics from 20 departments to explore climate justice issues. “We were designed to crosscut many different departments,” says Chapple. Linking academia and the community is key. She says researchers are expected to “make sure your research project is useful to people on the ground working on climate and justice issues,” with community stakeholders involved in the design of research.

No less important is nurturing new talent. Clarence Qian, with graduate degrees in architecture (Waterloo) and business (Toronto), spent his year as a 2021 Urban Leadership Fellow examining the potential of mass timber construction to contribute to sustainable, affordable residential housing. This year, while completing his business studies, he signed up for the School of Cities’ graduate multidisciplinary urban project, which brings together students from various academic disciplines to work on an urban problem.

Qian and his team members examined how to add laneway homes, duplexes and triplexes to the traditional mix of residential housing options.
“In my MBA, we talk about numbers every day,” he says. “For urban issues, it is never just one aspect; for my [multidisciplinary] project, I met others from different perspectives.”

Qian, now director of development at Distrikt real estate developers, sees his future in cities. “My passion is trying to make the city of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area a better place for people to live.”

That’s promising for urban advocates like C40’s Miller.

“It is my hope that universities that are making such an effort to link directly with city governments can spark that [youth] interest into a real fire of passion for solutions to our society’s challenges,” he says.

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