Innovating for the city

Individuals who want to impact the public sector should turn their efforts to municipal government. Cities are generally free from the brinkmanship of national and state politics, and by the year 2030, 60 percent of the people in the world will live in cities. Whether the issue seeking impact is environmental or technological, small improvements in cities will yield big returns across the world.

Increasingly, cities are also becoming hubs for innovation. Municipal officials have different motivations than their national counterparts. While the local congressperson will ideally be elected because of his or her stances on political issues, most municipal politicians are elected by how efficiently they allocate city services. Your councilperson’s stance on universal health care matters little if he or she can deliver faster garbage pick-up, reduce crime and charge cheaper water bills. Different incentives foster a system that is collaborative and more open to change.

Look at examples of innovation in cities across the country. Boston used food trucks as inspiration to solve the complaint from citizens that traveling downtown for city services was difficult. They implemented “City Hall To Go,” a truck that travels and provides city services in different neighborhoods (think of a food truck that lets you pay your parking ticket or get a library card instead of buying tacos). In San Francisco, the “SFGov” mobile application allows citizens to quickly gather information on city services and connect with city officials. My favorite example is in Bogotá, where mimes were placed at traffic intersections to mock bad drivers. Immediately after the introductions of these public performers, traffic fatalities were down by more than 50 percent.

Most innovation on college campuses is directed at international and humanitarian dilemmas. We have solar-powered cookers, portable medicine kits and mobile applications for refugees. While these projects have tremendous potential, they are also—as I know from personal experience—difficult to scale. They may be too expensive to implement, too complicated to adopt or catered to an international organization that is resistant to change. They miss their opportunity for impact and forever remain just a good idea.

The bureaucracy that limits innovation in large-scale institutions is not nearly as stifling in cities. While city budgets constrain the capital available for investment, the willingness to adapt is commonplace in municipalities and that will motivates officials to risk trying a new idea. Duke students could potentially have significant impact if they directed their next innovation at cities, and if projects are successful at the city level, bigger institutions will likely also consider those ideas.

This past summer, I interned at Houston City Hall, where I developed a mobile application called Support Local Grow Together. SLGT advertises local, small businesses to Houstonians, thereby increasing the businesses’ revenues and hopefully ensuring their sustainability. Mobile searches are increasingly driving retail purchases, so businesses that are not online are quickly losing customers to establishments that are successfully leveraging mobile marketing. This is a problem that SLGT hopes to rectify. SLGT was a partnership between the City of Houston and the already existing SLGT movement in Houston. This partnership, in combination with open source code and inspiration from other examples of city innovation, facilitated the development of a product that would have otherwise required a significant financial investment.

Other cities have more institutionalized methods of fostering innovation. There now exist offices devoted to improving city services through change and adaptation and offices that hire students with big ideas or host competitions that bring student innovators together. These competitions rapidly provide implementable solutions while also fostering a more entrepreneurial climate by taking problem solving to the crowd of diverse thought.

On campus, our own form of municipal innovation has appeared in the form of campus enterprises and new services provided by old organizations. We now have budding food and grocery delivery services, mobile applications to track buses, a DukeMobile application that hastens the search for campus information and Fix My Campus—a platform that pipelines student complaints to student legislators. These ideas could see implementation at the municipal level, and we could similarly use projects that have worked in cities on our campus. Imagine if we had a more efficient waste collection system that reduces the trash overflow we see on weekends or a neighborhood watch program that reduces on-campus robberies. These ideas do not have to come from administrators. They can, like many of our best campus enterprises, germinate from students who take initiative to innovate at the local level.

My internship at Houston City Hall showed me how dynamic, exciting and fulfilling municipal politics can be. Local government is rarely mired in the same partisan battles we see in Washington and in our state capitals. Cities are eager for good ideas. If we devoted more of our problem solving and advocacy to municipalities, we might see less crime, illiteracy, pollution and inequity. Small marginal changes, in the aggregate, can have tremendous impact. 

Patrick Oathout is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Tuesday. Send Patrick a message on Twitter @PatrickOathout.