WRLDCTY is a global platform exploring livability, lovability, and longevity in cities. Through international forums, fellowships, labs, and residencies, it brings together urban leaders and creative thinkers to imagine more resilient, inclusive, and lovable urban futures.
Diana Lind is a writer, urban policy specialist, and author of Brave New Home. Through her Substack, The New Urban Order, she explores housing, public space, culture, and the changing nature of cities, connecting policy and big ideas to the everyday experience of urban life.
Sheila Foster is a leading scholar of cities, democracy, and the urban commons. Her work explores how communities share responsibility for the public spaces, institutions, and resources that shape everyday life—and how collective stewardship can make cities more equitable, democratic, and inclusive.
LabGov is an international research and action network developing practical models of collaborative urban governance, helping communities, institutions, and governments steward cities as shared resources.
Co-City Baton Rouge is pioneering community-led redevelopment through an innovative land bank and trust, giving residents a lasting role in shaping and stewarding their neighborhood's future.
Chicago's NeighborSpace land trust protects community gardens from development while empowering neighborhood groups to manage and steward shared green spaces as urban commons.
San Francisco's Community Arts Stabilization Trust helps artists and cultural organizations secure affordable, permanent spaces, pioneering new models of community ownership and cultural preservation.
Nobel Prize-winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom challenged the “tragedy of the commons,” demonstrating how communities can successfully govern shared resources through cooperation, collective responsibility, and locally developed rules.
Founded by striking cable workers in New York City, People's Choice Communications is reimagining internet access through cooperative ownership and community-controlled broadband infrastructure.
Turning sunlight into shared community wealth, Solar Commons uses community trusts to ensure that the economic benefits of solar energy support local priorities and collective decision-making.
Justin de Benedictis-Kessner studies urban politics and the surprisingly difficult question of accountability: when something in a city works—or doesn’t—do residents actually know who is responsible? His work explores how complex institutions, elections, media, and everyday public services shape the relationship between cities and the people they serve.
Glitter is a Philadelphia-based neighborhood cleaning service that lets neighbors pool resources to care for their block—creating local jobs while experimenting with where individual, collective, and municipal responsibility for public space meet.
Morgan Berman is a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur and community leader working at the intersection of technology, civic life, and social impact. She is the founder of Glitter, a neighborhood-based street-cleaning platform that enables residents and businesses to collectively fund recurring litter removal while creating paid local jobs. Her work explores community agency, public space, and a deceptively simple question: when something needs doing in our cities, whose responsibility is it?
New York City’s Office of Mass Engagement brings the practices of grassroots organizing into City Hall, seeking to move public engagement beyond meetings and feedback sessions toward sustained participation in governing. Created by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in 2026, the office asks what happens when residents are treated not as an audience for government, but as active participants in it.
Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor of New York City. His administration has experimented with bringing organizing directly into city government, including the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement to expand the ways New Yorkers participate in shaping public decisions.
The Boston Office of Civic Organizing works to make it easier for residents to participate in civic life and take action in their neighborhoods. Its programs range from civic leadership and neighborhood events to micro-grants, mobile City Hall services, and Love Your Block, which supports resident-led neighborhood cleanups. The office describes its role as reducing barriers to civic participation and helping residents “connect, collaborate and take action.”
Antanas Mockus is a mathematician, philosopher, educator, and former mayor of Bogotá who used mimes, humor, symbolism, art, and social experiments to explore a radical idea: that cities can intentionally cultivate how citizens behave toward one another.
The Fog of Accountability asks a deceptively simple question: if local government is the level of government closest to our daily lives, why is it so difficult for voters to know who deserves credit when things go right—or blame when they don't? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner looks at the structures that make local accountability difficult, including weak electoral competition, complicated institutions, limited voter knowledge, and gaps in local media coverage.
Urbanists on Bakfiets Talking Cities is a video series from urbanist Lior Steinberg that puts city conversations literally in motion. Inspired by Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Steinberg invites fellow urbanists aboard a bakfiets—a Dutch cargo bike—and rides through cities while talking about streets, mobility, public space, and how cities actually work. The moving conversation makes the city itself part of the interview: ideas can be encountered, questioned, and demonstrated as they ride. The series launched with Tactical Urbanism co-founder Mike Lydon exploring Ljubljana, Slovenia.
If The Death and Life of Great American Cities was Jane Jacobs’ She’s So Unusual, Dark Age Ahead is the deeper, stranger masterpiece you wish more people knew.