How the Science of Infection Can Make Cities Stronger
To meet local challenges from climate change to corruption, city governments should make their best ideas go viral. A study by European researchers has found that Paris is the most vulnerable city to heat, due to historically hotter cities such as Palermo and Madrid. The study suggests that Paris has developed adaptations for dealing with extreme heat, such as wearing masks, avoiding large gatherings and taking vaccines. The authors argue that the best ideas are not being adopted quickly or widely enough. They suggest that instead, the world needs to adopt better policies based on network science. Bloomberg Philanthropies has announced a $50 million investment in grants, technical assistance, and travel opportunities for city officials to adopt policies from other parts of the world. They argue that this initiative is just a first step towards making urban solutions more contagious. They also suggest increasing annual budget outlays for new pilots and trial runs, creating a dedicated space for riskier programs.
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Earlier this year, a group of European researchers published a study with a scorching conclusion: As climate change makes heat waves more prevalent across the continent, the city most vulnerable to excess heat deaths is not a warm southern metropolis, but the relatively cool city of Paris.
Why? In part, the reason is that historically hotter cities have developed adaptations for dealing with extreme heat, from the shady architecture of Palermo to the siestas of Madrid. That leaves Paris at the bottom of a deadly learning curve.
This is just one urgent example of why cities need to talk. The world has an incredible stockpile of effective urban policies, but the best ideas are not being adopted quickly or widely enough. Covid-19 taught us all how to slow the spread of viruses: wear masks, avoid large gatherings and take vaccines. To speed the spread of good ideas, we need to take the opposite tack by making urban solutions go viral.
This is more than a metaphor — it’s a workable model. Network science teaches us that diseases and ideas spread according to the same principles. “Infectiousness,” which epidemiologists measure with a value called R0, depends both on the type of information being spread and the networks through which it travels. A deadly virus, locked in a room of three people, can only infect those three. A great idea, trapped in a single municipal office, may never escape city borders. It’s not just the content; it’s the context.
On Wednesday, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that it is tackling this issue with the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange, a $50 million investment in grants, technical assistance and travel opportunities for city officials to adopt policies from other parts of the world. (Bloomberg Philanthropies is the philanthropic organization of Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg CityLab.) We hope this promising new initiative is just a first step. If we want good ideas to be implemented at global scales, the world must grow the ranks of “policy epidemiologists” who work to increase the R0 of good ideas.
What, exactly, makes a policy contagious? For one thing, strong relationships between policymakers. Such bonds do not form automatically; local leaders are rightfully focused on their own corners of the world. We should look to organizations devoted to breaking down silos, such as C40 Cities, a coalition of 96 cities working together on the climate emergency. At the triennial C40 Mayors Summit, dozens of leaders come together to compare notes on local-level climate policies. Through these gatherings and the ongoing relationships they foster, C40 has helped planet-saving ideas, from bike-sharing to sustainable landfills, spread on a planetary scale.
Even in the days of easy digital communication, these face-to-face gatherings remain irreplaceable as policy “super-spreaders.” More of these events can make a difference, especially those that include mid-level officials who do the real work. We put too much stock in the politician, and not enough in the deputy director of the parks department.
Besides improving the flow of information, we need to lower the immune defenses of city halls that are naturally resistant to new ideas. Within cities, we should increase annual budget outlays for new pilots and trial runs, carving out a dedicated space for riskier programs that might lack automatic political support.
Meanwhile, advocates already play the crucial role of adapting policies for new contexts, akin to how genetic mutations allow a virus to jump between different host species. Such adaptations can be technical or cultural, such as convincing Western cities—which have long wrongly assumed their superiority—to learn from the Global South. For example, Boston has harnessed its highly-educated population to become a biotech powerhouse. But it has a lot to learn from the disease-surveillance infrastructure in Cape Town, which warned the world about the Omicron variant of Covid-19 before anyone else.
Of course, you cannot spread good ideas without knowing what the good ideas are. The quality of an idea is separate from its infectiousness, so it is very easy to infect the world with a boondoggle. Elected officials might pass around policies to score political points, such as the “anti-woke” book ban crusades that have swallowed up school boards across America, and distracted from the issue of pandemic learning loss. These ideas are viral for all the wrong reasons.
In other cases, a pilot program that succeeds in one place can falter when implemented elsewhere. A successful US program in which nurses visited young mothers to improve health outcomes had no impact in the UK — perhaps because Britain already has universal healthcare. We cannot spread ideas for their own sake; we need to validate them with both statistical analysis and feedback from human sources on the ground.
It's no secret that good things can come about when cities share ideas. Take Guadalajara, Mexico’s Visor Urbano program. It took business and construction permitting from a paper-based application to an online form, making it much harder for municipal officials to discreetly solicit bribes. The program was a smashing success, reducing bribe requests by 74% and cutting wait times by 84%. Since winning Bloomberg Philanthropies’ $1 million Mayors Challenge in 2016, Guadalajara has exported the model to 25 other Mexican cities, multiplying the impact against corruption.
It wasn’t easy, though. A key player was former Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Alfaro, who was able to spread the word about Visor Urbano and equip cities with infrastructure needed to adopt it after he became governor of the state of Jalisco. A multidisciplinary team supported implementation, driving for thousands of miles from Guadalajara to meet with other local leaders in person and help them solve specific challenges in their city halls. After taking hold in dozens of cities, the next big test for Visor Urbano is jumping to new regions, nations and continents. As the idea reaches new audiences at international conferences, that big leap could be underway.
The challenges of our present moment are increasingly localized, and cities can no longer rely on the centralized policies of nation-states alone. A mayor facing floods in coastal Germany needs expertise from city leaders in Pakistan just as much as aid from Berlin. If New York wants to prepare for a rapidly aging population, it should listen to its elders in Seoul and Tokyo. A teeming network of global cities, transmitting new ideas back and forth, could help our world keep pace with the future — that is, if they learn to take off their proverbial masks.
Carlo Ratti is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab, and a co-author of “Atlas of the Senseable City.”
Michael Baick is a staff writer at the design and innovation office CRA–Carlo Ratti Associati.