Time for new changemakers to step up
Urbanism is the business of all changemakers who care about public wellbeing and climate action. And indeed, most likely, urbanism needs you.
Here are some of the roles that especially need to step up for urbanism.
Policy professionals
Keep asking why things work they way they do in a city–or why they dont, or what it’s so hard to change–and you will find policy. An ordinance, a procedure, an expression of values or priorities (or lack thereof) by electeds, an implied understanding about what those electeds want. An adopted budget, one of the most concrete expressions of policy of all.
So urbanism needs elected officials, staff policymakers, and advocates. What they can do:
Align rules with outcomes: Shift from prescriptive codes to outcome-based standards that prioritize safety, access, housing supply, and emissions reduction. Reform parking minimums; allow more housing types near jobs and transit; legalize gentle density.
Integrate health and climate: Bake active transportation, heat mitigation, flood resilience, and zero-emissions targets into land use, capital planning, and procurement. Require climate risk and health impact assessments for major projects.
Make permitting predictable and fast: Transparent timelines and digital workflows speed good projects without sacrificing review quality. Pair speed with community benefits and accountability.
Fund the right things: Invest in sidewalks, transit priority, street trees, and maintenance—not just expansion. Use value capture and impact fees to support affordable housing and public realm upgrades.
Pilot, measure, iterate: Start with place-based pilots; track safety, access, small-business vitality, emissions, and equity; scale what works.
Facility professionals
One of the most formative aspects of a town is its accumulation of physical facilities–the buildings, community centers, campuses, and neighborhood districts that draw people in and bring them together. A town in not much without these facilities, and the way these facilities are made up and operate together have a great impact on the wellbeing of a town’s residents.
Urbanism needs real estate developers, owners and operators of buildings and other places where people work, study, shop and visit, and administrators of community centers and campuses. What they can do:
Treat sites as part of the city, not isolated parcels: Open campuses to neighbors with permeable edges, public pathways, and welcoming ground floors. Prioritize mixed-use and human-scale design.
Reduce travel demand and improve access: Offer transit benefits, manage parking smartly, provide bike and micromobility amenities, and coordinate with cities on first/last-mile solutions and safer streets.
Build and operate for climate and resilience: Deliver high-performance buildings, green roofs, shade and trees, stormwater capture, and onsite renewables. Join or create district energy and thermal networks.
Support local economies and inclusion: Lease to small, local businesses; adopt community hiring and procurement; create flexible, affordable ground-floor spaces; invest in public realm and shared amenities.
Make places people want to be: Provide third places, restrooms, water, seating, and wayfinding. Good operations—security that’s welcoming, maintenance that’s responsive—shape perception and use.
Anchor institutions as civic partners: Hospitals, universities, stadiums, malls, and airports can act as resilience hubs, workforce pipelines, and transit anchors when they align their capital plans with civic goals.
Local government executives
The practice of urbanism has rapdily evolved over the last couple of decades. The field now has the benefit of science and evidence-based practices throughout. However, a lot of the things that best practices point to are not intuitive, and the change inherent in making things better is instrinsically disruptive. Yet at the ened of the day, expert staff are foremost employees, and the plans and proposals they bring forward are limited by their organizational mandates.
So urbanism needs city managers, other local public agency top officials, and their senior leaders. What they can do:
Break silos and deliver as one city: Stand up cross-department delivery teams (planning, transportation, housing, public works, public health, sustainability, finance) with shared KPIs, pooled budgets, and a single accountable owner for priority corridors and districts.
Set and fund a short list of enterprise outcomes: Choose measurable targets (e.g., fewer serious traffic injuries, faster buses, more housing approvals, cooler neighborhoods, lower emissions) and tie them to the budget, capital plan, and leadership performance agreements. Publish dashboards and report progress.
Make permitting and project delivery predictable: Create one-stop shops, concurrent reviews, clear service-level agreements, and escalation paths; digitize workflows and inspections; empower project managers to unblock issues quickly.
Resource authentic co-design: Fund compensated engagement, translation, and community partners; share data in plain language; build feedback loops from pilots into permanent programs.
Use procurement and partnerships as levers: Write outcome-based RFPs, prequalify innovative vendors, include pilot/scale clauses and social procurement; align investments with regional agencies, utilities, school districts, and anchor institutions.
Invest in care and operations: Protect O&M budgets; implement asset management and preventative maintenance for streets, lighting, trees, and transit stops; measure and improve reliability and cleanliness.
Build capacity and manage risk: Modernize classifications and training; use risk-based approvals; bring legal and procurement in early to enable innovation with compliance; maximize federal and state funding.
Public-interest investors
Urbanism presents profound opportunities to make life better and deliver important climate solutions at scale, including for groups who have been and continue to be the most left out. However there is incredible inertia in the forces that govern communities, and the work of making change–through policy, politics, public education, and more–needs resources.
So urbanism needs philanthropic funders, government grantmakers and providers of incentives, and impact investors. What they can do:
Align capital with public outcomes: Tie grants and investments to clear metrics for safety, housing affordability, emissions, and equity—and fund measurement and independent evaluation.
De-risk and crowd in capital: Offer first-loss, guarantees, PRIs/recoverable grants, and credit enhancements; fund predevelopment, technical assistance, and community engagement to get projects to “shovel ready.”
Reward enabling environments: Prioritize jurisdictions with predictable permitting, equitable zoning reforms, complete streets, and anti-displacement protections; use challenge grants and outcome payments to accelerate delivery.
Fund operations and stewardship: Support ongoing maintenance, activation, and care of streetscapes, trees, and transit amenities—not just capital ribbon cuttings.
Build local capacity: Invest in civic intermediaries, CDFIs, community land trusts, and city capacity for grant writing, data, and compliance—especially in smaller and under-resourced cities.
Scale what works: Back multi-year funds that replicate proven pilots; require open data and knowledge sharing to speed adoption.
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