The Engaged Cities Award shines light on the growing number of ways city leaders are cocreating the future with residents, enabling cities around the world to learn from best practices and bring effective strategies back to their own cities. Finalists demonstrated an understanding that local government works better when it is open to the ideas, perspectives, and talents of its citizens.
The city changed its regulations to allow public collaboration between citizens and city government to improve public spaces. City staff worked with communities to design and implement projects that address local needs.
The city engaged citizens to share data about unsafe streets and developed an app that encourages residents to improve their driving behaviors, with the goal of decreased traffic-related fatalities.
To respond to pressing fiscal needs and rising costs, city leadership educated citizens about the budget process and collected feedback in order to create a budget that aligns resources with community priorities.
The shutdown of the mining industry caused a large district to suffer from economic hardship, abandoned land, and loss of identity. City leadership collaborated with residents to develop more than 540 acres of land into a public park that physically and emotionally reconnected residents.
To improve the experiences of a fast-growing immigrant youth population, the city used a human-centered design approach to rapidly prototype, develop, and implement citywide programs and services.
In response to a growing health crisis, city leadership developed a hub-and-spoke approach to improve health outcomes for its residents. The city engaged citizens to develop ideas for initiatives and provided leadership and support for implementation.
City leadership created a citywide campaign to elicit citizen opinions and proposals for the city constitution using a citizen working group and online petitions, many of which were incorporated into the city’s constitution.
The city invited citizens to submit their solutions to some of the city’s biggest challenges in a citywide competition. The first competition resulted in a drone prototype capable of removing graffiti in difficult to reach places.
To combat a high level of violence, the city created local councils made up of residents in 15 neighborhoods. The councils launched a variety of community projects to build trust between neighbors, such as the rehabilitation of public parks and arts events, and helped resolve conflicts within the community.
The city brought city staff and citizens together in person and online to analyze the large amount of data the city had collected to learn more about public problems, such as income disparity and crime, and to inform policy.