A Call to Action: Reinventing Cities Through Partnerships

Today, City Digital and the Smart Chicago Collaborative are merging to form the City Tech Collaborative. As City Tech, we will reinvent cities. We are dedicated to bringing technology solutions to cities that elevate the voice of the community. I am honored to be the first Executive Director of City Tech and below is the first article about our work.

Today, a new innovation organization was launched in Chicago. It isn’t the first and likely won’t be the last, but I do think it is different. And I am excited about it. That is, in part, because I am the executive director of this new group, called the City Tech Collaborative. Mostly, I am excited because of the work that we do.

At the City Tech Collaborative, we reinvent cities. That’s a tall order.

Cities are complicated places to work and they are facing multifaceted problems such as climate change, aging infrastructure and increased demand for services. As the world’s cities grow and change and become more intertwined with each other, their ability to address these challenges alone or even with a single partner is increasingly limited. City Tech formed to drive collaboration and innovation around cities’ most intractable problems.

How do we do that? City Tech transforms cities into testbeds for new ideas. With partners and people, we remake essential services and infrastructure, from skills to skyscrapers. We then prepare these solutions for other cities, thus increasing the world’s odds of solving big, urban problems. We focus on using technology to design precise, measurable pilots with a clear path to scale.

City Tech uses Chicago as our testbed, so that our solutions can be pressure tested in the real world before we bring them to market. We are currently working on projects that include:

• Mapping and managing all of pipes and tunnels under the city;
• testing ways to ease congestion on the L around Cubs games; and
• launching a digital directory of public health services in Chicago.

Next year, our work will expand to include waste management, risk modeling for resiliency, connected construction and data-informed homeless services.

We bring cities, companies, community groups and people together to tackle problems far too big for any one organization to solve on its own. For instance, Microsoft and a start-up called Opti have teamed up with city departments to divert rainwater from overloaded sewer systems. We’re piloting that solution in Chicago and will work with residents to refine how well it is working. We execute all of our projects using a proven methodology that delivers innovative results to residents.

City Tech is the perfect example of the “whole being greater than the sum of its parts.” The organization was born from the merger of City Digital and the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Our funders include large companies, such as Microsoft, ComEd and Mastercard, and philanthropic organizations, such as the MacArthur Foundation and Sprague Institute. We execute our projects with our funders as well as with community groups, academics and startups.

Our goal is to get solutions we have developed into the hands of our partners and other cities. We believe that involving people and communities in that work delivers better ideas with an improved chance of adoption and impact. We work on multi-dimensional problems that require multi-disciplinary teams to solve them. The work is complex and often frustrating, but always rewarding.

And our approach only works when we have the strongest, best partners at the table representing cities, industry, philanthropy, academia and our communities. If you are up for the challenge, drop me a linke at brenna.berman@uilabs.org