![Podcast microphone against a blank background](/sites/g/files/omnuum10826/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/datasmart/files/podcast_microphone.jpg?itok=3Q9qYvou) # Redesigning Broken and Legacy Systems to Unlock Innovation with Communities Episode Ninety-Four May 13, 2026 [ Betsy Gardner ](/people/betsy-gardner) City leaders want to innovate, but most are stuck solving yesterday's problems with yesterday's tools. Real breakthroughs come from fundamentally changing how governments listen to communities. Host Stephen Goldsmith speaks with [Dr. Francisca Rojas](https://publicinnovation.jhu.edu/about/our-team/francisca-rojas/), executive director of the [Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins](https://publicinnovation.jhu.edu/), about how technology and design are helping cities understand what residents actually need—and why legacy systems are the real barrier to change. Embed *Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts. The following is a transcript of the conversation.* **Steven Goldsmith:** This is Steven Goldsmith, professor of urban policy at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University with another episode of our podcast, the Data-Smart City Pod. Today we'll be joined by a partner and a colleague, Dr. Francisca Rojas, who is executive director of the other Bloomberg Center, the one for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins. A little confusing, but welcome. **Francisca Rojas:** Thank you, Steven. I'm so pleased to be here. I really appreciate the invitation to share our work. **Steven Goldsmith:** Let's talk about where your past and mine intersect. One, I was chair of the Anacostia Redevelopment Commission, so I want you to talk about that for a second. Secondly, I was involved at the beginning of Cities of Service when I was chair of AmeriCorps and you're involved with that. So this is a way of asking you to introduce yourself but to talk about me at the same time. **Francisca Rojas:** I'd love to do that. So when I was just starting out in my career, I worked for Mayor Anthony Williams in the District of Columbia Office of Planning in Washington on a very ambitious vision that the mayor had to transform the city's other waterfront. Everybody was very familiar with the Potomac River, but not so much with the Anacostia River. In fact, residents didn't even know that the Anacostia River was in their city. A lot of federal land was on that river's edge and it was inaccessible to residents, but the mayor saw an opportunity to transform it on behalf of residents and really generate a really transformative new neighborhood that would also bolster the fiscal health of the city by generating new revenue and taxes. And so I was the project planner on that effort, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, which today is fully built out. It's an unrecognizable neighborhood from what it was. And we invited Steven when he was mayor of Indianapolis to be on the Blue Ribbon Committee. We needed experts to tell us whether we were on the right track or not. And that was the first time we met. I was very young, it was my first job. I worked in City Hall, and in the role I have now, we have a team of people who have all worked in city halls and now work on behalf of supporting the people who are driving similar types of ambitious transformations in their cities. **Steven Goldsmith:** How about a minute or two about your portfolio in the Bloomberg Center? What are you in charge of? How do you configure which cities you participate with? **Francisca Rojas:** So the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins is a team of experts and researchers that at this point is working with nearly 300 cities around the world and more than 2,000 innovation directors, civic designers and other municipal problem-solvers that every day are tackling their city's toughest challenges. It was founded in 2021 through a partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Johns Hopkins University to build on nearly a decade of support of Michael Bloomberg to stand up innovation teams in city halls. And it was a pioneering effort then to integrate and embed staff with a team-based model of problem solving that has proved durable and replicable. And what we do at the center is essentially institutionalize and scale that work and give the field the knowledge and the capacity-building infrastructure that it needs. And so we work with city halls on building up their public innovation capacity and we lead a portfolio of programs around that work. So that includes what you mentioned, Cities of Service and Love Your Block. And that really is about the civic engagement element of public innovation and how public innovation relies on and gives an opportunity for engaging residents and those who are closest to the problem to ideate and develop solutions to those problems. We also have i-teams, the innovation teams program, which is present now in nearly 50 cities that we're working with. And then we also have a research element of it to try to codify and build that field of knowledge through evidence-based research. **Steven Goldsmith:** Well, that was a lot of stuff. **Francisca Rojas:** It's a lot of stuff! **Steven Goldsmith:** Very impressive. I have a number of questions. I want to focus today on the intersection between kind of emerging technologies and communities and innovation. And think a little bit in particular about how those technologies are allowing more innovation and more interaction with communities. We have a working hypothesis at our Bloomberg Center in our AI work, which is that public officials don't have enough discretion to solve community problems. They can learn about the community, but how do they get more authority to be responsive? In what ways do you see technology broadly driving innovation and/or driving better ways to listen to the community, engage the community? **Francisca Rojas:** So I think technology is a fundamental tool for this work. It helps people in city hall collect, engage, analyze what they're hearing from residents, also to better more deeply understand the problems at a kind of a deep systemic scale because it's so much information all at once, you really do need the technological tools to interpret it and to collect it as well. And so two examples of how tools are supporting city hall staff and particularly those who are at the kind of bleeding edge of practice in city halls, which those are the folks that we work with every day, the public innovation practitioners, I love this example in Savannah, Georgia. We are working closely with an innovation team that is tasked with supporting neighborhoods in achieving greater climate resilience. And a big problem in Savannah, given it's a Southern city, it's a coastal city, is flooding. And the city started to work with the FEMA maps to understand where the flooding was happening, where the floodplains were. But as they were engaging residents and the neighborhoods that they were focused on, they were hearing that residents were experiencing flooding in places that weren't identified on the FEMA maps. And so they realized that they needed kind of the resident insight to better understand the reality of flooding in the city. And so they worked with academics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and used a map spot tool that the university has had for a long time that projects digital maps on a wall. And then we overlay sheets of paper and with residents, you start to mark up those maps so that residents can say, "Well, I experienced flooding here on this corner in this street with this curiosity." And then that input is kind of woven back into the digital maps that the city is now using across city departments that have responsibility for the public realm from the transportation department to the parks department to evaluate the different interventions that they can design to mitigate the flooding from greening strategies to better stormwater management in a very place-based resident-informed way. And that's that combination of the digital and the analog working together so you can have an interface that's friendly for resident input, but then the digital tools to make it much more effective for city staff to be able to analyze that data and then design the interventions. **Steven Goldsmith:** That's a great example. I was speaking this week to officials in St. Louis, which created an immersive approach to community engagement where the community can fly a butterfly through the community, stop at a building, look at what the proposal is for that building, move to the next building. And the ability to improve the imagination and understanding of communities about what the future may be is, it's like what you've just said, is an exciting way to kind of capture input. **Francisca Rojas:** Yeah. We're seeing a lot of cities as well developing digital twins for exactly that purpose, to help residents kind of project and imagine what a different future state could be like in their city, but it's also a tool for participatory planning. We were just with the city of Orlando a few months ago prototyping a digital twin that residents can use to better understand affordable housing projects in the city and kind of explore all the different implications from traffic, what the sidewalk would look like, what the different amenities that come with the project would look like and how they would experience that and really kind of in an immersive and participatory way, also give feedback and ask questions of those projects. And ultimately what Orlando's hoping is that it really facilitates the approval of those projects in city council and really expedites their ability to deliver on affordable housing. **Steven Goldsmith:** Let's stay on this for a second, that was a great example. Whether you're generally innovating or you're working on controversial issues like affordable housing, what's the role of narrative and how does technology affect the ability to use narrative for community support? **Francisca Rojas:** I think it's a really powerful storytelling tool, right? With the digital twin, it's visualization, but it's in 3D, it's interactive. It helps I think residents see themselves as a protagonist in that experience. I'm trained as an urban planner. In planning, we're always projecting into the future and we're imagining what different tomorrow could be and what the sorts of interventions that you need to get to that outcome, which typically our aims are for increased well being and better quality of life for residents. And I think it's really hard to convey that transformation in kind of technical terms or even in words. We've often used renderings. I think for the Anacostia Waterfront, we used watercolor renderings that were really beautiful, but they were static, right? This was 25 years ago and they were static. And today, people can really see themselves in that future. I think it helps to dismantle a lot of fears that people have about change and help them kind of dream in more ambitious ways. **Steven Goldsmith:** That's great, thanks. Let's move to kind of a cousin of that issue, the better understanding of a community's needs through technology. You were briefly telling me about the Maryland innovation i-team. Could you go through that story again? I thought that was particularly compelling. **Francisca Rojas:** Sure. So we're supporting an innovation team for the state of Maryland. It's the first ever state-level innovation team. Typically, we work with innovation teams in city halls, and one of their first initiatives that they delivered about three months ago is the Maryland Community Business Compass. And it is a platform that is designed for local entrepreneurs that particularly want to create services for childcare and for fresh food in underserved communities in the state. And what the platform does is find funding opportunities and help those entrepreneurs access business support resources by scanning all of the policies and programs statewide that are available to them in terms of funding and technical assistance to start up those types of businesses. But it also geolocates those opportunities and tells you what programs are eligible for those communities because the program is targeting neighborhoods that are underserved, particularly in those services. So it connects the people who want to deliver those services with the communities that need it the most. And what the platform does is uses AI, uses a large language model to scan all of the PDF documents where all those very bureaucratic places where that information tends to live that a resident wouldn't even know where to look. And so it scans all of those resources, chunks the text, it processes it through an LLM and then extracts structured insights that are classified from an individual perspective, a community perspective, or any sorts of relevant statistics that could be informative for an entrepreneur who wants to create a sustainable business in those neighborhoods. And then all that information is spatially located to the census tracks that are most in need of childcare and fresh food access. **Steven Goldsmith:** So this is terrific in and of itself, but it's also an excellent example of another important contribution that government can make. So you have big box retailers who have property experts who identify transportation patterns and what other competitors are nearby, what's the discretionary income, et cetera, and they make a site decision. If you are a mom and pop and you want to either open a retail store or a childcare center or fill in the blank, previously your access to information was much more restricted. So the barriers to entry were quite difficult. What you have suggested is that there is a role for government in making information more available, which will help folks make market-based decisions, and we can reduce those transaction costs of acquiring that information. It's such a critical role. I'm glad you called that out. Do you see anybody else doing that sort of work or is Maryland the leader now? **Francisca Rojas:** I think it's a first of its kind platform, and I'll point to something else that I think is significant about this tool and in that contrast with the way that big box stores do their kind of location decisions. They're not thinking about matching their services specifically to those neighborhoods that need the services the most, and they are also typically not the best fresh food providers for communities. So here, there's an aim of providing childcare services so that those communities can also enter the workforce more easily and more affordably, but also providing fresh food so that we're guaranteeing access to food security, but healthy food in neighborhoods that typically don't have access. **Steven Goldsmith:** So that was a great message, particularly to chief data officers who can be advocates for that. Let's challenge you on the following. Let's say you're giving advice to a chief innovation officer or a mayor on what they can do to create a culture for innovation that helps overcome the restrictions in the legacy systems. What should they do? How do you create more than just an innovation in a city? **Francisca Rojas:** Well, the fact that they already have the role of chief innovation officer is a huge first step, right? Having somebody who's responsible every day for tackling tough challenges, it's more common now than it used to be, but there's still room, still more opportunity for that. I think that the essential building blocks of innovation in city halls is being very mission-driven, understanding what the problem is that you're trying to solve and understanding why previous efforts have failed. What are we missing in the solutions? And typically these are the types of problems that don't have an off-the-shelf solution or those off-the-shelf policy solutions have failed in the past. And so there's getting a really deep understanding of the problem, but you need to be able to open doors to the other departments within city government, but also, so the internal insights that the city hall might have been missing in the past, but also the external insights, really engaging the right stakeholders that are critical to understanding the problem or who experienced that problem. So cutting across the styles of government, understanding that the solutions don't come from just inside government, they really need input from elsewhere. Collaboration is also really critical. Governments these days don't have all of the resources or all of the tools to address very, very complex problems and that are so dynamic and they're changing. They're not static problems. We've got so many forces at play. All you have to do is just read the newspaper from one day to the other and you're like, "Well, that's happening now." And having a leader, the mayoral support is so core and mayoral buy-in is really important to opening those doors, to giving license to reach outside of government, but also driving the motivation towards an ambitious approach to the work. **Steven Goldsmith:** Is there an example we should be paying attention to? **Francisca Rojas:** Just an example from this week, we had the Baltimore i-team present to the city council on a one-city approach to this longstanding problem of vacant housing in the city. There's I think currently 14,000 vacant buildings that are kind of known and registered to the city, and for a long time the city has been very focused on rehabilitating those buildings, but as they've been rehabilitating those buildings, new vacant buildings have come online. So they're just really running after a problem that continues to grow. And so they just don't make as much headway as they need to on rehabilitating housing. So what the one-city approach does and what the innovation team came to understand by speaking with people who live in neighborhoods with the challenge of vacancy, but also speaking with experts who have been working on this and community developers that have been working on this in community organizations that support families that live in neighborhoods that experience broad-scale vacancy, is that there's still not effective policies to address the prevention of new vacant housing. And so now the one-city strategy really looks to coordinate all of the different aspects of city government that can focus on vacancy and it's driven by the un-affordability of housing repairs by tangled titles that prevents people from staying in their homes. So working on both the prevention and the rehabilitation is the type of insight that an innovation approach can bring to the city. **Steven Goldsmith:** Yeah. You sound quite knowledgeable. Can I get some advice? **Francisca Rojas:** Sure! **Steven Goldsmith:** So we have a project funded by the Knight Foundation that is oriented around how generative AI can improve the way cities and the way they perform and community groups can engage each other, so how can you use generative AI to better understand what's happening in your community so that you can have more constructive interaction with the city. And the city officials to use the same. So if I wanted to structure these projects to create maximum innovation, using generative AI to create innovation in community engagement, what recommendations do you have? How do we structure it? Who should be at the table? How do you think about improving the operations of government through the use of generative AI for community engagement? **Francisca Rojas:** I would say that, I think this holds true for civic technology generally, is that the user perspective is key. What are the inputs that you need that you are looking for from residents? What is the motivation for them to even engage with the system and what is the change that you hope that the tool will enable? And I think those design principles are going to be true across the board. With generative AI tools, I think it's also important in the process of designing it that the stakeholders all understand what's under the hood. What is the source data that is being used for the model? How do you train it? Is it kind of off-the-shelf commercial? How do you make it a trustworthy tool and that the results reflect a reality that's relevant to the community? I think those just off the top of my head would be important. In terms of who leads it, maybe it's an intermediary that knows how to produce dialogue between the city hall and a community if that trust isn't there already. If it is, then it's a great opportunity for city halls to build those relationships. What we're seeing is that in some places like in Austin, they're really eager to have resident-facing GenAI tools to help with that relationship building. And their City Hall is so large and it's so representative, they've been testing them internally first to refine it so that by the time you get to a resident-facing, you're not really dropping the ball or entering into maybe kind of riskier outcomes because you can't cause harm, right? You can't cause harm. It's so important for city halls to maintain trust. **Steven Goldsmith:** I like the idea of testing it on yourself first. That's a good idea. **Francisca Rojas:** Yeah. That's Daniel Culotta, who is the innovation director in Austin. **Steven Goldsmith:** You have such a great opportunity, right? You're assisting these cities with innovation, but you're learning from such a huge network of innovators. You have a unique place for perspective. I think that the legacy systems of government are the enemies of innovation, right? The administrative processes, the HR processes, the procurement processes, the hierarchal processes. So can you really be successful until you change the structure of government? **Francisca Rojas:** I think it's fundamental and we were just having a conversation yesterday. We have a Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellowship program at the Center that I didn't discuss earlier, but we give really experienced public sector practitioners who have been doing the work in city halls an opportunity to join us at the center for one or two years and take a step back and reflect on their practice and codify their learnings on behalf of the field so they can kind of feed it back to practitioners. And one of our newest fellows who started with us last week, she was leading permitting for Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania. And before that, she was the innovation director in Philadelphia. Her name is Eliza Erickson. And we were just talking about how permitting and procurement are really hot right now in the innovation space because exactly the reason you just said, Steven, there are these fundamental functions of government that create significant blocks, and we are seeing that kind of open innovation approaches are helping to kind of hack those systems. I was just talking about Mexico City and how they have turned procurement around and into an open system, particularly for their transportation investments. And they are utilizing and have been utilizing open procurement processes where all the information is transparent, it's available. They do market studies to understand what the latest technology is. First, they did it with bike shares, but they've also done it with scooters, with BRTs, and then really invite the vendors to propose the solutions and then they use reverse auctions to basically bid down the cost of the service and they've achieved really remarkable cost savings through this open procurement approach. So we're finding a lot of innovation in permitting in procurement. I think it's exciting, but it needs to be deeper and more pervasive. **Steven Goldsmith:** Thank you so much. Well, this is Steve Goldsmith. We have had a fascinating conversation with Francisca Rojas who directs the innovations work at the Bloomberg Center at Johns Hopkins. Thank you so much for your observations and your work as you push forth innovation in a way that helps cities. It's been a great discussion and thanks for your time. **Francisca Rojas:** Well, I really appreciate this opportunity to chat with you, Steven, and to reconnect after so many years. I think I'll just leave everybody with an inspiration. I think this really is the moment for cities to make a choice to think differently. They can hold the trust line. They can continue to show government that it can deliver progress for residents, and innovation capabilities are the ones that are going to demonstrate the capacity to listen, to adapt and to deliver for residents. I feel very privileged to be in this role and to run this organization on behalf of practitioners who are on the front lines every day and ultimately who are trying to really improve lives for their residents. **Steven Goldsmith:** Thank you so much. ## About the Author ### Betsy Gardner ![Headshot of Betsy Gardner](/sites/g/files/omnuum10826/files/styles/hwp_1_1__100x100_scale/public/2025-05/Betsy%20Headshot%20resize.jpg?itok=k2OsSp1g) Betsy Gardner is the editor of Data-Smart City Solutions and the producer of the Data-Smart City Pod. Prior to this, Betsy worked in a variety of roles in higher education, focusing on deconstructing racial and gender inequality through research, writing, and facilitation. She also researched government spending and transparency at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Betsy holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Policy from Northeastern University, a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Boston University, and a graduate certificate in Digital Storytelling from the Harvard Extension School. See also:- [ Artificial Intelligence ](/topics/artificial-intelligence) - [ Civic Data ](/topics/civic-data) - [ Data Visualization ](/topics/data-visualization) - [ Innovation ](/topics/innovation) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)