City Administration

On November 8, 2024, three days after the presidential election, the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and The Kresge Foundation brought together the chiefs of staff of the thirty largest U.S. cities for an already scheduled convening...

In the world of government contracting, requests for proposal, or RFPs, are rarely exciting to anyone but the company who wins the work. But city leaders everywhere should pay attention to a creative RFP issued by the city of Boston earlier this year. It...

Cities today face mounting pressure to deliver more effective services using fewer resources. To meet these challenges, performance management systems must evolve. This paper proposes “StatGPT,” a next-generation, technology-enabled approach that builds...

Local governments today face problems that do not neatly fit within departmental lines—whether it’s homelessness, climate resilience, or effective service delivery. These challenges demand systems that work across agencies, not just within them. Success...

This article originally appeared in Government Technology. As cities confront a falloff in revenues compounded by competition from a wide range of new uses for curb and sidewalk space, the time has come to appropriately price parking and other uses at the...

This article originally appeared in Governing Magazine. Five years ago this month, Sidewalk Labs, then a sister company of Google, pulled the plug on plans to build a high-tech city neighborhood of the future on the lakeshore of Toronto. Pitched as a...

This was produced as part of the Community Data Health Initiative , generously funded from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Introduction In 2007 the Bloomberg administration outlined a sweeping commitment to the environment in a long-term plan called...

This article originally appeared in Government Technology. Few areas of municipal operations present as much complexity, political anxiety and opportunity as the property tax system, which stretches from planning and building permits to assessments and...

This article originally appeared in Governing Magazine. In our program at the Harvard Kennedy School we explore exemplary data practices in city governments to identify the principles that will take municipal data use to the next level. In June we...