ABOUT THIS REPORT
This report was prepared by StateUp in collaboration with Visa and Resilient Cities Network. Findings and suggested actions are based on in-depth interviews, a survey of city officials, and desk research conducted by StateUp, working with Visa and Resilient Cities Network, as well as our long-run work with government agencies around the world and with the broader public-purpose technology innovation ecosystem.
OUR APPROACH
Unique data
Our unique dataset and qualitative research is grounded in the experiences of city teams and leaders. We map the challenges they face and illuminate novel case studies, sometimes in challenging circumstances, of engaging public financial innovation to make cities more resilient to critical shocks and stresses. The report also presents actions that can further empower cities to engage public financial technologies to meet critical needs, based on our in-depth research and co-creation with city leaders and other key stakeholders.
Digital as a tool, not an end
Approaches to addressing complex challenges necessarily require a combination of policy, technological, and behavioral levers. In this report, our key focus is on technological tools, but we do not treat them in a silo. As our suggested actions show, evidence-based policymaking, behavioral change, and digital adoption are mutually reinforcing, together enabling innovative approaches to tackling major public needs.
City participation in numbers
More than 30 cities were engaged through survey research and individual semi-structured interviews. We engaged city officials in both city Resilience Teams (primarily Chief Resilience Officers), and Digital, Data, and Innovation Teams (primarily Chief Data or Digital Officers). This included interviews with the Chief Resilience Officer and other relevant city officials from cities including Athens (Greece); Broward County (USA); Cape Town (South Africa); Mexico City (Mexico); San Antonio (USA); and Santa Fe (Argentina). Interviews were also conducted with digital, data, and innovation officials and related stakeholders in cities including Copenhagen (Denmark), Kyiv (Ukraine), London (UK), and Tel Aviv (Israel).
30 cities participated in the survey research, including four cities from Africa, six from the Asia Pacific region, five from Europe and the Middle East, eight from Latin America and the Caribbean, and seven from North America. The list below displays all cities engaged through interviews and survey responses for this research.
PARTICIPATING CITIES
CORE TERMS
Urban Resilience: the capacity of a city’s systems, businesses, institutions, communities, and individuals to survive, adapt, and thrive, no matter what chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. (Source: Resilient Cities Network)
Public Financial Innovation: the updated infrastructure, policies, business models, and city-level ecosystems needed to enable enhanced government financial processes and serve communities through them
Public Financial Technologies: technologies at the core of Public Financial Innovation, including digital payments solutions.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Cities that thrive explores how urban centers can harness public financial innovation to help confront critical twenty-first century challenges, and prosper amid them.
The twenty-first century has proven to be full of uncharted territory for cities, from pandemics to increasingly widespread climate-change impacts and ongoing social, economic, and technological change. Resilient cities have the capacity to thrive in the face of such uncertainty and adversity. By building urban resilience, cities can help protect infrastructure and ecosystems, promote economic stability and social cohesion, safeguard public health and wellbeing, and help ensure the sustainability of their city for future generations. Cities that Thrive showcases how city governments can take steps to achieve rapid, context-driven progress across these critical areas by integrating Public Financial Technologies as a foundational layer within their resilience toolkit.
The aim of this report is both to map the current situation and to identify new trends in how cities engage public financial technologies. It further offers practical models for building up the urban public finance innovation ecosystem critical to meeting current challenges and preparing for future ones. Our data shows that cities across the globe have already started to engage public financial technologies, but may only just be starting to recognize the potential that these innovations can offer.
Why this matters now
- Cities face significant financial and broader resource constraints in addressing their key resilience needs. Under such constraints innovation can be key to more effectively and efficiently serving local needs.
- Cities are critically concerned about climate change, in every global region. Many opportunities exist for them to engage digital payments solutions, data-driven decision-making, and public purchasing innovation as vehicles to mitigate, adapt to, and respond to the impacts of climate change and extreme weather.
- A broader range of city needs, including social equity and financial inclusion, are often underserved by current practices, and public financial innovation has a clear role to play in helping cities to address them.
- There is a far greater level of data, insights, and decision-support tools on offer than cities are currently using. Payments and financial data and data analytics, for example, represent a promising opportunity for cities’ planning and response strategies, enabling cities to support local communities and economies in a more tailored and effective way.
“I see a lot of potential benefits of my team's work and the data work we do for resilience. [...] The most success we’ve had is when we start working collaboratively [with resilience teams] from the basis of saying ‘what problem do you want to solve?’ and let's build something together.”
Theo Blackwell MBE, Chief Digital Officer, London
As our research shows, the journey to integrating public financial technologies is not always simple. Barriers, ranging from organizational silos to technical capacity gaps within government and among vulnerable populations, can slow or limit change. In our survey research, most digital teams reported no mandate to work on policy challenges relating to social equity, economic opportunity, water security, food security, or resilience to natural hazards. In addition, 33% of city resilience teams said they had no visibility or input into digital projects.
There is no “magic wand” solution: no two cities are exactly the same, and their approach to integrating public financial technologies must necessarily start from the needs and challenges faced by local communities. Success stories nonetheless reveal a common theme: action should be collective, involving, and led by, participants from across the public-purpose innovation ecosystem (see Figure 1), including city government, residents, and the private sector. There are many lessons that can be learned from the experiences of other cities, and general principles that can help to galvanize the use of public financial technologies as a key lever for urban resilience.
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