Creative Bureacracy Is Possible. Here Are 3 Things Cities Do to Foster Innovative Local Government

credit: Flickr

Want to make your city more efficient and liveable? Try breaking away from the old ways of doing things.

That's the upshot of a new study out of the University of New South Wales that looks at how some of the world's biggest cities are innovatingor at least trying toto solve some of their biggest problems, including housing affordability, climate change, and public transit, the Guardian reports.

The study, published in the Journal of Urban Policy, looked at how cities around the world are doing it, including Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) and Bologna's Office of Civic Imagination.

"They work with an explicit tolerance of failure and learning until a version of a policy, or a way of delivering a service, begins to work better," the study's lead author says in a press release.

"The return on investment here is [] so much greater if we fail and then change 'fail' to 'learn,'" one of the study's participants says.

The study found that some of the world's biggest cities are doing this by breaking away from the "business as usual" model of city government and embracing "human-centered design, co-design, co-creation, and

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