Urban Imaginaries
Urban Imaginaries is designed to promote city innovation and will strengthen the innovation capabilities of mayors and city leaders in secondary cities across Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. In doing so, city governments will gain the skills needed to solve complex urban challenges and enable sustainable development across the region.
Inspiration Sessions
Storytelling for Systems Change
PowerPoint | 2-pager | Azerbaijani | Georgian | Ukrainian
This session introduces city teams to storytelling for system change. Building on the work done by CPI, the session will show to city teams how stories can be a vehicle for building empathy, changing mindsets and learning, and thereby lead to systems change. The practical part of this session will be dedicated to showcasing to cities how they can voice stories from communi- ties on the ground, irrespective of what city problem teams are working on.
Participatory Foresight
PowerPoint | Ukrainian | Russian | Romanian
In times of increasingly rapid change, growing complexity, and critical uncertainty, responsible governance requires preparing for the unexpected. This inspiration session will introduce participants to participatory foresight, a structured and systematic way of anticipating and better preparing for possible futures. Participants will get introduced a case study – Rustavi, Georgia, showing some of the practical tools that are increasingly used today by city leaders to analyse emerging trends, anticipate possible risks and engage their communities in designing their futures.
Human-Learning Systems (HLS)
This inspiration session introduces participants to a new method of public management - Human Learning Systems, and explains how it encourages learning across the planning and implementation of any public program. Building on the work currently being done by CPI and delivered within the Urban Imaginaries program, this session uses case studies and examples to show how this is being piloted at city-level, country-level as well as globally. Using these examples, the session also illustrates the limitations of a traditional ‘scaling’ approach often adopted by governments, and instead advocates for scaling of experimentation and the capacity to learn within government. This session builds on the recently released report ‘Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious.’
Innovative Resource Mobilization
How do we support alternative financing ways? This inspiration session introduces participants to potential pathways their respective cities can take to improve their resource mobilization strategy. The session will be an opportunity for participating municipalities to discuss alternative ways to better understand their financial needs, improve their budgeting initiatives, and strengthen the transparency of their financial frameworks by using the Responsible Sensing Toolkit (RST) designed by the City Innovation Exchange Lab (CITIXL) in Amsterdam. Participants will have the opportunity to exchange with CITIXL co-founder Paul Manwaring on how RST can help to put more ethical (and more efficient) solutions for fundraising and budgeting in place in their respective contexts.
Internal resources
Overview of Urban Imaginaries Program
External resources
Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious
Introduction to Systems Thinking for Civil Servants: Driving Improved Outcomes in Complex Situations
Innovation in the face of crisis: Insights from European cities
Armenia's Transformative Urban Future: National Urban Assessment