LocationsCities in Motion: Reimagining Urban Innovation
October 1, 2025
More than half of humanity now lives in cities. By 2050, this figure will surge to nearly 70%. Cities also generate more than 80% of the world’s GDP, serving as engines of prosperity, platforms for innovation, and purveyors of culture. This is why the United Nations has been supporting sustainable urban development since the foundation of UN Habitat in 1977; the Cities Alliance joined the fray in 1999. After the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals as the overarching framework of global governance, several UN agencies, including UNDP, joined the Local 2030 Initiative meant to accelerate the implementation of the Goals at a local level. UNDP brings to the table substantial work on cities, including flagship projects such as Mayors 4 Economic Growth, the Cities Experiment Fund, and the Mayors Challenge.
Yet, these same spaces still reflect our greatest social, environmental and economic fault lines. From the expansion of informal settlements to the intensifying impacts of climate shocks, cities face a multitude of interconnected stressors. COVID-19 compounded the crisis of urban poverty, while underfunded transport systems and unplanned sprawl have strained infrastructure and widened inequality. As disasters increase in frequency and intensity, vulnerabilities are exposed. Despite these challenges, there’s an opportunity to reimagine cities as inclusive, resilient ecosystems, which the work of UNDP’s Accelerator Labs illustrates.
Raving About Cities: How Next Practices Emerge
In 2024, UNDP launched a new approach to global learning: R&D Raves. Each Rave starts from observing a pattern where many Country Offices, independently from one another, direct substantial innovation efforts to the same thematic focus. Through the R&D Rave, they join forces with each other and with partner organizations to form a loose learning coalition. Over a period of several months, they come to a shared understanding of the new opportunities they’re seeing. R&D Raves bring these actors together across boundaries—geographic, organizational, and disciplinary—to co-create a deeper understanding of emerging opportunities.
In the case of cities, 31 UNDP Accelerator Labs, spanning from Africa to Latin America are innovating around cities. Most experimentation is focused on public spaces, transport and mobility, and urban waste. We launched an R&D Rave to explore what patterns emerge in urban innovation in our Network.
Rethinking Public Spaces for Social Cohesion
One pattern that surfaced globally is the reinvention of public spaces as catalysts for social cohesion, cultural identity and climate resilience. From markets to parks, UNDP is working with cities to rethink who these spaces serve and how they are shaped.
- In Panama, public markets are being transformed from underutilized public spaces into active centers of community life and experimentation. They’re more than just commercial spaces; they’re the epicenters of life in cities. That’s why the Accelerator Lab used rapid ethnography to co-design them in a way that builds on the historical, cultural, and gastronomical relevance of the market and the barrio of Santa Ana, drawing on people's memory and emotional connection to the neighborhood. This has translated into a “placemaking strategy” that is activating the underutilized public space as a means to strengthen social cohesion through leisure time, market events and circularity initiatives in the market.
- In a different experiment, the Lab in Panama conducted generative AI workshops in Betania, where intergenerational groups visualized climate change scenarios in their neighborhoods. These AI-generated images became powerful tools for surfacing emotional and social responses—bringing together different generations of citizens to talk about the role of infrastructure in promoting or hindering social cohesion. While the AI generated images lacked some context, they made climate change more tangible and urgent.
To explore the possibilities of AI in improving civic engagement, students at the University of Panama created scenarios using UrbanistAI - a platform that allows real-time rendering of images – to explore a potential future.
- In North Macedonia, the Lab focused on urban heat islands in Skopje, where densely built areas with minimal greenery trap heat and exacerbate climate vulnerability. They initiated conversations with communities about their lived experience of heat and drew policymakers into the discussion through storytelling about nature-based solutions. Additionally, the Lab facilitated citizen-led crowd mapping of potable water sources, jumpstarting a movement that drew media attention. Building on this work, the Lab also produced a comprehensive analysis of urban cooling solutions, drawing on a dataset of approximately 250 examples from cities around the world.
Mobility and Transport: Reimagining the Right to Move
Within urban mobility, Labs explored how transport reflects social norms and economic dynamics such as inequality and informality.
- In Colombia, the Lab confronted the complexity of mobility through a data-driven and empathy-informed approach in Bogotá. They conducted an experiment with photogrammetry, a technique that uses images to model the world, to help city officials take a fresh perspective on the problem of illegal parking. Rather than treating bad parking as a nuisance, the Lab tried to understand the motivation behind parking decisions and why people made them. It also reframed parking as a quality-of-life challenge that was impacted by deeper issues such as corruption, informal norms around car ownership, and the politics of enforcement. Well-designed public transportation can also improve quality of life, but it’s critical to start with a clear understanding of how existing informal transportation works. Data tools helped uncover the relational landscape—who speaks, who benefits, and who obstructs—as a starting point for the future of transportation in Bogotá.
- In Senegal, where formal transport options are limited, the UNDP Accelerator Lab spotlighted the critical role of moto taxis in enabling access to jobs. Participation in this sector—largely informal and dominated by youth—can be hampered by discrimination and regulatory gaps. To address this, the Lab piloted the introduction of electric moto taxis, seeking to reduce pollution while enhancing job quality and dignity. The Lab is working to generate interest from private investors and policy actors, positioning moto taxis not as a problem to regulate, but as a potential solution to scale.
Food for Thought from Raving in Cities
A couple of cross-cutting themes also emerged from the Rave process. And while they aren’t quite patterns, they point to design considerations that are worth acknowledging.
- Gender dimensions. The R&D rave helped us understand the way gender impacts how people experience public transportation. For example, in Bogota, where driving confers social status, cars can anonymize women’s identities while public transport often exposes women to risk. This might incentivize women away from using public transport, which has implications for cities that want to reduce carbon emissions and traffic.
- Tradeoffs and inclusion during crises. In the context of Ukraine where multiple crises persist, questions around heritage, accessibility, and displacement emerged: what should be preserved, and for whom? For example, how might it be possible to build inclusive systems when some communities are invisible in planning processes? These are tensions that are important to confront, but difficult to resolve.
- Post-funding realities. Of course, there’s the perennial question of what happens after funding ends. A colleague from a foundation prioritizing mobility work and others highlighted the unease around project exits. Too often, conversations about sustainability are postponed indefinitely, leading to dependency or disappointment. Several Labs are grappling with this head-on as they aim to design for durable impact, even as many of their experiments can yield valuable insight in the short-term.
Closing Observations about Raving for Cities
Reflecting on the multiple conversations that composed the Cities Rave, there is one observation that’s worth sitting with: interventions often emerge when symptoms become intolerable. From bike lanes to public market reimaginations, change often begins with discomfort.
The real breakthroughs came from embracing messiness—cities are systems of competing intents. A moto taxi driver wants to make a living while a policymaker wants to reduce emissions. The Labs engage with these tensions and ensure that sensemaking is a practice shared with the urban communities they serve. Whether through AI-generated visioning in Panama or citizen-sourced water maps in North Macedonia, the Cities Rave reminded us: transformation often begins with the idea that cities are not just sites of complex problems, but landscapes of potential solutions.
Note: Huge thanks to Siddhi Patil for her inspired visual sensemaking during the rave and for our contributing sketchnotes for this piece.