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Symposium on Institutional Innovation in Cities
7 January @ 15:00 – 9 January @ 13:00 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
This symposium is a partnership between The Institutional Architecture Lab (TIAL) and the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University.
City governments worldwide face complex challenges that cut across traditional departmental boundaries – from climate adaptation and organized crime to mental health and energy transitions. Traditional vertical hierarchies and functional silos were designed for stable, bounded problems in the 19th century. Today’s overlapping emergencies and slow-burning crises demand different organizational forms, particularly to make the most of data, digital technologies, and AI, which have opened up radically different options for public institutions.
This symposium explores how cities can move beyond hierarchies to design institutions – platforms, stacks, networks, and other forms – that coordinate across boundaries. We will collectively map emerging innovations worldwide: such as Chief Heat Officers orchestrating cross-agency responses to extreme heat, emergency operations centers integrating real-time data across departments, care hubs combining services in walkable neighborhoods, and digital platforms that simplify citizen access while enabling new forms of coordination.
Who will participate
The symposium convenes city leaders, senior practitioners, academic researchers, and institutional innovators from across the globe to share knowledge, analyze cases, and advance our collective understanding of institutional design for cities.
Expected Outcomes
- Mapping emerging cross-cutting coordination innovations across cities and domains
- Identifying gaps and opportunities for institutional design
- Linking a network of scholars and practitioners committed to advancing institutional innovation in cities
- Feeding into new tools and playbooks for institutional design in cities
Agenda overview
Wednesday, Jan 7
Evening: Welcome reception [time and location to be confirmed]
Thursday, Jan 8
09:00 | Opening Session: Institutional design & Cross-cutting Coordination
11:15 | Thematic Session 1: Emergencies, Climate & Nature
14:00 | Thematic Session 2: Digital Services, Infrastructures & Data
15:30 | Thematic Session 3: People, Places & Care
17:00 | Reflection Day 1
19:00 | Group Dinner
Friday, Jan 9
09:00 | Recap + Objectives for the day
09:30 | Making sense of new grammars & models
11:15–12:45 | Reflections on design dimensions and forms
13:00 | Closing
Pre-reading
The City as Mesh: Options for Handling Cross-Cutting Tasks in City Governments
This dossier examines options for organizing cities in the late 2020s and beyond, focusing on cross-cutting tasks and methods for horizontal organization.