City governments across the world usually organise much of their work through functional hierarchies – departments or secretariats with specialised responsibility for transport, housing, sanitation, education, environment and so on. Their approaches mirror those of national governments and the traditional multi-divisional business which had separate teams for manufacturing, marketing, sales, and for different product lines.
Those hierarchical structures became the norm in the late 19th century and they still work well for stable, bounded problems. They ensure clear accountability; a concentration of specialised knowledge; and a means to engage relevant stakeholders. Often, they bring together officials and professionals with a strong shared ethos – whether for policing or education, transport or housing.
But vertical silos have also always created problems. Many priorities don’t fit them neatly. Sometimes departments clash, or dump costs onto each other. They may fail to share vital information.
There is a long history of attempts to create more coherent, coordinated ways of working, and as cities face overlapping emergencies (from pandemics to climate disasters), and slow-burning crises (in jobs, care, security and housing) that cut across these silos, many are looking for new ways to coordinate action.
Some of the new options make the most of digital technologies which make it much easier to organise horizontally – with shared platforms, data or knowledge, or one-stop shops or portals for citizens. Some involve new roles (for digital, heat or resilience), new types of team or task force (such as I-Teams for innovation). And many involve new kinds of partnership or collaboration, with mesh-like structures instead of the traditional pyramid hierarchies of public administration.
This dossier is part of a broader exercise on how to imagine and build institutions for city governments across the world conducted by TIAL with the support of the Bloomberg Philanthropies. Here we briefly look at some interesting cases from around
the world along with possible frameworks for understanding the challenges of coordination and using new tools to solve them.
Part of the aim is to liberate cities from the constraints of traditional 19th and 20th century pyramids, which still predominate in their everyday work. These administrative models still have their place. But in an era which has seen extraordinary organisational innovation (from TikTok and Google to Nvidia and Wikipedia) as well as the rise of complex new needs and demands, cities which rely too heavily on old models risk being neither sufficiently agile nor sufficiently trusted to thrive.
