arcxcenter

Smarter Cities

We help local governments, city administrations and municipalities:

Map their own administration innovation ecosystem.
Identify development opportunities in priority areas for administrations and citizens.
Develop innovation agendas and roadmaps based on existing internal innovation drivers.
Build smarter public-private partnerships and new funding mechanisms based on incremental development and quick wins.
Make their programs and cities smarter places to live.

We help urban tech companies:

Design and implement co-development innovation strategies with local governments, city administrations and municipalities
Design and implement impact assessment systems

Institutional Innovation

We study political, economic and social institutions to advice national and regional authorities, civil society and the private sector on how to modernize human systems and make the world a freer place to live.

Capacity Development

We create, design and implement educational curricula, programs, workshops and executive training modules for governments, universities and firms seeking to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals in their business models and operations.

Reform of the Parliamentary System in Portugal

June 3, 2019June 28, 2019arcxcenter

The purpose of this book is to create and offer reflection and work tools for inter-party collaboration around the design and implementation of new configurations and new consensuses for the Portuguese parliamentary system.

It was not written to punish the system, to denigrate it, to destroy it or to discredit it. The focus and discourse throughout the pages of this book are constructive and center on the possibility of institutional innovation and improvement of the parliamentary system from the opportunities identified by the more than one thousand people who collaborated in this project.

It is an empirical, historical and positivist, non-partisan exercise that departs from reality as presented in the present to idealize how it could be in the future; and thus encourage new behaviors, attitudes and decisions on the part of political actors.

Thus, in this work we are also faced with an exercise in political philosophy, as value judgments are issued around problems that need to be resolved.

Purchase the book here.

Smarter NYC Case Studies

June 1, 2019June 13, 2019arcxcenter

How City Agencies Innovate

The “Smart(er) NYCitywide Research Group” was created by André Corrêa d’Almeida with scholars from 13 universities and research institutes, with the goal of developing case studies aiming at examining how innovation from within the New York City government is making urban systems smarter and shaping people’s lives. The focus is on how city agencies have been adapting to and adopting new data and technology innovations to make their management systems more inclusive and responsive to decision making and citizens, their success, failures and replicability. These case studies will be published by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2018. In addition to this single-city project with New York City (U.S.) the initiative also includes a cities-cluster project with Lisbon and Cascais (Portugal). This “Smart(er) City” initiative is also being expanded to the UK, China and Latin America.

General Objective and Research Questions

The School of International and Public Affairs’ (SIPA) Master of Public Administration in Development Practice (MPA – DP) Program of Columbia University (CU) is partnering with The City of New York in an effort, led by Professor André Corrêa d’Almeida, to map the ecology of innovation in NYC. More specifically, the case studies will be based on smart city initiatives identified across city agencies. The project’s unifying objectives are to:

Describe the process of how specific smart city innovations were initiated, developed and implemented within NYC agencies;
Reveal key roles, interactions, decisions, challenges and best practices that contributed to successful innovation and solutions;
Uncover behavioral aspects capable of hindering creativity and innovation across city agencies;
Identify institutional elements, incentives and contextual variables that fostered innovation;
Highlight organizational attributes that supported innovation;
Discuss how NYC’s programs compare to a sample of similar programs around the world;
Describe outcomes and discuss the assessment and impact of the initiatives;
Recommend next-generation enhancements to these programs; discuss how NYC’s innovation policies can facilitate growth of these programs; discuss the “way forward” for optimizing benefits for NYC;
Showcase NYC as an incubator and test-bed for innovative smart city initiatives and help reimagine bottom-up possibilities that emerge from within public administration.