The world's most innovative local governments

Local governments have a structural advantage over national ones in terms of innovation: they are closer to the problem, have shorter decision cycles and can experiment at small scale before scaling up. Porto Alegre, Brazil, introduced participatory budgeting in 1989, allowing citizens to vote directly on the distribution of part of the municipal budget. The model was so successful that the UN included it as a reference practice and it was adopted by more than 3,000 municipalities worldwide.

Barcelona implemented the concept of "superblocks" from 2016: the reorganisation of urban space into blocks of nine city blocks where through traffic is excluded, freeing the interior for pedestrian, cycling and community use. Data from the first district implemented, Poblenou, showed noise reductions, air quality improvements and increased commercial and social activity in the recovered spaces. The city of Paris adopted a similar concept with its "fifteen-minute city" and several European cities evaluated their own adaptations.

Singapore, Medellín and Vienna appear recurrently in urban governance innovation indices. Medellín went from being the most dangerous city in the world in the 1990s to winning urban planning awards for its transformation through cable cars, libraries and urban interventions in the most marginalised neighbourhoods. Vienna maintains a social housing model covering 60% of the population, which consistently makes it one of the cities with the highest quality of life in the world according to multiple international indices. In all these cases, local innovation preceded national policy by years or decades.