In Dialogue with Prof. Sheila Foster

Editor’s note: Editorial changes have been made to this interview for brevity and continuity. This interview took place on March 21, 2023.

 

Sheila Foster is Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University. She previously served as chair of the advisory committee for the Global Parliament of Mayors (2017-2020) and is currently a member of the New York City Mayor's Panel on Climate Change (serving as co-chair of the Equity Workgroup). She co-authored her recent book “Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities” with her colleague Christian Iaione at the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (LabGov).

 

Uwe Brandes is the Faculty Director of Georgetown Global Cities Initiative and Professor of Practice in the Urban and Regional Planning Program. 

 

Sooin Choi is a Georgetown Global Cities Initiative Student Scholar and Research Assistant. She is also pursuing a graduate degree in Urban and Regional Planning.

 

Uwe Brandes: Congratulations on your new award-winning book, Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities.  This book speaks to so many issues associated with community collaboration in the context of city building. Can you give us an overview of why you wrote it? 

 

Sheila Foster:  The book is the product of about 10 years of on-the-ground experimentation and from talking to international scholars about cities. What centers the book is the idea of the city as a shared infrastructure, where there is potential for more collaboration from the bottom-up within communities that lack a lot of the resources that others take for granted. These shared resources could range from housing to new forms of energy production, to internet connectivity, etc.

 

The book is partly theoretical and partly empirical. We surveyed hundreds of cities and their associated policies over this 10 year period in order to get a sense of the innovation that we see around collaboration.  Our focus is collaboration initiatives that deeply involve communities to build their capacity and co-create the goods and services they need. 

 

UB: Can you talk through an example in order to illustrate how stakeholders are coming together to collaborate? 

 

SF: Let’s start with Harlem. New York City has a smart city infrastructure that is quite robust. There is a wireless kiosk on almost every few blocks in Manhattan, so it's highly connected. Yet, one in three households in certain parts of New York City, like Harlem and the Bronx, do not have broadband high-speed internet access in homes.  Using the Co-Cities framework and design principles, we partnered with an anchor institution called Silicon Harlem, which has the capacity to bring various members of the community along with the city of New York, and a number of researchers and engineers from University of Virginia and Arizona State. We designed a community-based broadband network using state-of-the-art technology.

 

That’s one example of how you start with what the community needs. You start with mapping community assets, including who should be involved and start to bring people to the table. You prototype something that you practice to build in order to give people a sense of the potential of the prototype. You then put it in place and you test it, and then go back and refine it. It’s a process that’s still ongoing.

 

Sooin Choi: Are there emerging international trends in how cities work with local communities? How are local communities claiming more agency in the process? 

 

SF: There are lots of ways. One is the idea of these urban living labs, where we see cities like Mexico City. The lab for Mexico City was run by a non-profit organization, that is to say not by public officials, and it includes many creative thinkers, including artists.  Others, like the New York City Co-labs, were spun out of city agencies and offices. Some are based in marginalized neighborhoods, where they work together with technologists and entrepreneurs to fund and help co-create innovative ways to process their trash or introduce more street lighting. In the favelas of Rio, an organization named Catalytic Communities is working on a community land trust model that would stabilize land values and protect residents against the threat of displacement. This is not a cut and paste model, but rather we have design principles that are adaptive to the urban and community context.

 

SC: Can you tell us about LabGov. How it got started and where it is now? 

 

SF: The lab got started with my colleague Christian Iaione at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. He started working in Bologna when the city wanted to be a collaborative city, and he helped draft the municipal initiatives that made Bologna famous for civic imagination and neighborhood engagement labs. He invited me along in the course of that project, and I became the co-director. This work grew into a conference in Bologna on "The City as Commons" with over 200 researchers from around the world and a year or so later  the Rockefeller Foundation hosted us at their Bellagio retreat to bring together American and European cities and various foundations, to diffuse and refine the Co-City approach and spread it to North American cities.

 

The lab is based on the idea of governing the city as a commons. Universities have a special mission in catalyzing this work. LabGovs are based in universities and other knowledge institutions (such as research institutes). We work with PhD students and postdocs from around the world who helped us with the research for the book and work on our own co-city projects and in various cities like Rome, New York, and Baton Rouge, and who sometimes go on to start their own labs. 

 

UB: What are your students at Georgetown interested in these days? 

 

SF: I work with students from various schools, but mostly McCourt students. We have about 30 exemplary case studies that we feature in the book, and graduate students interacted with those projects to do the empirical qualitative work to help us understand what the best practices are. I’ve used students to advance research projects, especially on the qualitative side of the work. 

 

UB: So now that this book is done, what’s next? 

 

SF: I’m following the path that the work leads me right now. I've served on the New York City Mayor's Panel on Climate Change for the past six years. I’m working on the Panel’s report with a focus on the second iteration of climate equity. The climate justice work I’m working on combines climate change, community displacement, and social vulnerability.  Our effort is to not just map where social vulnerability is located in New York, but to map the risk of displacement from both direct and indirect climate impacts. We also have an energy democracy and energy justice project, where we try to understand the social impact of energy initiatives. That is keeping me busy.