Renewing the promise of cities

Agglomeration has long underpinned the power of cities. Density brings people together, enabling specialisation, economic spillover, and innovation. For much of the past century, cities could rely on proximity, infrastructure, and governance to catalyse growth. Fold these ingredients into the city and, voilà: economic dynamism and cultural creativity emerge.

But in an increasingly fragmented world, the social connectedness that binds these ingredients together can’t be taken for granted. The old formula is no longer enough. Cities must now work to connect.

Siloing undermines the promise

In an era of identity silos, polarised politics, and algorithm-driven narrowcasting, cities have a renewed strategic role. Their advantage comes not just from density, but from connection: the productive friction that occurs when people, ideas, and perspectives collide. Diversity is essential, but its strategic value grows only through interaction – that’s when it sparks innovation, generates new understanding, and helps inspire shared direction.

When left to ourselves and our algorithms, we lose the creative tension that emerges when our assumptions meet different realities. And in doing so, we miss the sparks that build new insights and breakthrough ideas.

At the city scale, our public conversations rightly celebrate diversity, uniqueness, and inclusion. These are essential values, especially in a world where destructive “-isms” are again gaining traction. But when we frame diversity purely as a moral or cultural goal, we leave a major strategic dividend on the table. Diversity, in its broadest sense, becomes a driver of advantage only when it connects across disciplines, sectors, identities, and geographies.

Research backs this up. A Harvard Business School study found that when migrants and locals innovated together, they generated more socially beneficial ideas than homogenous groups. Similarly, a BCG study shows that diverse leadership teams can generate up to 45% of revenue from innovation – 19 percentage points higher than less diverse teams, and a study published in HBR finds that diverse teams solve complex problems 30% faster. These are not just moral gains – they are strategic outcomes that cities can pursue.

Cities as idea networks

INSEAD strategy professor Nathan Furr's research on networking for ideas shows that innovation is sparked when people move beyond the familiar, seek out fresh perspectives, and apply those insights in new contexts. The same principle applies to cities. Those that enable citizens to cross social, sectoral, and spatial boundaries are better positioned to solve creatively, act decisively, and build broader coalitions for action.

A powerful example of this is Linz, Austria, where the Ars Electronica festival has helped recast the city’s global positioning. Originally known for heavy industry, Linz has become a leading hub for media arts and creative technology. The festival attracts over 100,000 visitors annually and has catalysed the city’s broader transformation, including its designation as a UNESCO City of Media Arts. The impact has been both economic and cultural: local businesses thrive during the event, international investment has grown, and the city has developed a distinct advantage at the intersection of science, technology, and the arts.

This is the connective power of cities. Unlike the broadcast era, when people tuned into the same few TV channels, today’s urban life is shaped by nano-tribes, identity niches, and hyper-specialised communities. While this can be freeing by enabling individual identities to be explored and expressed, it can also fragment us into adjacent echo chambers that appear diverse in the abstract yet rarely intersect in the real world.

As legal scholar and author Cass Sunstein has warned in his book #Republic, the more we isolate ourselves within like-minded clusters, the more extreme and disconnected our thinking can become.

The power of constructive collisions

The job of cities, then, is to create platforms that enable not just the representation of many voices, but meaningful interaction between them. I’m reminded of Patrick Lencioni’s lesson that high-performing teams must foster the conditions for productive conflict. Applied to cities, this looks like respectful, curious, and honest dialogue across differences.

This is more than nice-to-have sentiment: it’s strategic necessity. If cities are to navigate the forces of technological disruption, aging populations, rising inequality, climate volatility, and geopolitical realignment, they need to make big and challenging choices. And they must make those choices together.

That means creating forums where diverse perspectives can be shared on common challenges in a “strong convictions, loosely held” tone. It also means listening to the fringes. As innovation and growth expert Rita McGrath reminds us, “snow melts from the edges” – so cities must learn from what’s emerging and unravelling before it reaches the core.

Integration as strategic advantage

This logic of connection isn’t just social – it’s professional and economic too. On one project, we brought together specialists from civil and services engineering, architecture, construction, sustainability, and environmental disciplines to co-develop a kit-of-parts solution for bridges and viaducts. Over a short series of workshops, we produced an integrated design and gained valuable insight into each other’s disciplines. The speed, quality, and professional growth we achieved simply wouldn’t have been possible through traditional siloed development.

In addition to a willingness from the broader team to work in this new way, successful implementation required some of us – including my fellow designers Heath Gledhill and Fiona Cheung – to step back from our natural technical domains and actively facilitate the integration conversation.

As David Epstein argues in Range, generalists who cultivate breadth and cross-domain fluency are best equipped to thrive amid uncertainty and complexity. Economist Vikram Mansharamani, who describes himself as a “global generalist,” makes a similar point: in an era of hyper-specialisation, it is the integrators and dot-connectors who create disproportionate value. Cities and institutions can learn from this logic: by fostering civic generalists and integrative thinkers, they can translate across interests, bridge fragmented systems, and align innovation with shared purpose.

Renewing the promise of cities

At their best, cities are a bet on the belief that we are better together. They carry the promise that proximity, diversity, and interaction not only grow economies, but fuel imagination, resilience, and opportunity.

To realise that promise in a changing world, we need to get better at crossing boundaries – and turning connection into advantage.

For those shaping cities, the work ahead is not only to plan and deliver, but to reach across divides, connect diverse perspectives, and convene the brave conversations our shared challenges demand. By connecting across difference, we give cities a fighting chance to live up to their promise – as engines of imagination, inclusion, and shared possibility.