Small cities lead
The urgently needed and radical innovation is now happening in small cities filled with brave councils who prioritise life before profit.
The last century has been one with an enormous focus on global scale - global production, global profits, global solutions and global social media. The scale of possibilities, dreams, fear, dangers and crises is so vast that it’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed as a normal human being just trying to cope with everyday life. However, during the last few years I’ve seen hopeful actions from small scale municipalities who don’t shy away from putting the safety of future generations before short term profit and traditional mindsets. Instead of following the global or national mainstream pathways they’ve paved the way for brave decision makers to get some slack and challenge norms.
In the small municipality of Tomelilla in Southern Sweden (13 000 habitants), the city council have started to actively apply the Doughnut Economy to their way of working. More important to them was the regenerative future for all citizens rather than only focusing on money as a first threshold in every project. In 2023 they started the work on a strategy for the very first primary school in the world to be built on the Doughnut Economy principles with a collection of massively radical solutions that will impact the city in a positive direction for a long time moving forward.
Another small city is Grenoble in France (150 000 habitants) who in 2014 decided to ban billboard advertising and instead open community spaces and plant trees. 300 ad locations were removed to give space for 50 trees. The city’s deputy mayor Lucile Lheureux explained: “The business model of street advertising is down. Advertisers want to upgrade to digital screens. We don’t want to make that move. We don’t want our city’s children bombarded with animated advertising on TV screens in the street.”
And now last week, the American city of St. Paul, Minnesota (300 000 habitants), revealed that their new city council is made up of only women, most of whom are of colour and under 40 years of age. From civil engineering to nonprofit directing, they have a wide range of professional experiences and multicultural backgrounds. Their top priorities include a comprehensive housing policy, renter protections, climate action, public safety interventions that use police officers less and mental health responders more, and economic development.
"This new class of leader sends a clear message from St. Paul voters, I believe, to the whole world," Council President-Designate Mitra Jalali said. And I’m sure she is completely right. The message from St Paul is one that will spread and share hope throughout the world. Women now not only know that they can, but also expect to have the right to fill half of the seats at the tables where decisions about the global future are taking place.
