Effectively setting goals for a city leader

Look at your local elections. What options do you have? I can select from a potpourri of parties, or rather ideologies. I could vote conservative for pro-business, socialist for more social security, green for more emphasis on our environment, right-wing to blame everything on immigrants, left to overcome capitalism, and so on. But if we want our city to be socially inclusive with a strong safety-net, very conscious about the environment, and decisive about decarbonization, while creating an innovative and strong business community, we’re basically screwed.

We act like business owners on crack: we select our city leader mainly for one single reason or capacity. We are prepared to throw all other reasons overboard. Then we let them define the vision, the goals and the strategy, any tactics and timeline. After that we decide whether our city joins the transformations around us; or if we’d rather stick our heads in the sand. We let them decide how to spend our money. And, yes, of course they get a fixed four- or five-year contract along the way. For God’s sake, we don’t even define goals for them to achieve.

But what if we, the citizens, stop acting as if we were on drugs? What if we voted not only on one issue, but rather on a much larger list of priorities for our cities? Or even on all priorities? What if we all decided first where we want our city to be, effectively setting goals. Only after that we would vote for those who we see most fit to get us there.

Create a passionate vision

You think that’s a utopia? You’d be surprised. Take the city of Porto, for example. Rui Moreira and some friends started to have simple conversations in cafés with citizens about how they wanted their city to be. While starting with often fewer than eight citizens per conversation, rumor spread quickly and a year later, it was tough to even get into the cafés while the neighborhood conversations were going on.

They jointly created a passionate vision of the Porto of their dreams. This was not a political movement, but it became such when the media suggested Rui and his friends enter the mayoral race. Undetected by the political establishment, they had connected with thousands of citizens. These new ideas spread so quickly that just two years later they took the elections in a clean sweep, turning the city’s political system upside-down.

If you have a vision for how your hometown should be, get out there and start making it happen

And Porto is not alone: Valérie Plante and her Projet Montréal co-create(d) the city’s priorities with citizens on a neighborhood level. It took the movement three years to become a key force in the city, and about eight years for their leader to be elected mayor. 100 citizens deeply concerned with the city’s social divide started Ada Colau’s Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common). Co-creating a new agenda for Barcelona together with thousands of citizens unleashed a passion that led them to win the largest share of votes of any party in the local elections just one year later.

So, who says we need to accept the very limited choices we have in local elections? There’s no use grumbling about politicians or the lack of activity in your city. If you have a vision for how your hometown should be, get out there and start making it happen. No excuses. After all, it’s just as much your city as it is theirs!

Here you can find another one of Gerald Babel-Sutter’s texts: “We fucked it up. So, it will be us who fix it.”