London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Oct 09, 2025

Let’s Not Go Back to ‘Normal’

Let’s Not Go Back to ‘Normal’

A rush to return to pre-pandemic life means giving up chances to make necessary improvements to how cities work.

As Covid-19 hits the South, West and Sun Belt of the U.S., many cities that were part of the “first wave” are starting to feel, well, normal. And that’s not a good thing.

“Normal” in too many cities looks like this: Pedestrians and cyclists die on streets made for cars, not people. Chronic underfunding of local government and social services entrusts the health, well-being and education of our most vulnerable neighbors to the variability of tax revenue.

Black and Brown communities lack the space or amenities to social distance and are penalized when they seek creative means to do so. And in times of crisis, while some big businesses are quick to equate showing up to your job as an act of heroism, they remain unwilling to pay a living wage to heroes.

But even as we’re looking at the failures of the status quo, we’ve also seen the possibilities of a better kind of normal: Birdsong has become the predominant city soundscape.

People are reclaiming streets and sidewalks for sociability and to demand social change through protests. Unheralded public servants are opening data and standing up user-friendly dashboards to make government more transparent and deliver critical information to residents with remarkable speed.

Mayors across the country are experimenting with guaranteed income projects as a means of advancing racial and economic justice.

The changes we’ve seen in our cities in an extremely short period of time suggests that many of the barriers to better cities are not technical or financial, but rather political in nature.

That's why it’s critical that we don’t allow a desire for normalcy to lead to a rushed return to normal, and the failure of the status quo. Instead, before our memories of what better cities look and feel like begin to slip away, we should be thinking about how the entire city ecosystem - government, businesses, residents, nonprofits and philanthropy - can support a major culture change in cities: from hiding from failure to embracing and constructively learning from it.

This is the focus of a new report from the Centre for Public Impact and the Aspen Institute's Center for Urban Innovation that looks at ways of fostering new ideas within the public sector.

Creating this paradigm shift will require radical changes to longstanding mindsets and beliefs about innovation, risk, and the role of government, and yes, failure. But the foundation for big, (relatively) fast culture changes in the public sector has already been established.

A renaissance in public sector innovation has been percolating for years. Innovators within local government, supported by philanthropy, have brought data and analytics, continuous improvement, human-centered design, and other critical innovation tools to the forefront of government operations.

However, what’s been missing from this has been a correlating change in the culture surrounding public sector innovation, specifically attitudes toward learning from failure inside and outside of government.

Over the course of several months, our team worked with a cohort of six cities and counties across the country to understand the barriers to creating a “fail forward” culture and to generate tangible actions to bring this culture to fruition.

After implementing actions to build this culture, 95% of the public servants in the cohort that responded to our survey reported that they considered innovation as part of their job, compared to just 51% beforehand, demonstrating that culture is the key enabler in driving innovation.

Positive urban transformation came out of an intense reflection on what caused such catastrophic failures and a deep commitment to find a better way forward. We face a similar moment now.


But we also found that in many ways the deck is stacked against governments that want to become more innovative. Within local government, the mantra that “government can’t afford to fail” is pervasive.

And while this sentiment is not entirely wrong - a risk-averse posture is appropriate for many government functions - it contributes to a fear of failure that discourages passionate public servants, of which there is no shortage, from identifying (or acknowledging) problems and from engaging in the experimentation and learning necessary to develop more effective solutions.

Public sector leaders will need to build psychologically safe cultures that incentivize responsible risk-taking in the pursuit of improving a status quo that is not delivering results for residents.

Outside of government, the rush to classify ambitious, new programs as either winners or losers encourages the “blame game” and discourages risk-taking. Take, for example, this 2013 article recounting the overwhelming negative coverage of New York City’s then recently launched Citi Bike program.

The article reads almost like a parody knowing what we know seven years later about the vast benefits of bikeshare systems which have become nearly ubiquitous in major cities around the world.

Narratives like this crowd out any room for nuance and have the effect of cutting budding promising programs and solutions off at the knees before they’ve had the chance to mature.

This rush to judgment obscures the nature of “wicked” problems where there is almost never a simple solution or immediate success.

The broader public will need to realize that deliberate experimentation, and the failures and learning that come with it, is critical for breaking path dependency toward slow-moving disasters, like Covid-19 now and climate change in the future.

For all its agonizing, and fatal, impacts, Covid-19 is not unprecedented: It’s neither the first pandemic nor the worst. Cities have always come out the other side better, but not by accident.

Positive urban transformation came out of an intense reflection on what caused such catastrophic failures and a deep commitment to find a better way forward. We face a similar moment now.

Cities all over the country have seen clearly where they are failing. It’s counterintuitive, but remedying those failures will require more failure, born out of a commitment to build a better future through bold innovation and cross-sector collaboration.

Jennifer Bradley is the founding director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute and a co-author of The Metropolitan Revolution. Josh Sorin leads the City Innovation program in North America at the Centre for Public Impact.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
×