More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) continue to grapple with economic stagnation, aging infrastructure, and environmental degradation while also facing new pressures from climate change and regional conflicts. In this context, traditional city planning, which tackles problems in isolation, is struggling to keep up, demonstrating the importance of reimagining urban development. Urban strategies often rely on siloed, one-off interventions that fail to reflect the complexity of social challenges or adapt to shifting conditions. As a result, efforts are frequently fragmented, overlook root causes, and miss opportunities for long-term, cross-sector collaboration.

Instead of addressing one issue at a time in reimagining urban development, cities need to develop a set of coordinated, interlinked solutions that tackle multiple urban challenges simultaneously and align efforts across sectors. As part of a broader strategy to address environmental, economic, and social goals at once, for example, cities might advance a range of initiatives, such as transforming biowaste into resources, redesigning streets to reduce air pollution, and creating local green jobs. These kinds of “portfolio” approaches are leading to lasting and systems-level change.

Since 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been collaborating with 15 cities across EECA to solve problems in ways that embrace complexity and interconnectedness. Selected through open calls under two UNDP initiatives, Mayors for Economic Growth and the City Experiment Fund, these cities demonstrated a strong interest in tackling systemic issues. Their proposals highlighted the problems they face, their capacity for innovation, and local initiatives and partnerships.

Their ongoing journeys have surfaced four lessons that can help other cities move beyond conventional planning pitfalls, and adopt a more responsive, inclusive, and sustainable approach to reimagining urban development.

1. Understanding Root Causes Through Community Engagement

Many cities attempt to solve complex problems by targeting their most visible symptoms. Cities often respond to rising unemployment, for example, by offering tax incentives that attract new businesses or industrial parks. Yet surface-level solutions like this overlook deeper, interconnected issues like skills mismatches between workers and available positions, inadequate transportation access to and from job centers, and barriers to entrepreneurship caused by complex regulations and limited access to capital.

Read the full article about reimagining urban development by Yaera Chung, Ievgen Kylymnyk, and Svetla Baeva at Stanford Social Innovation Review.