WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities-Yale Hixon Center Learning Event 2024
These proceedings capture insights from a learning event convening finalists of the 2023–2024 WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities with WRI and Yale experts to explore how cities can accelerate climate-ready urban transformation. Drawing on experiences from five cities around the world, the discussions highlight how community engagement, partnerships, institutionalization, and different pathways to scaling can help promising urban initiatives grow into lasting change.
As cities face growing climate risks, innovative projects are demonstrating how urban development can simultaneously strengthen resilience, improve people’s lives, and create more inclusive communities. Yet moving from a successful intervention to lasting transformation requires more than simply replicating what works. It depends on building community ownership, forging durable partnerships, embedding new approaches into institutions, and adapting solutions as they expand.
These conference proceedings capture insights from the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities–Yale Hixon Center Learning Event, held at the Yale School of the Environment in September 2024. The event brought together representatives of the five finalists from the 2023–2024 WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities, alongside WRI experts and Yale faculty and researchers, to examine what enables transformative urban initiatives to take root, endure, and scale.
Drawing on experiences from Buenos Aires, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Fortaleza, New York City, and Oslo, the proceedings explore different approaches to building climate-ready communities, from integrating informal settlements and restoring urban rivers to inclusive recycling, transforming schoolyards into green infrastructure, and embedding climate action into municipal budgeting.
Through project presentations, small-group discussions, and an interactive scaling workshop, participants examined the catalysts and enabling conditions behind transformative change and explored how successful approaches can expand their impact. Discussions highlighted the importance of including marginalized communities, building partnerships, institutionalizing solutions through policy and law, developing models for replication, and strengthening community ownership and cultural pride.
The proceedings distill practical lessons for urban practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and funders seeking to move from individual interventions toward broader urban transformation. A central insight is that scaling is multidimensional: initiatives can deepen community ownership, expand their reach, become embedded in institutions, spread to new contexts, and phase out practices that stand in the way of transformation. The experiences of the five finalists show that lasting change often depends on pursuing several of these pathways together.
