Mega Cities Project

The Mega-Cities Project is a transnational non-profit network of leaders from grassroots groups, non-profits, government, business, academia and media dedicated to sharing innovative solutions to the problems their cities face in common. We focus on the intersection of poverty/environment with special attention to voice and livelihood for marginalized groups.

Our mission is to shorten the time lag between ideas and implementation through experiential learning, collective creation of new knowledge and preparing the next generation of urban leaders. Since 1987 our local teams in 21 cities have identified and document hundreds of existing but un-recognized solutions; brokered the transfer of 40 of these across national, regional, and neighborhood boundaries; invent a leadership-partnership development strategy; designed a 3-continent undergraduate travel/study course--“Cities for the 21st Century”; and conducted a Global Leaders Survey which will be replicated periodically to track changes.

Our approach to sharing, awarding and scaling-up local solutions has been adopted by UN-Habitat as Urban Best Practices and has been instrumental in fostering an asset-based view of the urbanization of the world’s population. We focus on the intersection of poverty, environment, and participation with special attention to choice and opportunity.

We are now starting to make the transition to the next generation of urban leaders, innovators, and activists/scholars and to expand our network to include cities of one million or more. This new initiative is called Mega-Cities/Mega-Changes or MC2, which of course means energy.