One place to start in delivering solutions to a divided and distrustful nation: The hyperlocal level

The 2024 election confirmed several things: We as a nation are deeply divided, distrustful of each other, and dissatisfied with the ability of government to get things done. While distressing, that news is not new. Indeed, sociologist Robert D. Putnam has been sounding the alarm about growing isolation and eroding social capital since long before the “loneliness epidemic.” While the internet has in some ways made us more connected than ever, it is also polarizing and paralyzing when it comes to collectively solving problems. 

At the national level, bipartisan collaboration to identify the systemic sources of our economic and social distress will be a long time coming. In the meantime, voters still want someone to address the chronic challenges they see in front of them in the places where they live and work.  

In short, the rise of the digital world means that in the real world, we have more work to do than ever to solve problems. The good news is that in the remaining places where people mix and encounter those they don’t already know—whether that’s their neighborhood Main Street or downtown—the seeds of solutions already exist. At this hyperlocal level, individuals and institutions avoid ideological arguments, build trust, and do the on-the-ground work—often starting with public spaces—across the civic, nonprofit, private, and public sectors.  

By examining the proven record and growing importance of hyperlocal, place-based partnerships, we can better understand how to grow the role they play in addressing some of the country’s problems—one commercial corridor, one park, one downtown, or “one ZIP code at a time.”

The case for place: A record of success 

We have known for a long time that neighborhood quality of life is a key determinant of both personal well-being and voter satisfaction. However, the way that we deliver these results has changed dramatically over time. Today, hyperlocal efforts are often mis-framed as a form of secession, when in fact they are the opposite: a way to keep people and places engaged. 

In the 1970s, many cities in North America were in—or were perceived to be in—free fall. In his 1970 State of the Union address, President Richard Nixon said that “the violent and decayed central cities of our great metropolitan complexes are the most conspicuous area of failure in American life today.”  

Some of the most powerful manifestations of systemic failure were seen in public spaces, from parks to commercial corridors to public transit. Fundamentally, local governments were failing to finance or manage the delivery of services at the hyperlocal level in a way that was effective, efficient, or responsive to individual neighborhood needs. 

It was in this context that local champions—sometimes residents, other times businesses or local civic entities—began to take things into their own hands. Sometimes they asked for permission and power; other times, they simply began acting until authorities noticed and acquiesced. Initially focused on the public realm, these business improvement districts, parks conservancies, creative “placemaking” and “placekeeping” groups, community gardens, public markets, and community development corporations played a significant role in arresting urban disinvestment and abandonment, stimulating place-based vibrancy and culture, and rebuilding social and civic infrastructure. 

In recent years, some of these entities have expanded to co-managing and programming a major new category of public space in partnership with transportation advocates: streets and sidewalks (and plazas created on them). At the same time, some of the most promising experiments in addressing specific issues such as homelessness, crime, education, health, and small business support have focused on a place-centered approach, integrating an array of public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic players at the place level. 

While the names of the entities and the enabling legislation vary from state to state, the larger arc of crisis, exasperation, experimentation, and evolution is the same.¹ With a few notable exceptions, these many and varied neighborhood and place-focused partnerships spread laterally across the continent after being incubated or invented at the hyperlocal level, rather than being triggered by a significant and intentional legislative or policy initiative at the federal level. As a result of their diverse and divergent origins, this collection of place-centered partnerships that transformed cities represents an extraordinary array of entities and mechanisms, each responsive to their particular cultural and political environment. 

While these widely varying organizations exist in urban areas around the country and the globe, only recently has this collection of hyperlocal entities been examined as a field, with a focus on what intentions and policies can make them more effective and empowered, especially in less-resourced areas. And despite a growing sense of the importance of “place,” the least developed aspect of hyperlocal policy is determining and refining what “place governance” (both civic structures and policies) and financing models are necessary to create and sustain safe and vibrant places. 

These place-centered partnerships are far from the only reason cities and small towns bounced back from the edge in the 1970s. But as policymakers search for mechanisms for cooperation and collaboration in the face of dysfunction at the national level, we can start by learning from—and improving upon—place-based partnerships that build community, trust, health, and wealth at the hyperlocal level. Having been effective in places as distinct as New York’s Times Square and the Bronx River as well as rural towns and suburbs, these place-centered, multisector partnerships contain a set of solutions for society at large.

A place governance research agenda 

So how can we learn from—and improve upon—the last 50 years’ of place-based partnerships that played a key role in reversing urban decline? Who has succeeded in building and sustaining strong places? What are the legal, regulatory, governance, and management mechanisms that link those players with government at the hyperlocal level and incentivize their working together for the common good? Which bureaucratic barriers hold them back? What are the financial mechanisms that sustain place-centered institutions? Where are these place-centered partnerships not happening and why not? 

The answers to these questions lie among us. By drawing on the creative and entrepreneurial energy of the nonprofit, government, and private sector practitioners who are already doing this work, we can identify the most durable and innovative models and mechanisms that allow these hyperlocal community partnerships to create vibrancy in more contexts and communities.  

Yet too often, there is a disconnect between many of the academics, designers, theorists, and ideologues who talk about issues that are related to place and the practitioners who do the daily work of managing and sustaining a place or public space. Many of them operate with very different assumptions, perspectives, and even information about what is going on at the hyperlocal level. 

A research agenda should begin with work to more broadly identify the common interests and experiences of different institutions, individuals, and practitioners who have been focusing on place over the last five decades across fields such as parks, public space, public markets, community gardens, neighborhood empowerment, community development, anchor institutions, corporations, and other hyperlocal entities. 

Now is the time to undertake this work. Every neighborhood deserves the transformative power of place-centered nonprofit partnerships. In neighborhoods where these efforts struggle or do not yet exist, cities can and must do more by proactively building their capacity to make the work easier, and by funding or finding revenue streams that make up for inadequate investment in the past.  

Today, cities face a double stress test that is not dissimilar to that of the 1970s and 80s: ballooning budget deficits and collapsing confidence in their ability to deliver core services. So they would be wise to intentionally incentivize the positive aspects of place-based partnerships while addressing the very real limitations that grew out of their haphazard emergence and evolution half a century ago. Only then can all neighborhoods and their residents benefit from the multisector partnerships that strengthen their distinctive institutions and authentic assets.