Transforming the built environment to enable sustainable and fair urban futures requires a more systemic approach. Cities are trapped in the pursuit of sustainable parts or sectors, within the misleading assumption that the sum of the parts can lead to a sustainable whole. We need to fundamentally rethink the policies, values and narratives guiding urban development, focusing less on the elements and more on the interactions; so that we can drastically reorganise our urban systems in ways that can provide services and produce places for people and planet to thrive. At the same time new and more systemic planning models should not emerge as a top-down intellectual exercise but need to be embedded in and support a wider societal transformation process.

The Cities LOOP strives to live to this double challenge by working with cities taking a collaborative systems approach. We believe that if embedded in the right process, transforming the built environment could be as much an end- helping to foster sustainable, resilient, healthy, and equitable urban futures-, as a means to strengthen democracy and build institutional capacity, help cities explore new engagement and participatory methods, and create healthy spaces for open dialogue.

Building on qualitative and quantitative systems thinking tools, we equip local decision makers with practical tools, improved narratives, a sound evidence base, and cross-sector strategies so they can deal with complex challenges and implement change. By combining systems thinking with participatory and co-creation methods, we also aim to help bridge the growing disconnect between decision-makers and society; helping strengthen the democratic process and making the implementation of bold and transformative policy more socially acceptable, and politically feasible and sustainable