How can cities make migration work for everyone?

To help answer that question, the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies is launching the Flourishing Cities Initiative: Practical Solutions for a World on the Move. The multiyear initiative will unite researchers, municipal leaders, community partners, and policymakers to create evidence-based solutions that ensure newcomers and longtime city residents thrive together.

“When people move, they bump into new cultures, new ideas — and that creates incredible possibilities, but it also creates challenges,” said Brian S. Lowery, founding faculty co-director of the Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business. 

For the past year, the institute has been exploring what it takes to produce thriving communities as people move, both within and between cities and internationally. The Flourishing Cities Initiative will continue this work, focusing on the challenges associated with the movement of people: in education, health care systems, the labor market, housing, and the legal system, among others. 

“Cities are doing really innovative work in this area. They are trying to make local government more accessible to newcomer populations, trying to build trust with key government institutions, including law enforcement and schools,” said Tomás R. Jiménez, founding faculty co-director of the Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Joan B. Ford Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. And these innovations can provide models that can be followed at the state level. 

Working across the aisle

To launch the initiative, Jiménez moderated a conversation between two prominent leaders with experience leading cities: Julián Castro, ’96, former mayor of San Antonio, former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and CEO of the Latino Community Foundation; and David Holt, mayor of Oklahoma City, president of the United States Conference of Mayors, and dean of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. The event was co-sponsored by the Stanford Leadership Institute of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Holt and Castro said the nonpartisan structure of city government often makes it easier to work with people of all political persuasions. Castro is a Democrat and Holt a Republican, but they were both elected mayor in nonpartisan races.

They emphasized the importance of both symbolic and substantive policies to make everyone feel welcome, from inclusive boards and commissions to welcome centers for new arrivals. Both leaders said they valued research and data, in making decisions and as a way to persuade the electorate.

“It’s a powerful tool — I wish it were used and embraced more by local politicians,” Castro said. Holt said that on many hot button issues, public perception is often not aligned with reality. “You can accept their reality, or you can use data and research to make a different argument,” Holt said. 

A multi-pronged approach

The Flourishing Cities Initiative will have three main goals:

• Support and amplify solutions-oriented research.
• Drive real-world change by introducing these solutions into city practices via cross-sector collaboration.
• Use Stanford’s instructional capacity to work with cities on civic engagement tools or courses for local officials. 

The initiative will include collaborations across all seven schools at Stanford, as well as with outside groups. For example, the institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also called the d.school) will work with the Institute to design and execute a convening next spring with Welcoming America, an Institute collaborator, to develop the research-to-action pipeline for municipal policy. The institute is also working with the d.school on trainings for local government leaders.

The institute is also launching research with other groups on campus, including the Deliberative Democracy Lab and the Educational Opportunity Project. 

The launch event began and ended with performances from Diana Gameros, an NPR Tiny Desk Concert-featured singer, instrumentalist, and composer.

Music offers “the power to encourage us, to help us think beyond what’s possible, and to provide the inspiration to actually get there,” Jiménez said.