Primer series
The SDG 11 primer series draws on the Generative Cities framework and related work on civic and community infrastructure that produces public value across grant cycles.
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Primers
Draft
A City That Keeps Giving Back: Generative Cities and the Cost of Living
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Strip away the abstractions and a city has a simple job: to let the people who live in it afford a decent life and build toward a better one. A place that does that is working. A place where the rent outruns the wages, where getting to work costs more than the work pays, where longtime residents are priced out of the neighborhoods they built, is failing at the one thing that matters most, however impressive it loo…
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Getting There: Transportation as the Cost of Access to Work, Care, and Food
V. Viyas Thilagarajan, MS · 2026
A job is only a job you can get to. A clinic is only useful if you can reach it on the day of the appointment. Healthy food is only an option if the store is within reach and the trip is affordable. For a great many households, the binding constraint on work, health, and nutrition is not the thing itself but the distance to it and the cost of crossing that distance. This primer is about transportation as access, a…
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Knowing Their Own Ground: Community Data and the Power to Govern a Neighborhood
Amber Avery, PhD · 2026
A community trying to keep itself affordable and stable faces a practical problem before it faces a political one: it often cannot see its own situation clearly. Which blocks are losing affordable units? Where are rents climbing fastest? Which households are one shock away from displacement, and which streets lack a reliable transit connection to work or a grocery store? The information exists, scattered across ag…
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The Foundation Under Everything: Housing Affordability and the Cost of Instability
Brandy Hampton, MBA · 2026
For most households, rent or the mortgage is the largest single expense, the one that gets paid before food, before medicine, before saving for anything. When that cost climbs out of reach, everything else in a family's life bends around it. This primer is about housing affordability as the foundation under every other measure of a livable community, and about why instability, the constant risk of losing one's hom…
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The New Utility: Broadband as the Infrastructure of Opportunity
Samuel Washington, MS · 2026
Applying for a job, seeing a doctor, helping a child with homework, managing benefits, running a small business: each of these increasingly assumes a reliable internet connection. What was once an amenity has quietly become a utility, as essential to participating in a community as water or power. This primer is about broadband as infrastructure of opportunity, and about why the gap is no longer mainly about wheth…
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The Power to Stay: Community Control When Neighborhoods Change
Jonathan Moore · 2026
There is a cruel pattern in American neighborhoods. A community endures decades of disinvestment, and then, when investment finally comes, rising costs push out the very residents who held the place together through the hard years. The improvement they waited for becomes the reason they have to leave. This primer is about that pattern and how communities resist it, and its argument is that the decisive question is…
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