Generative Cities
The traditions we build on and the contribution we are making.
American Collaboratory’s focus areas grow from decades of scholarship on what makes cities livable, equitable, and self-sustaining. This page traces that lineage and names what American Collaboratory adds.
Foundations
Intellectual foundations
Field-defining traditions, presented in order of influence.
Amartya Sen
Development as Freedom (1999)
The capabilities approach: development measured by what people are able to do and be. American Collaboratory’s focus on community authority and voice draws directly from this tradition.
Martha Nussbaum
Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011)
Extended Sen’s framework into institutional design and policy. The idea that institutions have a responsibility to create conditions for human flourishing is foundational to how American Collaboratory thinks about governed infrastructure.
Elinor Ostrom
Governing the Commons (1990)
Nobel Prize–winning work showing that communities can govern shared resources through institutional design. American Collaboratory’s approach to knowledge stewardship builds on Ostrom’s principles.
Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione
Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities (MIT Press, 2022)
A contemporary framework for collaborative urban governance, grounded in Ostrom and applied to cities globally. It informs how American Collaboratory imagines shared stewardship in practice.
Baltimore
Applied in Baltimore
Lindsay J. Thompson — “Livable Cities: Wealth for Human Flourishing” (with Richard Milter, Oxford Routledge, in The Capability Approach and the SDGs). Also: “Livable Cities” in the Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society (Sage, 2018). Thompson, Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and founder of Carey CityLabs, developed a framework for livable neighborhoods organized around five pillars. As Co-PI on the Kauffman Foundation–funded Bmore Collab initiative, Thompson’s framework directly shaped the environment American Collaboratory emerged from.
Contribution
Generative Cities: American Collaboratory’s extension
The traditions above describe what livable cities have (Sen, Nussbaum), how shared resources can be governed (Ostrom, Foster and Iaione), and what neighborhood flourishing looks like (Thompson). What they leave open is the question of persistence: how community-generated knowledge keeps producing value after the partnership, grant, or administration that created it ends.
Generative Cities names the condition American Collaboratory works toward. A generative city keeps producing returns on the knowledge, tools, and relationships that communities and institutions build together. The infrastructure holds. The knowledge stays governed. The benefits compound.
American Collaboratory’s six focus areas operationalize this idea.
Mapping
How focus areas connect traditions and SDOH
Hover a row to highlight connections. Each domain links scholarly traditions to Healthy People 2030 domains.
Knowledge Stewardship
Traditions
SDOH
Civic Research Partnerships
Traditions
SDOH
Community Technology
Traditions
SDOH
Community Data Governance
Traditions
SDOH
Livable Aging
Traditions
SDOH
Community Design
Traditions
SDOH
Health
Social determinants of health
Governed knowledge infrastructure strengthens each of these determinants by keeping community-generated research, tools, and relationships in active use. American Collaboratory’s work connects to the broader Adloris health technology ecosystem through Agnes Canopy, Open Source Harbor, and African Health Nexus.
Sources