Alaina Harkness

I am a research Fellow in the Brookings Institution's Office of the Centennial Scholar, working on the Project on 21st Century City Governance. To mark its 100th anniversary, the Brookings Institution launched the Centennial Scholar Initiative in January 2016 to cultivate a new style of scholarship at Brookings, fostering work that is cross-program, inter-disciplinary, international, and intensely focused on impact. This new urban order demands intellectual and practical responses of equal measure: new language to communicate the disruptive dynamics underway, new metrics to measure urban prosperity across multiple dimensions, new solutions that are grounded in practice, new kinds of public and private institutions and financial instruments to ensure that capital flows seamlessly to city needs, and new forms of governance that both modernize local capacity and maximize the relationships between cities and higher levels of government. My team works to develop and catalyze transformative solutions to the hard economic, social, and environmental challenges facing cities across the world. The goal is to inform and propel new patterns of urban growth, new forms of urban finance, and new norms of urban governance that are concrete, imaginative, integrated and, ultimately, transferable. I am on leave from the MacArthur Foundation, where I served as Senior Program Officer, Cities.