Urban Action Avenue, Global Ideas Call & Publication
Urban Action Avenue was a Cities Forum initiative inviting urban thinkers and practitioners worldwide to share ideas and essays on urban transformation, later curated into a published booklet.
Year: 2021–2022 | Client: Cities Forum initiative | Country: International
Urban Action Avenue was a Cities Forum initiative inviting urban thinkers and practitioners worldwide to share ideas and essays on urban transformation, later curated into a published booklet. Conceived as a platform for thought leadership and knowledge exchange, it gave a global community of urbanists a space to surface fresh, grounded ideas about how cities can change for the better, and gave Cities Forum a way to convene and amplify that conversation.
Our approach
The call was organised around three award categories that framed the debate: "Accelerating Urban Action", "Age, Gender and Urban Transformation", and "Habitable Places, Citizens' Wellbeing and Happiness". Submissions were assessed and scored against clear criteria, with winners selected in each category and strong runners-up also featured. The response was genuinely international, spanning topics such as land-use change in Bangalore, the heritage and gentrification of Ahmedabad's walled city, public space in the Caribbean, a development moratorium in Java, and "mobilities of care" in cycling, a rich cross-section of urban challenges and ideas from very different contexts.
What we delivered
Cities Forum managed the initiative end to end: designing the call and categories, assessing entries, selecting winners, and compiling the contributions into a publication booklet. The plan extended to publishing entries on the Cities Forum website, in the spirit of its "Meet the City Changers" content, and promoting the winners across social media, with standardised profiles prepared from each submission, turning a one-off call into lasting, shareable knowledge.
Impact
Urban Action Avenue demonstrated Cities Forum's role not only as a consultancy but as a convener and publisher of urban knowledge, building community around the ideas that drive city transformation. By soliciting, curating and amplifying diverse global voices, with particular attention to inclusion, wellbeing and the pace of urban action, the initiative reinforced the firm's thought-leadership profile and its connection to an international network of urbanists, complementing its project work with a distinctive contribution to the wider conversation about the future of cities.
