How thinking at different levels can help us with collective action

A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas.

An industrial building tries to locate in a suburb of Cleveland in the 1920s and we end up in a national housing crisis in the 2020s.

The butterfly effect illustrates the chaos theory, which pervades popular culture (including a great cinematic mansplanation). Developed by MIT professor Edward Lorenz, the theory that some systems are intensely dependent on initial conditions is based on his meteorology research. While the theory focuses on small initial inputs and large outcomes, I wonder about the steps in between, from butterfly to tornado. What is happening to the trees in Venezuela or the frigatebirds in the Caribbean or the clouds in Mexico? How do these different scales and different geographies interact to create the system and outcomes over time?

Place-based, but what’s place?

These questions help illustrate a way I have come to conceptualize collective problem solving through policymaking. As an urban planner, I’m often starting with my own analysis in terms of place. “Place” is admittedly a nebulous concept; for some it means a city, for others a neighborhood or community. “Place-based” policy as a term of art used by researchers typically means looking at a specific community.

For me, it means all of these and more: various levels of geography from my place at a desk to my community to my city, region, state, and country. I think it even scales up to our place on the planet and maybe even in the universe. Our collective challenges often originate and propagate at various scales of geography. Sometimes you may need to look at the butterfly in Brazil; sometimes you may need to tackle the tornado in Texas; often you need to look somewhere in between.

Scales and Levels

When I see a collective problem that is asking for a policy solution, I find myself asking, what is the ideal level of intervention and what are the inputs and impacts at various levels or geographies? I most commonly look at these categorical levels:

individual -> household/home -> neighborhood -> city -> region -> state -> nation -> globe

Sometimes the ideal level is not the easiest level to work at. If it is not, what can be done at another level? And in all cases, how can we consider the various forces and impacts at levels above and below where we are working? While these questions cannot in and of themselves provide solutions, they can provide a framework for trying to maximize impact by conceptualizing where to start and understanding potential impacts of various solutions.

I realize that’s all a bit conceptual so will share some examples. While working in DC, I found that housing policy was particularly important to conceptualize at different scales, especially at the neighborhood, city, and regional levels. A strong citywide policy, for example significant investment in affordable housing, could end up with negative results if other jurisdictions in the region do not do their part to add affordable housing. A focus on the cheapest and fastest means of producing affordable housing could result in a concentration in low-income neighborhoods and dearth of it in higher-opportunity areas.

But this is true in other domains. A common scale mismatch many city residents see is when a proposed bike lane that could bridge a a critical transportation gap for a whole city or region is scrapped because it takes away parking from local businesses. But there are others that are more hidden: communities can try to fix an immediate problem, such as a budget deficit with tax increases or flooding with a flood barrier. But these may cause unintended problems at other scales or in other geographies such as loss of taxpayers to neighboring jurisdictions or worse flooding downriver.

Match the policy to its level

A common problem with our collective problem solving efforts is that they focus on the most convenient political level. Some policy areas, like immigration, operate primarily at a national level, leaving only certain (often weak) levers for municipal policymakers. While local government often allows people to be heard much more easily, not only are foreign affairs a few levels away from the control of city halls (especially in DC which lacks federal representation) but such efforts can take time and focus away from the areas where cities have a more direct impact, like schools and public safety. On the other hand some domains, like land use, are often determined at the neighborhood or block level, so national-level intervention is limited.

As planning director, I had to make clear to many engaged residents that, while we had critical tools around housing regulation and investment, there were much larger forces that had to be reckoned with, primarily demand to live in the city and region. Indeed, to the vast majority of people in the region, the political boundaries of DC were not as important as housing costs, schools, amenities, and proximity to jobs. At the other end of the spectrum, even in a city that had growing demand for housing, there were neighborhoods that continued to suffer from disinvestment and for which affordable housing was not a problem.

An example of ideal (but not always easy) starting point: the metropolitan region

If we think about the chain of events in our imagined scenario from a butterfly flapping to a twister, there is likely somewhere along that chain where the impact morphs from small to systemic changes, which is the greatest point of leverage. Perhaps it’s when the clouds start forming in Mexico. For policy areas that I focus on, such as economic development, housing, and transportation, the regional level is often the most potentially impactful level. This is true for a number of domestic, urban policy challenges because most cities work as regional economies in terms of jobs, housing, and transportation. Even education is a type of regional market, where many households choose their location within a region based on it.

Regions, unlike cities, don’t always have consistent boundaries, sometimes being defined by the US Census, by regional bodies called Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), by regional business organizations, or even special districts. MPOs, which have significant roles assigned by the federal government in transportation planning, are made up of officials from regional jurisdictions and can help guide and align regional policies. In the Washington DC region, our MPO set ambitious regional housing and affordable housing targets. The challenge is that, apart from some federal requirements, they do not have an official role in many policies and are most effective convening regional partnering and bringing data and analysis to local decision making.

There is another nongovernmental approach to drive collective problem solving through regional economic development coalitions. Often led by universities or nonprofit organizations, these groups, such as New Energy New York in Binghamton, do not have the power of governmental bodies, but seek to build infrastructure around collective action for inclusive economic development at the regional level. I have seen the power of this regional collaboration that works across sectors in my recent work tied to federal place-based investments (for example, U.S. Department of Commerce’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge, Tech Hubs, and CHIPS funding as well as National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines).

While there are examples of success, regional policy is usually the hardest to implement because we do not have elected political infrastructure at that level, with some notable exceptions (for those interested, check out David Rusk’s seminal work on the city-metro divide and ways of addressing this level of governance). While the region is often ideal level, it is just as often not the easiest to actually realize change.

So if you ever have the good fortune of seeing a frigatebird in the wild, maybe you can ask what butterfly’s wind are they flying on, when will that storm blow in Texas, and where along this chain can we leverage the systemic change?