The city administration has always strived to save citizens time and effort. Prominent recent examples can be found in Mexico Citywhich delivered Efficiency, equity and accessibility through the introduction digital access to hundreds of locksmiths and in Paris And Clevelandwhich the planning around the idea of 15 minutes citywhere residents can reach essential services within a quarter of an hour. Local governments from Amsterdam To Montrealhave long been working to expand people’s access to recreation, with a so-called 24-hour city Approach to keeping facilities open outside of normal opening hours.

Now, time use is emerging as a common guide for all sectors, encouraging cross-sector collaboration and providing a targeted method for assessing the impact of policies on citizens’ daily lives. This approach takes a holistic view of the time citizens spend commuting, using services, working and leisure, and aims to maximise the time they have left for what matters most. Local authorities can thus work together on a range of challenges – sometimes led by a ‘time policy officer’ who deals with the temporal aspects of city life – by deploying a portfolio of time-related interventions.

Look at results more holistically.

Many of the most innovative time-use approaches in cities have in common that they do not Only They’re about improving the speed of services or changing how and when residents access them. They also reflect city leaders’ desire to find new ways to improve resident outcomes and overall well-being.

“When we conduct studies, we see that many people want to drive slower,” says Marina Lafay, the city councilor who is in charge of the city’s efforts to improve time use in Strasbourg, France. Her team finds that by having more control over their schedule, some residents are better able to care for their loved ones and participate more frequently in local social life.

City leaders are observing the same change in the United States, where Show data that Americans are less obsessed with work and more focused on balancing their lifestyles. In 2021, the US Conference of Mayors assumed a resolution that includes proactive local approaches to improving residents’ wellbeing, including by addressing mental health, stress and other lifestyle challenges.

Cities are responding to these changing local priorities with innovative time-use approaches. Barcelonawhich in 2022 called the “world capital of time politics” of the Time network of local and regional governmentsa coalition that shares innovations around time use.

Barcelona has integrated efforts to measure time-specific concerns in its Municipal Omnibus survey, which specifically asks whether residents have the time they need to care for their loved ones. The city also influences the results by ​​as EuroCities noticedby awarding “grants to local companies that are committed to the work-life balance of their employees by taking measures such as avoiding work on rest days, reducing the number of work meetings or guaranteeing the right” to time off. And that’s just one example – Barcelona recently his efforts and identified 75 cross-sector actions that local leaders have taken over the past year to address challenges related to time use.

Triggering cross-cutting measures across all city authorities.

Time use being a factor in local decision-making is nothing new, but what is more novel is that cities are now giving their staff the mandate to address time use challenges and use them to improve a range of outcomes – in partnership with the entire local government.

“The main innovation of the second generation of time policy is that now, after the COVID pandemic, we see time policy as holistic and cross-sectoral,” says Marta Junqué, Secretary General of the Time Network of Local and Regional Governments.

Some cities achieve this level of coordination by relying on an increasingly common but still uncommon function in city hall: the “temporary policy officer.” These are cross-departmental roles that can be assigned to staff who may also have other responsibilities. Councilor Lafay’s position in Strasbourg, for example, also includes a mandate to address challenges related to improving citizen engagement and participatory democracy in the city, which means cross-agency cooperation.

“We need to find some private time as a society that people can voluntarily invest in civic engagement,” says Julien Defer, who regularly works with LaFay in his role at the Strasbourg mayor’s office. Her innovations include a city-provided concierge service that helps busy citizens with everything from organizing home repairs to buying fresh produce at the farmers’ market. This type of solution can impact not only citizens’ ability to attend public meetings, but their lives more generally.

In BolzanoItaly, the city’s time policy officer, Sylvia Profanter, has been experimenting with new opening and closing times for local schools to reduce the amount of time all city residents – whether they have school-going children or not – spend in traffic jams. This work involves sifting through mobility data and working closely with the local school system and other authorities.

Barcelona has now gone so far implement a city-wide time pact This helps to ensure that time use policy is incorporated into virtually all government activities.

“There is nothing in a city that is not affected by time,” says Giulio Quaggiotto, an expert in public sector innovation at the MBR Center for Government Innovation in Dubai. So if cities “create a new connective tissue between different departments (focused on collaboration in the use of time), they can suddenly offer much better solutions.”

Reframing old problems to imagine bold solutions.

One benefit of this citywide focus on time use is that it provides a new “lens to look at everything the city does,” says Quaggiotto. And one of the most ambitious examples of this can be found in the Care blocks from Bogota.

The city’s main goal in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ award-winning Global Mayors Challenge was not just time, but rather reducing the burden on unpaid caregivers (disproportionately women) and helping their relatives, who often live with disabilities. Yet time use—and in particular time poverty, or the fact that access to personal time is unequally distributed among residents—has provided a useful framework to help the city address a range of challenges related to care, education, and more.

To achieve this, Bogotá created hyperlocal one-stop shops that offer recreational and educational programs as well as essential services and support such as legal advice, Care of relatives, and even a place to do laundry. Time was a helpful factor throughout the entire effort. The laundry service alone – which is designed to save the nursing staff from having to do laundry – had saved Residents work 14,700 hours or more than 600 days, according to the city. As Minister for Women’s Affairs, Laura Tami saidThe new approach helps “women to escape from time poverty, regain their economic autonomy and pursue their life projects.”

For Quaggiotto, the work in Bogotá is remarkable because those responsible “have reorganized all the city’s services based on this principle of using time.”

Projects like the one in Bogotá are encouraging cities to think and work in new ways. Local decision-makers around the world can look to time use as a framework for putting together a portfolio of actions that address critical priorities – now and in the future.

“This is not just about mobility, equality or whether a city is open during the day and at night,” Quaggiotto explains. “It’s about all of these things – all together and at once.”