Latin American Cities Are Taking Sustainability to the Streets

Do more yoga, plant some seeds, get to know the neighbors. For many people, the past three or four months have meant focusing on these sorts of pleasant but perhaps unambitious activities. As lockdown orders steadily rippled through much of the world this spring, many of us made a loose game plan as to how we’d get through it. For most of us, though, writing five books on extreme collaboration wasn’t on the cards.

But most of us aren’t Leonardo Maldonado and Tomas de Lara, co-founders of the global sustainable cities movement Cities Can B. They used the lockdown to pull together and crowdfund a series of short books, due for release in September, covering “everything we have learned to date” about how to collaborate, city by city, to tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or “humanity’s grand challenges,” as they call them.

Cities Can B is a movement in the truest sense of the word. In practical ways it is mobilizing a large swathe of groups – universities, governments, citizens, and business – around a shared vision for making cities sustainable. It sprang out of the B Corps movement, which Tomas was driving in Brazil back in 2015. With the Olympics shortly coming to Rio de Janeiro, he was convinced that there was an opportunity to use some of the B Corps’ purpose-driven approach to help provide a decent social and economic legacy for the city. He soon found some powerful allies. Rio’s aptly named Chief Resilience Officer got on board, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation – which has their Latin American headquarters there – signed up to help.

The idea proved infectious. “We talked with the Federation of Industry, the Chamber of Commerce. Of course, with City Hall saying ‘yes, let’s go, Olympics are coming,’ everybody that we talked to joined, and said, ‘amazing project, let’s get on it,’” Tomas explains. And so, with seed funding secured from the BMW Foundation, Rio Can B was born.

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