THE CREATIVE BUREAUCRACY FESTIVAL AWARD

They are unsung heroes. Fighters for the common good. Unconventional thinkers. But rarely do they receive the praise they deserve. We want to change this and celebrate them.

This is why, every year, Charles Landry and the team of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival identify people in government or other fields who have made a difference and who have contributed to making the lives of citizens like you and us better. At each Creative Bureaucracy Festival, we honor these changemakers and innovators with the Creative Bureaucracy Award – a badge of honour for those striving to make good things happen in the public sector but who are overlooked far too often.

The Award Ceremony takes place during our Grand Finale of the Festival on 15 June, 18:00-19:00 CEST.

In 2023 we are proud to offer our award in five different categories to these innovative minds and places:
Large Scale Impact | Innovator of the Year | Power Shifter | Legacy | Young  Faces – Young Spaces.
More about the Young Faces – Young Spaces Award can be found here.

LARGE SCALE IMPACT AWARD

The City of Bogotá, represented by Angela Reyes

Awarded to the City of Bogotá for its continual innovative capacity across time which has embedded imagination within its citymaking. This is best exemplified most recently by the city’s pioneering Care System, the first urban master plan that places caregivers at the centre of policy and service delivery design.

Angela Reyes is lead for digital transformation in the Bogotá innovation team. Her project focuses on developing digital tools to support the city’s care blocks program (Sistema Distrital del Cuidado – SIDICU).

The Bogotá care blocks program is a $4.5B investment that identifies services and links them to measurable social change as key to reducing women’s disproportionate care burden and reorganizing government to ensure women have equitable opportunities to thrive.

INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR AWARD

Eric Hubbard

The City of Freetown in Sierra Leone is exposed to extreme climate vulnerabilities due to uncontrolled deforestation and rapid urban expansion. Eric Hubbard has served as senior advisor to the Mayor of Freetown since 2019, where he has guided the design and implementation of several projects tackling climate adaptation and mitigation head on. This includes the #FreetownTheTreeTown campaign to plant, digitally track and grow 1 million trees by 2023—an effort that would increase the city’s vegetation cover by 50%.

What makes this initiative especially innovative? Firstly the #FreetownTheTreeTown campaign puts change at scale in the hands of local communities: Eric helped to conceive and design a “community growing model”, where reforestation is co-designed, co-managed and co-owned by the community and the city government at every stage.

Secondly, in the design of the #FreetownTheTreeTown initiative, Eric has managed to embed long-term thinking into a system that is designed by short-term thinking. Most tree planting campaigns are ineffective over time and at scale because they neglect maintenance. Eric started with maintenance, which allowed him to think about the long term financial sustainability of the initiative. This reframe led to the creation of a pioneering, self-sustaining financing model that blends sources of finance and digital innovation. It could be replicated to scale urban nature-based solutions in other under-resourced cities.

POWER SHIFTER AWARD

Kristina Lunz

Kristina Lunz is the founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. The CFFP actively addresses topics and systems where the current status is rooted in patriarchal values and perpetuates systemic violence through capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. These systems negatively impact different people in different ways based on their gender, race, ethnicity, class, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and more.

Feminist foreign policy is a means to rebalance the power inequalities which perpetuate this oppression. It does so by providing a political framework which is informed by the everyday experiences and needs of people who feel the consequences of policy decisions.

LEGACY AWARD

Jaime Lerner

As the chief architect of the Curitiba Master Plan, he was appointed mayor during Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971. When the nation returned to democracy, he was elected to another term. During his 12 years in office, Lerner devised many of Curitiba’s innovative, inexpensive solutions to city problems.

For instance, in the early days of the public transit system, to increase its funding and encourage ridership, he made a special city lottery, valuing bus fare as lottery tickets. To combat Curitiba’s growing litter problem, he created more incentives for recycling, including exchanging bottles, cans and other recyclables for food. Lerner believed in implementing plans swiftly — in just 72 hours, he converted the city’s downtown into Brazil’s first pedestrian mall.

Jaime Lerner passed away in 2021.

Learn more about Lerner’s life and legacy here.