Media and Insights

The Wagner senior seminar provides students practical, real-world experience prior to graduation. The course serves as the qualitative and quantitative conclusion to students’ time at NYU and connects them to top practitioners in the public policy realm. This semester, students partnered with the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a leading international non-profit focused on democratic reform in developing nations, and Living Cities, a philanthropic collective at the forefront of city-level policy design and implementation. The students had two very ambitious assignments. One, was to identify, research and write about 70 examples of innovation that have taken root in cities around the world. The second related assignment was to determine—based on the examples—what, if any, difference existed between innovation and democratic innovation. The students conducted their work through expert interviews and more traditional policy research methods including literature and internet reviews. Their findings, informed by domestic and international leaders alike, will published by Living Cities and NDI at the web site: www.bigboldcities.org. The students were organized into seven groups around five of the original global innovation cities that Living Cities and NDI studied. The cities were: Bogota-Medellín, Mumbai, New York, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. See the link below for a slide presentation of the best examples the students identified.

https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/labs/Wagner.senior.seminar.slides.pptx