Cities are designed.
The streets we drive on. The bus stops we wait at. The parks we play in. The forms we fill out. The signs we ignore. Even the process for complaining about a pothole, was designed by somebody.
Which means all of it can be redesigned.
Design thinking gives Cincinnati a different way to solve problems. Instead of starting with bureaucracy, budgets, or “Well, that's how we've always done it,” we start with people.
Go stand at the bus stop. Walk the broken sidewalk. Try opening a small business. Attempt to navigate a city service without already knowing which department handles it. Ask a kid what would make their neighborhood more fun. Ask an older resident what makes getting around unnecessarily difficult. See Cincinnati through the eyes of the people actually using Cincinnati.
Then comes my favorite part: make something.
Don't spend three years debating whether an idea might work. Build the cheap version and find out.
Paint a temporary plaza. Turn an empty storefront into a pop-up shop. Prototype a ridiculous new bus shelter. Give residents $500 to improve something on their block. Test a tiny urban garden. Put a bench somewhere people actually want to sit.
Some ideas will work. Some will fail spectacularly.
And that is good! Now we know something we didn't know before.
That's the difference between treating Cincinnati like a finished product and treating it like a living prototype. We should be constantly asking:
• What isn't working?
• Who isn't being heard?
• What could we try?
• How can we make this easier, kinder, stranger, safer, faster, or more fun?
And perhaps most importantly: What happens if Cincinnati residents become designers of their city instead of simply customers of it?
A better Cincinnati doesn't necessarily require one gigantic billion-dollar idea. Maybe it requires thousands of little ones.
Try something. Learn something. Change something. Then do it again.
Cincinnati isn't finished.
Thank goodness it’s not.