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Meghan Mills

Hello and welcome to The City Citizen. This is a podcast series from the EY organization, examining how cities can transform to be more resilient and sustainable places to live and work.

I’m your host, Meghan Mills, EY Global Strategy & Operations Leader – Government & Public Sector for EY.

Each episode, we’re joined by expert guests, for their specialist insight into our theme. Joining us from Sweden is Peter Danielsson, Mayor of Helsingborg. Hi, Peter.

Peter Danielsson

Hi. Happy to join you.

Mills

And from Austria, Gerald Babel-Sutter, co-founder and CEO of Urban Future. Hi, Gerald.

Gerald Babel-Sutter

Hi Meghan.

Mills

Peter, Helsingborg is on a remarkable, award-winning transformation agenda. It’s been making sustainable transformation happen quickly with ambitious change projects. And we’ll look at how you’ve driven that change in a moment. But for people who aren’t familiar with Helsingborg, can you paint a picture of the city for us?

Danielsson

Yes, I can do that. Helsingborg is a mid-sized city. It is situated at a very attractive location in between Oslo in Norway and Hamburg in Germany, in the greater Copenhagen area. And it is a city with a very high quality of life, and it has made Helsingborg one of the region’s fastest-growing cities.

And we have high ambitions. We are actually one of Europe’s most innovative and green cities. And we are also proud that Helsingborg, through our recent Expo, brought together 99 other cities in Europe to lead the way toward climate neutrality by 2030.

And of course, Helsingborg, like other cities, is also facing comprehensive challenges, such as climate change, security, social sustainability and a demographic challenge, and at the same time, our citizens want simpler, faster and more flexible services.

So, in other words, we have concluded that this equation and these challenges, they can only be solved by changing how we work and finding new solutions. And that is why we, in recent years, have focused so strongly and invested in innovation and collaboration across all sectors, with H22 City Expo this summer (June 2022) as a crescendo.

Mills

Amazing. It’s such an inspiring story, and I look forward to diving deeper into that. I’ve also added Helsingborg to my top list of places to visit. It just seems like an incredible city.

And, Gerald, before we get deeper into the topic, what is Urban Future’s story and relationship with Helsingborg?

Babel-Sutter

Well, Meghan, the Urban Future story is a story basically that has been born out a very simple observation. So, when you deal with sustainable cities, most of what has been and actually still is said and written about, is about what cities should be doing.

But what we saw was that what city leaders wanted the most and actually needed the most was a very hands-on expertise on how to do things and how to transform the various aspects in the city.

So, we had the idea of creating an environment for municipal leaders where they can openly share their experiences, but more importantly, where they can share the mistakes that are being made along the way. And today, Urban Future brings together about 3,000 people every year. 3,000 of those who initiate, who run the transformation processes in hundreds of cities around the world.

So, that is what Urban Future is. And we have been very lucky earlier this year, when this year’s Urban Future event was hosted by the city of Helsingborg, making Helsingborg not only a place for thousands of shapers to meet, but actually be a very shining model for other cities to learn for from.

Mills

So, Peter, you’ve been Mayor of Helsingborg since 2006, really taking the city from being a typical municipal administration to a shining example of one of Europe’s most impressive and innovative transformation stories. What type of mindset and culture was developed to facilitate this change?

Danielsson

Yeah, Meghan, this has been an amazing journey for me, 16 years as Mayor. And I think it’s important to start to say that we set up an ambitious goal to tackle the city’s challenges and that goal was to make Helsingborg one of Europe’s most innovative cities.

We also created structures that support achieving the goal and added earmarked funding for innovation. But of course, we also wanted to change our employee’s mindset, and the strategy has been to get our employees to dare, to test and do more. And we wanted to create a strong culture where you seek solutions instead of obstacles, and where you see opportunities and challenges, and don’t fear mistakes but see the mistakes as learning.

And actually, the fear of failure is the greatest challenge in many organizations. And that’s why we, in recent years, in Helsingborg have tried to counter the fear of failure in different ways. And one way is to test many things on a smaller scale – to start doing instead of starting to investigate.

And we have also set up an award for the Mistake of the Year, and that is to underline that it is okay to fail, as long as you try, and you learn something from it. And a learning here is that leadership is absolutely crucial for the culture in a city, but leaders have to lead by ambition and by example. Leaders also need to dare, test and do, and we have a lot of examples of that in Helsingborg. For example, our large-scale investment in innovation and H22 project and our quality-of-life program and our local Paris agreements with the businesses and our citizens.

Mills

Gerald, in keeping with that same theme, what are some of the other projects in Helsingborg that really stand out to you as examples of how it’s become a more sustainable and inclusive place to live and work?

Babel-Sutter

Well, that’s a long list actually. I have never seen in our work with cities across Europe, any city that had such a profound massive transformation in how the city operates. And I cannot stress this enough, because when you have an organization and administration, a city administration, I think everybody has an image in their mind on what is an administration and what are they doing?

And now put on top of this, the idea of being, I don’t know, Google or a tech company where everybody is innovating, and everybody can come up with ideas. And you sit together in cool offices working on future projects.

And that’s actually what happened in, or what happens in, Helsingborg. And I've never seen that before, how these people are working together and how different the skills are that their managers have. Rather than being administrator, making sure that a certain number of papers is pushed through their agenda or through their teams, but more being enablers so that everybody in this huge organization can come up with ideas and create the transformation that the city wants.

And whether it’s a project for a new district — whether it’s a project for treating waste water — whether it’s a project for creating new children’s playgrounds — you can pick out of hundreds of projects they have been doing in their organization and together with their environment of businesses and universities and citizens.

Danielsson

I would like to say that the H22 project, that led to the H22 City Expo, was not just a project for us, it was a platform for an ecosystem. It was a movement that totally changed the city’s DNA and transformed Helsingborg from a producer of services to an enabler. And where solutions were, are, procreated in collaboration across all societal stakeholders. And that is very important for solving the difficulties and the challenges that our city stands in front of.

Babel-Sutter

Peter, that’s what I really like about Helsingborg, because you can read about cities trying to do that. You have all this sustainability jargon where you have cities saying, okay, we have this holistic approach of triple, quadruple helix, working together, collaboration. Helsingborg is where it actually happened. We made it happen, and that’s pretty cool.

Mills

Okay, let’s take a look at leadership’s role in the city’s transformation. Peter, what have you learned about how to lead well during a rapid period of change?

Danielsson

That the foundation is very important. As a leader, you have to set a clear structure with an inspiring vision, ambitious goals and a good city governance structure. And you also need to promote a brave and permissive culture based on a trust-based leadership and well-trained leaders.

And actually, we send all our leaders on training camp in Helsingborg, because we know that leadership is crucial if we want to reach good results.

And if you have this foundation in place, then it’s easier to handle rapid change. And another learning is that, to be able to handle rapid change and complex problems, we need to collaborate more. We need to break the silos within our own organizations, and we also need to collaborate more across all sectors with other cities, with regions and with the state, with academia, the private sector, civil society and, of course, with our citizens. They can be change drivers as well.

Mills

Gerald, what is your view on how diversity and leadership contribute to driving ambitious change?

Babel-Sutter

My view on diversity is that it’s absolutely crucial. And I can just give you a very quick example of how I personally experienced that. So I come from Austria, which is located in the center of Europe, rather conservative. And when I deal here with cities and city leaderships, I would say about 90% of the people I deal with are men.

And in the past couple of years, we have been working with two cities in northern Europe, where it happens to be that about half of the people that we deal with are women. And it is a profound difference in collaborating with female-led teams compared to male-led teams in that respect.

But here comes the fact that many of these teams not only have a more balanced gender situation but they also have way more diversity of backgrounds from the people. So, the urban planning department does not only have urban planners in it, but they have, I don’t know, they have mobility experts, and they have sociologists, and they might have people who are dealing with communications and people from physics and very different areas, and all of these play together in trying to find solutions to challenges.

And I think that’s one of the learnings that we have seen when working with innovative cities, that they have found a way to break down their topic silos and really get people with many, many different backgrounds into the teams that need to find solutions for challenges.

Mills

Peter, you’ve employed hundreds of specially trained new managers. You’ve spoken a little bit about your leadership training programs. How do you get the right people behind you and build the right team of diverse perspectives to join you on this transformation journey?

Danielsson

I think it’s important to have an inspiring vision, and clear and very ambitious goals that attract people. And, once again, the culture is important. In Helsingborg, we have a culture that promotes daring, testing and doing, and kind of states that nothing is impossible, and that attracts people.

And we have also invested in innovation and sustainability, and we have replaced our old balanced governance system with a system of trust-based governance. And all of this is well known and part of our city’s brand as an innovative and sustainable city. And in my view, that attracts the right people.

And, while on board, I think it’s important to talk about the “why.” Why do we have to become a more innovative city? Why do we have to collaborate more? It's in “why” we find motivation, we find understanding and the power to go forward.

So, if you focus on the “why,” you also get the right people to want to work for a transformation of the city, so that we could solve the problems that Helsingborg and other cities are facing.

Mills

Now let’s look at how you get your citizens involved in making their city a more sustainable and inclusive place to live. You’ve established an annual Vision Fund that allows any resident to realize their city development dream. How does this work in practice?

Danielsson

So, the Vision Fund is a fund that residents and companies can apply for money from in order to realize their ideas on how to contribute to better welfare in the future and to a smarter, more sustainable city. And every year, we grant this fund one million Swedish crowns to create innovative projects. And you can actually apply for funding up to 100,000 Swedish crowns for your project. And since the start of the Vision Fund in 2014, over 120 ideas have been implemented by citizens. And all of the projects have, in different ways, contributed to the development of Helsingborg as a more inclusive and sustainable and smart city.

And that creates a lot of motivation for the citizens to get involved and make Helsingborg a better place to live and work in.

Mills

Gerald, do you have any other examples of citizen engagement in transformation plans in other cities? I know getting citizen engagement or getting citizen ideas can be something that is challenging to city leaders.

Babel-Sutter

So one example could be, for example, the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. They came up very early in their process of getting people more involved, they came up with a project called Vitamin G. And the goal was to find ways on how to “green” the city. How to get more greenery into the city.

And they had the typical project where they invited people to come up with ideas, but what was the particular part of this is that they were not only soliciting close to 2,000 ideas, I think, but what they then did is they actually implemented every single one of them. So they pooled similar ones together and then gave the people the funds to do it themselves.

So, the people took ownership first, then they saw, “Hey, my voice counts. I can actually make a difference.” And they kind of owned their little project in the neighborhood, in their house, in the city, wherever it was about. But I’ve never ever heard about a project where they wanted to attract ideas, and then actually got all of them implemented.

Mills

Finally, Peter, if someone was visiting Helsingborg for the first time, what would be your favorite place to show them in the city?

Danielsson

Oh, that’s a hard question. We have so many special places in Helsingborg. But if I had to choose one, I think I will go for the former royal castle of Sofiero in Sweden, and its beautiful garden, which actually has been appointed Europe’s most beautiful garden a few years ago. So, a warm welcome to Helsingborg and the castle of Sofiero.

Mills

I can’t wait to visit the city and the castle. Thanks so much for joining us, Peter, it's been great having you on the podcast, sharing the story of Helsingborg, which is certainly very inspiring.

Danielsson

Thank you so much for having me.

MILLS

Gerald, it's been a pleasure having you as well. Thank you for joining us.

Babel-Sutter

Thanks, Meghan. Thanks for inviting me to your show.

Mills

Do join us again to meet more special guests discussing the future of cities. Also, you can subscribe to this series, so you won’t miss an episode. From me, Meghan Mills, Peter Danielsson and Gerald Babel-Sutter, thanks for listening and goodbye.

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