A closer look at time helps cities keep pace with residents’ evolving needs

Center bottom photo by Sebastián Orjuela

August 21, 2024

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Time use is emerging as a unifying guidepost across sectors, fostering cross-collaboration and providing a focused way to assess how policies impact residents' daily lives.

City leaders have always worked to save residents time and effort. Prominent recent examples can be found in Mexico City, which delivered efficiency, equity, and accessibility by rolling out digital access to hundreds of key services, and in Paris and Cleveland, which are reorganizing planning around the idea of the 15-minute city, where residents can reach essential services within a quarter of an hour. Local governments from Amsterdam to Montreal, meanwhile, have long worked to expand people’s access to recreation with a so-called 24-hour city approach at keeping amenities open during non-traditional periods.

Now, time use is emerging as a unifying guidepost across sectors, fostering cross-collaboration and providing a focused way to assess how policies impact residents' daily lives. This approach takes a holistic view of time spent commuting, accessing services, working, and enjoying leisure, with the goal of maximizing the time residents have for what matters most to them. It allows local agencies to make joint progress on an array of challenges—sometimes under the leadership of a "time policy officer" charged with addressing the temporal aspects of city life—by deploying a portfolio of time-related interventions.

Taking a more holistic look at outcomes.

What many of the most innovative time-use approaches in cities have in common is that they aren’t just about improving the speed of services or changing how residents access them—or when. They also reflect city leaders’ desire to find new ways to address resident outcomes and broader well-being.

“When we [do] studies, we see that a lot of people want to slow down,” says Marina Lafay, the councilor in charge of city efforts around time use in Strasbourg, France. Her team notes that more control over their schedules permits some residents to better look after loved ones and engage more often in local civic life.

City leaders are seeing the same shift in the United States, where data show that Americans are less work-obsessed and more focused on lifestyle balance. As far back as 2021, the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution embracing proactive local approaches to improving resident well-being, including by addressing mental health, stress, and other lifestyle challenges.

Cities are responding to these evolving local priorities with innovative time-use approaches. Perhaps none more so than Barcelona, which in 2022 was named the “World Capital of Time Policies” by the Local and Regional Governments Time Network, a coalition sharing innovations around time use.

Barcelona has incorporated efforts to measure time-specific concerns into its “Municipal Omnibus” survey, specifically asking whether residents have the time they need to look after loved ones. The city also shapes outcomes by, as EuroCities noted, offering “grants to local businesses that show a commitment to the work-life balance of their employees by adopting measures such as avoiding work on rest days, cutting the number of work meetings, or guaranteeing the right” to log off. And that’s just one example—Barcelona recently tallied its efforts and identified 75 actions across sectors that local leaders took to address challenges involving time use last year.

Triggering cross-cutting action throughout city agencies.

While time use as a factor in local decision-making isn’t new, what is more novel is how cities are now giving staff a mandate to address time-use challenges—and use them to improve a range of outcomes—in tandem with the whole of local government.

“The main innovation of the second generation of time policies is that now, after the COVID pandemic, we look at time policies as holistic and cross-cutting,” says Marta Junqué, secretary general of the Local and Regional Governments Time Network.

Some cities are achieving this level of coordination by relying on an increasingly common but still unusual responsibility in city hall: the “time policy officer.” These are cross-departmental roles that can be assigned to staff who may have other duties, as well. Councilor Lafay’s position in Strasbourg, for example, also includes a mandate to tackle challenges around improving citizen engagement and the state of participatory democracy in the city, which means working across agencies.

“We need, as a society, to find some private time that people can choose to invest” in civic engagement, says Julien Defer, who collaborates regularly with LaFay from his role in the Strasbourg mayor’s office. Among their innovations is a city-provided concierge service that helps busy residents do everything from set up home repairs to access fresh produce at the farmers’ market. It’s the sort of solution that can have ripple effects not just on residents’ ability to attend public meetings, but their lives more broadly.

In Bolzano, Italy, the city’s time policy officer, Sylvia Profanter, has experimented with new opening and closing times for local schools with an eye on reducing the time everyone in the city—whether they have kids in school or not—spends stuck in traffic. That work involves poring over mobility data and working closely with the local school system and other agencies.

Barcelona, meanwhile, has gone so far as to implement a city-wide time pact that helps ensure time-use policies seep into virtually everything the government does.

There’s “nothing in a city that happens that is not affected by time,” says Giulio Quaggiotto, an expert on public-sector innovation at the Dubai-based MBR Center for Government Innovation. So if cities “create a new connective tissue between different departments [geared at collaboration around time use], all of a sudden, you can now provide much better solutions.”

Reframing old problems to imagine bold solutions.

One advantage to this city-wide focus on time use is that it provides a new “lens to look at everything the city does,” Quaggiotto says. And one of the most ambitious examples of that can be found in the Care blocks of Bogotá.

The city’s primary goal in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Mayors Challenge-winning effort hasn’t just been about time, but rather to broadly reduce the burden on unpaid caregivers (disproportionately women) and help their loved ones, who are often living with disabilities. But time use—and specifically time poverty, or the reality that access to private time is split unequally among residents—has provided a useful frame to help the city tackle an array of challenges related to care, education, and more.

To do so, Bogotá created hyperlocal, one-stop-shops that include leisure and educational programming and essential services and support such as legal advice, care for dependents, and even a place to get laundry done. Time has been a helpful lens throughout the effort. The laundry service alone—intended to spare caregivers from spending entire days washing clothes—had, by the end of last year, saved residents 14,700 hours, or more than 600 days, of work, according to the city. As Secretary for Women's Affairs Laura Tami has said, the new approach helps “women to break free from time poverty, regain their economic autonomy, and pursue their life projects.”

To Quaggiotto, the Bogotá work is remarkable because leaders “reorganized the whole city’s services around this principle” of time use.

With projects like the one in Bogotá encouraging cities to think and work in new ways, local leaders everywhere can look to time use as a framework for assembling a portfolio of interventions that address critical priorities—now and in the future.

“This is not just a mobility issue, an equality issue, or a question of whether you have a city open during the day and the night,” Quaggiotto explains. “It’s all these things—altogether and all at once.”