The Civic Life of Cities Lab
Through research on nonprofits and the communities they serve, the Civic Life of Cities Lab brings together scholars from around the world to understand the organizational building blocks of a vibrant civil society.
The Civic Life of Cities Lab (CLC) started at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) in 2017 and has evolved into a virtual community of researchers at over a dozen leading academic institutions investigating these questions based on the data of our original CLC teams in seven global cities: San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, and Vienna. On our website, you can read about our approach, explore our publications, and discover the cities we study.
Why study cities?
Latest News
New CLC publications on urban integration and inequality in American Journal of Sociology and Urban Studies, August 2026
From Suites to Streets: Professional Expertise and the Organizational Pursuit of Social and Systemic Integration
Sociologists have shown that organizations shape urban integration, but prior studies have not revealed how organizational characteristics—particularly different forms of expertise—influence the pursuit of integration. To understand how expertise affects integrative practices and funding, we distinguish social integration—creating ties among constituents—from systemic integration—connecting constituents to institutional resources. Combining administrative, survey, interview, and ethnographic data on nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, we find that the institutional rewards of suite-level expertise are substantial but temporally contingent, while the link between integrative practices and funding is durable. Contrary to expectations, many organizations resist professionalization to pursue social integration through street-level expertise or combine both forms through tooling up. Bridging organizational and urban sociology, we challenge the assumption that nonprofits uniformly foster integration, offering new insight into how organizations navigate an evolving ecology of expertise.
Localizing Challenges: Perception and Localization of Societal Threats in Two Bay Areas
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are often portrayed as “agents” of urban change that respond to large-scale societal threats such as economic downturns, urban inequality, or environmental risks. Yet even within the same locality, CSOs differ markedly in how they perceive and localize threats. While some turn broader societal threats into actionable organizational mandates, others fail to do so. Our study proposes that managerialism, understood as the adoption of formal organizational practices, facilitates this localization by equipping CSOs with the reasoning and resources to bridge macro-level threats with organizational concerns. We test this proposition by drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from a comparative survey of randomly sampled CSOs in the two “Bay Areas” of Shenzhen, China, and San Francisco, United States—two tech-centered regions that exemplify contrasting urban regimes in the Global South and North. Adopting a two-stage selection model, we demonstrate that organizations geographically embedded in neighborhoods or cities are more likely to perceive societal threats and that managerial CSOs are subsequently more likely to localize them. Our findings highlight threat perception and localization as important precursors to organizations’ involvement in urban change, contributing to the literature on organizational dimensions of urban inequality, opportunity recognition in CSOs, and the role of managerialism in sustaining urban civil society.
CLC cross-city comparative research published in Nature Cities, October 2024
Organizational practices, such as interacting with and advocating for constituents or engaging in event hosting and collaboration, are critical to integration—creating connections across lines of difference. However, these practices are unevenly distributed across neighborhoods and shaped by neighborhood characteristics. Here, connecting organizational and neighborhood-level data, this study explores how neighborhood affluence (income) and heterogeneity (migrant population share) affect the integrative practices among civil society organizations. Using unique survey data from five global cities, we analyze the organizational practices of 863 civil society organizations in 536 neighborhoods. We find that social integration practices—connecting people to each other—are more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods. Conversely, systemic integration practices—connecting people and organizations to other organizations in the ecosystem—are more common in heterogeneous neighborhoods, especially when they are affluent. These findings shed light on the role of organizations in promoting social cohesion and economic development as well as disparities in integrative practices among neighborhoods.
Read the paper in Nature Cities
Read the Research Briefing
Read the article written by Floris Vermeulen
CLC Vienna Team publishes 3 articles about the societal and democratic role of nonprofits in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, August 2024
“Talking the Talk, or Walking the Walk? How Managerial Practices Relate to Nonprofit Organizations’ Role as Schools of Democracy” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08997640241278634
“Democracy and Management: Organizational Practices and Nonprofits’ Contributions to Society” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08997640241267861
“Societal roles of Nonprofit Organizations: Parsonian Echoes and Luhmannian Reframing of the Organization–Society Interface” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08997640241241321
CLC Researchers win awards from the American Sociological Association Community and Urban Sociology (CUSS) Section, July 2024
Jean Yen-Chun Lin won the Robert E. Park Book Award for A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities, published in 2023 in Columbia University Press, while Christof Brandtner won the Jane Addams Article Award for “Green American City: Civic Capacity and the Distributed Adoption of Urban Innovations,” published in 2022 in the American Journal of Sociology.