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
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.