UrbanShift Looks Back: Reflecting on the Impact of our Capacity-Building Offer

The UrbanShift project will conclude in October 2025. In the program’s final year, we will be looking back at our work to support integrated and sustainable urban planning through a series of conversations with the partner organizations who have led UrbanShift. This is the first piece in this series. 

Building more resilient and equitable cities starts with building a strong foundation of knowledge among people living and working in cities. Since UrbanShift’s launch in 2021, we’ve engaged over 7,000 people across our network of cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America through our unique capacity-building offer, which spans everything from technical training on geospatial data to inspirational study tours and peer exchanges on best practices.  

As UrbanShift concludes later this year, we sat down with Mariana Orloff and John-Rob Pool of World Resources Institute—which has led UrbanShift’s capacity-building component—to reflect on the past four years of progress and transformation. 

Mariana Orloff: Each of UrbanShift’s capacity-building activities was intentionally designed to highlight examples of integrated planning approaches, both thematically but also in the way that projects develop within cities. UrbanShift’s themes—from nature-based solutions to green and thriving neighborhoods—all depend on integrated approaches, and the ways to make them work in cities require multiple stakeholders coming together around shared goals, using data strategically, and sharing different perspectives and information. The use of data is absolutely a cornerstone of the project, and we have both created data for cities and enabled them to use their own data to enhance their decision-making.  

But there’s a gulf between laying the foundation and reaching our end goal of changing how decisions are made in cities—making them more participatory and more evidence-based. Ultimately, we don’t have control over that outcome: capacity-building is not implementation. 

Eillie Anzilotti: And there’s the challenge of the fact that this project spans so many different contexts. We work across 23 cities in nine different countries, and each has its own distinct set of challenges and processes that could make change more streamlined or more difficult. 

Mariana Orloff: Exactly. The cities where we work have so many things going on. There’s been political and economic disruption—it’s easy to forget we began UrbanShift remotely, during the height of COVID. And we often focus on projects that feel small in scale in comparison to these overarching challenges.   

John-Rob Pool: There’s also the fact that the nature of this work—development work at large—is that there’s often a very big lag between the work that you do and the impact that you have. Projects are often funded on tight time scales—three years, five years, seven years if you’re lucky—but the timeframe for transformation is much longer. 

So UrbanShift is structured in such a way to deliver specific activities, like nine City Academies, two national dialogues in each country. And of course, we have overarching impact goals around land restoration, biodiversity conservation, and greenhouse gas reduction that we’re reaching toward through these activities. Measuring the success of our activities—our outputs—is relatively easy: we can quantify them, conduct surveys to gather feedback, and keep tabs on actions stemming from them, whether that be new discussions underway or connections with financers. But from an outcomes and impact perspective, the understanding that time will tell is an important one to keep in mind. Nature-based solutions itself is a good analogy here: You don’t plant a tree today and have shade tomorrow, right? You have to wait 15, 20 years for it to grow. The benefits accrue over time. 

We have a sense right now, as we look toward the final year of the program, that some of the countries in our network are really making progress, really absorbing the ideas and capacity that UrbanShift has offered them, and using that to inform how they create positive change for people, nature and climate. Some of the other UrbanShift country projects are facing challenges that mean we might not see impacts for quite some time. And that’s just the reality of doing this work. 

Eillie Anzilotti: I’m interested in the philosophy behind UrbanShift’s capacity-building offer. We have so many different modalities, from Peer-to-Peer Exchanges to Geospatial Data Labs to our City Academies, which center on a specific theme. Why is it important to have this nuanced and layered approach to capacity-building? 

Mariana Orloff: It relates nicely to what John-Rob just said, about how capacity-building is a long process. We recognize that for our network of stakeholders in the cities to really absorb the principles, we need to offer different paths to understanding. Our capacity-building offer was designed as a learning journey. So again, to take urban nature-based solutions as an example: Someone could learn about the overall concept in a City Academy, see a successful approach to implementing them in another city through a Peer-to-Peer Exchange, like the one we hosted in Barranquilla on urban nature-based solutions, and then participate in a Geospatial Data Lab where they could actually look analytically at their city and understand where implementing nature-based solutions could have the greatest impact. Our Finance Academies could also help them connect with a potential financier to bring a project to life. By exposing people to the same concepts over and over again, through different avenues, we can open up pathways to implementation and help people understand what it takes to conceptualize and build out a successful project. 

Of course, because we work in cities and there is turnover among staff and resource constraints, it didn’t always work out that way. Ideally, we would have had the same cohort of people from each city take part in each activity, but that wasn’t always possible. In some cases, though, the same people were able to participate in the whole spectrum of activities, and they have really been able to absorb a lot and start to apply it in their cities. 

John-Rob Pool: In fact, we can see the impact already when someone does participate consistently. In Teresina, Leonardo Madeira Martins, who coordinates the Teresina 2030 Agenda, is our UrbanShift champion. He’s been really committed to learning from UrbanShift, and he’s in a leadership role within the city, so he’s been able to translate insights from our activities into action. We’ve heard from him that following the Peer-to-Peer Exchange in Barranquilla on the city’s greening strategy, Todos al Parque, he drew inspiration from that program into Teresina’s afforestation plan, which they’re already starting to implement. 

Eillie Anzilotti: Has there been a particular capacity-building activity that you think has had the greatest impact on participants? 

John-Rob Pool: I do feel that the Labs are a unique offer that tie into WRI’s organizational strength around data-informed decision-making. WRI is a deeply evidence-based organization, and we convene a number of different open-source data platforms that we’ve been able to draw on, in addition to the Cities Indicators Dashboard that we co-developed with Cities4Forests specifically for the cities within those two networks. The Labs really enable us to use and share our strengths around modeling and analytics with cities, and those are such essential tools for integrated urban planning. 

Mariana Orloff: I agree—if there’s one activity that encompasses all of the aims of the project, it’s the Labs. It’s very empowering to illustrate how to work with data, and guide cities toward solutions to complex challenges using their own resources. 

John-Rob Pool: Exactly. We saw that in the Lab we did in Marrakech—we heard from the stakeholders who participated that the Lab was instrumental in guiding their approach to equitably expanding green space in the city. In fact, we’ve even heard they’d be interested in doing another Lab with us in the future to further accelerate the work—which is about as strong an indicator of success as you could ask for. 

But just as important as the technical support is the inspiration that our capacity-building activities deliver. One of our earliest Peer-to-Peer Exchanges, which our C40 colleagues led, brought representatives from Freetown, Sierra Leone to Medellín, Colombia to learn about how they could implement a cable car system as a legitimate public transportation option for their city. And they haven’t only been inspired, but they’ve started to have discussions with the Ministry of Finance about what it would take to implement a similar project in Freetown. 

Eillie Anzilotti: Getting to the point where we can see this progress underway has not been easy, though. We’ve touched on the difficulties around political contexts and staff turnover, but I’m curious what some of the other challenges have been in rolling out this broad capacity-building effort, and how you’ve managed them?    Mariana Orloff: We have encountered a lot of challenges, but I think that part of what has made this project work is that we have been able to adjust. We have learned continuously and have improved a lot in our processes for delivering these events.  

The biggest challenge, which makes sense, is that for capacity-building to really be impactful, it requires a lot of resources and time—both on our part, as the hosts, but also on the part of participants from the cities. It’s the same as learning in school, right? As a teacher, you really need to think through the lesson plans and what resources to share and how to craft the learning journey. And for students, if you haven’t done the pre-work, it’s harder to get the most out of it.  

For our events, we’ve found they’re really engaging to the participants when they are able to bring their own case studies to present. We like to make sure we’re highlighting expert voices from our networks that we pull in, along with participants who can speak to their particular contexts and solicit input from other participants. And for the Labs, we’ve found it’s important for people to have really familiarized themselves with the data they have to work with and resources they need to understand it in advance. But our participants have demanding roles within their cities, and this kind of effort takes time and dedication. 

We are also constantly navigating the challenges and opportunities of facilitating knowledge exchange between cultures and across contexts. Language and the need for translation was something that we always had to build in additional time to get right. And we also found that there was sometimes tension around the regional structure of our program. For the majority of activities, we group participants by region and highlight examples from those countries and others nearby, based on the logic and assumptions that the regulatory approaches and legal environments have regional commonalities. But we have heard from participants that there is an appetite to broaden the lens and pull in more global examples. We have done that for some exchanges—like the Peer Exchange between Freetown and Colombia, and the one we hosted in Rotterdam for Latin American cities on water resilience. And those have worked well; it’s all about finding a balance. 

John-Rob Pool: Working across cultures is so rewarding, but it also presents challenges: each country has different norms around everything from coordinating with ministry representatives to timekeeping. It’s been a huge learning opportunity for us.  

Mariana Orloff: We’ve been talking a lot about our capacity-building efforts with the cities in our network, but we do also have a global focus. We designed our Online City Academy courses for a global audience of city practitioners to really mirror the quality of content that participants receive from our in-person, city-focused trainings.  

Eillie Anzilotti: Understandably, our capacity-building is primarily focused on our network of cities, because that's where we're trying to really strengthen the practice. But both the Online City Academy and our webinars have been a valuable way to democratize the learnings from the program and invite a broader community of practice into the conversation. 

So, if we look to the conclusion of the program at the end of 2025, what makes you feel most confident that we’ve been able to affect change through our capacity-building efforts?    John-Rob Pool: When we think about the long-term impacts of the project—our goals around improving conditions for people, nature, and climate—it feels hard to quantify right now, because as we’ve been talking about, these impacts materialize on a much longer timescale than our five-year project. But we can track the number of people we’ve reached, utilize the feedback we receive, and know that we have at least planted seeds for transformation—some of which are already starting to take root. 

Mariana Orloff is currently the Senior Advisor for UrbanShift, at World Resources Institute. Mariana was instrumental in the design and development of the UrbanShift project and in leading its implementation during the first three years with partners at C40, ICLEI and UNEP.  

John-Rob Pool is currently the Senior Manager for UrbanShift at World Resources Institute. He is responsible for managing the day-to-day implementation of the project and also develops and delivers technical content on nature-based solutions, urban biodiversity and urban climate finance for capacity-building activities such as City Academies, Geospatial Planning Labs and Peer Exchanges. 

Eillie Anzilotti is the Communications Lead for UrbanShift, at World Resources Institute. She manages the program's communications strategy, storytelling efforts and social media platforms.