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.

Read more about our approach, publications, and cities.

Why study cities?

Latest News

Pre-doctoral Research Fellow in Organizational Sociology and Social Innovation

Supervisors: Christof Brandtner (emlyon business school) and Woody Powell (Stanford University)

Timeline: Starting in summer or fall 2024.

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CLC researcher Christof Brandtner publishes the article “Can Cities Be the Source of Scalable Innovations?” in Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 2023.

In this SSIR article, Christof discusses how cities, as ecosystems of networked organizations, provide the necessary scale, reach, and resources to bridge the gap between small experiments and big problems.

CLC researcher Wenjuan Zheng’s new article “Converting Donation to Transaction: How Platform Capitalism Exploits Relational Labor in Non-profit Fundraising” published in Socio-Economic Review (SER), February 2023.

This SER article written by Wenjuan investigates the ramifications of the platform economy on the civic sector.

CLC researcher Christof Brandtner invited to talk at the seminar “Cities are Back in Town” hosted by Sciences Po in Paris, France, December 1, 2022

Christof is currently an assistant professor at Emlyon Business School in France. His upcoming talk is titled “The Civic Life of Cities: Professional Expertise and the Organizational Production of Urban Integration”. The talk will draw on the San Francisco data and CLC’s recent work on global comparisons of civil society organizations to examine the organizational production of urban integration.

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From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World

Patricia Bromley and the CLC director Woody Powell’s article “From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World” chosen for the Decade Award, given to the most highly cited work published in the Academy of Management Annals in the last 10 years.

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