It is with regret that we learnt last week that Citiscope, our strategic international partner urban news team, has closed as a result of the twin challenges of securing sustainable funding and having a relatively niche – albeit dedicated readership. Established in 2013, Citiscope’s mission was to provide coverage of urban problems and challenges, as well as how inventive local leaders and citizens are working to solve them during the current unprecedented urban transformations in the Age of the City. Some of their team are moving on but Carey Byron and Gregory Scruggs have transferred to the Thomson Reuter Foundation, which is absorbing the Citiscope mission and agenda as part of Place, the Foundation’s portal for news and analysis about land and property rights.
Mistra Urban Futures and Citiscope worked together on the Campaign for an Urban Sustainable Development Goal from 2014 and began collaborating more closely in terms of content after Citiscope attended the Urban SDG Campaign meeting hosted by Mistra Urban Futures at Chalmers in mid-2015. Since 2016 we have supported Citiscope financially, along with the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur and Kresge foundations, in order to ensure high level coverage of the Habitat III process, culminating in the adoption of the New Urban Agenda in Quito in October 2016 and its subsequent ratification by the UN General Assembly two months later. As part of the agreement, relevant Citiscope stories have been mirrored on our website, while we have supplied Citiscope with leads and material.
We wish the team well and look forward to continuing to collaborate with them at place. Existing recipients of Citiscope newsfeeds by email and social media will continue to receive coverage from place. See http://www.citiscope.org/story/2018/four-years-covering-urban-innovatio… for further details. The existing Citiscope archive will remain accessible on www.citiscope.org.
David Simon
Mistra Urban Futures' partnership with Citiscope included some collaboration for articles and commentaries. The most recent was signed Jonas Nässén and Jan Riise about experiences of the congestion charges in Gothenburg, published in November 2017.
Photo: Jan-Olov Yxell, Chalmers
