The “century of the city,” as it’s been dubbed, is filled with urban challenges, and it’s clear that “old thinking” about cities won’t get us through the mess; it’s what got us there in the first place. Enter new thinking, lots of it. New thinking about urban sustainability, about the use of technologies in urban space, about decarbonizing urban energy systems, about adapting cities to climate changes, about reducing the economic and social disparities among groups of urban dwellers, about governing structures for cities, and more.

In the application of these ideas, cities are becoming intentional “innovation laboratories”–live settings in which innovators try new things. In our new book, Life After Carbon, to be published in the fall, we examine how urban climate innovators in leading-edge cities around the world have been implementing hundreds of innovations that are transforming the fundamental nature of their cities. That’s one of the big 21st century dynamics driving change.

This innovation-driven transformation is occurring at four nested urban scales at once: sites and parcels–buildings, streets, parks, and more; districts, as in low-carbon neighborhoods,  university campuses, and hospital complexes; systems, as in transportation, energy, and water systems; and citywide plans that integrate changes across sites, districts, and systems while allowing flexibility and differentiation. Mostly, though, we emphasize change of systems as the big driver of transformation, because a city is fundamentally its operating systems.

In Life After Carbon we note that the most ambitious and innovative cities, which have become “urban climate innovation laboratories,” all push for change in their functional and spatial systems. Still, system-scale change is incredibly complex, risky, and takes a lot of time–and cities usually don’t have full control over the performance of their systems.

At the district scale, there’s still a lot of complexity to manage, but it’s more controllable, especially if the city owns the land, and it may be easier to get developers interested in investing; witness Stockholm’s Royal Seaport district, Austin’s Mueller community, and Toronto’s Quayside project with Sidewalk Labs. And new districts provide lessons for design of the rest of the city.

But it’s the site scale that is the target of the Reinventing Cities competition (#ReinventingCities), launched by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) and sponsored globally by C40 Cities. Sixteen participating cities have identified a total of 45 “underutilized spaces to redevelop,” including empty lots, abandoned buildings, underused markets, a former airport site, car parks, and an abandoned incinerator. They will invite neighborhood groups, developers, artists, environmentalists, and other stakeholders to compete for the opportunity to transform the sites into “beacons of sustainability and resilience.” Here’s the competition’s Theory of Change: “Winning projects will serve as models for cities around the world, demonstrating how the alliance between the public and private sector can shape the future, delivering decarbonised and economically viable urban development.”

When Hidalgo pioneered this approach in Paris, 22 public spaces became settings for innovative solutions developed by diverse teams. The site scale, says Hélène Chartier, an urban planner in the mayor’s office who moved to New York City to run the C40 initiative, is where “experiments in urban regeneration” can be mounted. “Small is beautiful”–and usually easier to   get going than big projects that have to take on many challenges at once. It also is a scale that is accessible to many different types of people, not just professional urban designers and planners. As the mayor put it in announcing the global competition: “Who better than our citizens to imagine the future of their cities?” In Paris, Chartier adds, some of the reinvention projects have changed how urban developers are thinking about the city and its future.

As ideas from the site scale move “up” into the district and system scales, ideas also move “down” to the site scale. C40’s initiative, for instance, insists that projects in the competition must be “carbon neutral,” a spreading standard for urban regeneration at every scale.

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