we ❤️ cities

At TeamZac, we believe that cities are among the most important inventions humans have devised. The economic and social benefits derived from the close collaboration and chance encounters made possible by cities have spurred most of the great ideas that make up modern life.

Cities are living, breathing entities that are influenced by millions of factors on a daily basis. Like all ecosystems, they have certain necessary conditions for long-term survival, including biodiversity, connectivity, and the ability to adapt over time. To thrive, each part of the city needs all of these components.

Cities adapt over time through continuous feedback. The individual actions of an untold number of actors provide new information every day. To thrive, cities must incorporate this feedback into their decision making processes.

To incorporate this information more effectively, cities must strive to reduce the length of these feedback loops. Doing this requires a tendency to favor smaller decisions made more frequently. Larger, less frequent decisions prevent new information from being utilized effectively. Smaller, more frequent decisions allow information to be fed back into the city more regularly, providing more opportunities for incremental, adaptive change.

We believe that this humble approach must be included in our planning processes. While cities should always be forward thinking, our plans must be broad and flexible enough to allow for adjustments when circumstances change. When we prevent small-scale changes from occurring, we set the stage for potentially disruptive large-scale changes.

We believe that cities must be understood at the ground level. Aggregated data and statistics can be instructive, but they are not sufficient. We cannot address the problems of cities through regression analyses and probability models alone. The most insightful urban thinkers have approached cities at a granular level, attempting to study what makes individual places succeed or fail. They took an anthropological and sociological approach to cities. Best practices encourage us to manage cities in a rational, scientific way. There are fundamental differences between these two approaches. Reconciling them is extremely difficult.

We are advocates for efficiency in many things. Routine tasks, data collection and processing, and many other similar functions are improved by seeking efficiencies. Technology is a powerful tool for this.

However, when it comes to city life, inefficiency is what creates vibrancy. When land use, economic development, and community building efforts seek efficiency as a primary goal, cities end up acting in counterproductive ways. Seeking efficiency in these areas creates stability at the ground level while stifling a city’s ability to adapt over time. It provides short-term gains at the expense of long-term viability.

We believe that cities should be profitable, and that fiscal responsibility extends beyond budgets and financial reporting. The biggest impediment to long term fiscal health is development patterns that create more long-term obligations than future revenues can hope to pay for.

We believe that true economic development involves creating new divisions of labor. While business recruitment is a valuable tool, real growth requires creating new things and is bolstered by local ownership.

We believe that constraints are valuable tools for generating creative ideas.

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We take pride in the fact that we're staffed by former city managers, auditors, budget directors, and planners. Having been in your shoes, we know what you're going through and how to cater our services to benefit you as much as possible.

The only reason we're here is to help cities become more vibrant and fiscally sustainable places. That's our passion, and it drives every decision we make. We truly love cities, and can't wait to help yours get better.

Chad Janicek
Co-founder and CEO