Urban Logic’s Priorities Portfolio

Urban Logic is a portfolio of projects aimed at enhancing urban sustainability and resiliency:Fountain-pen-on-a-leather-agenda

  • Thinking Spatially to Act Locally – Our basis for assembling data about impacts on cities relies on open source geospatial Web services and our alliances across industry, government and NGOs building spatial data and services.
  • Sustainable Resiliency®– A hodgepodge of scary statistics about cities from experts and advocates is no way to weigh prioritizing investments. Sustainable resiliency® is designed to normalize the performance benchmarks into a regional quality of life index that leads to investing in proactive solutions.
  • Means Meter® – Consumers have enormous untapped power to move corporate regional priorities, yet lack the information tools and financial incentive structures to use their power effectively. The Means Meter® is a Web service for mobile phone and desktop systems that pushes each shopper’s ethical values and choices out into the marketplace and earns them cash-back rewards for doing good as they individually define and see the good.
  • Sustainable Banking, Finance & Insurance – Too few banks grow regional sustainable resiliency®, or partner with the emerging socially-purposeful entrepreneur and their consumer to grow it. Urban Logic is researching and incubating a project that would launch a new sustainable bank (GoodBank™(IO), first in the San Francisco Bay Area, then scaling nationally and globally to serve the emerging social capital ecosphere, the SC-Eco.
  • The Social Capital Ecosphere (the SC-Eco) – Throughout the economy are a growing number of initiatives to grow transparency, so that consumers and businesses can better see the impacts their activities have on sustainability. We see a grouping of “neighborhoods” for ratings services, finance, shopping and other services. By taking a SC-Eco meta-model view, collaborations will more readily emerge across former competitors, all trying to “save the world.”
  • Procurement Visualization & Transparency – Collectively, governments account for 40% of US Gross Domestic Product, and spend billions on goods and services. American corporations spend trillions more. Urban Logic has prototyped a way to detect patterns in federal government procurements, with the goal of chipping off pieces that can be better fulfilled by “buying locally” from socially-purposeful enterprises and nonprofits. Leveraging procurement patterns can add to the SC-Eco, grow sustainable resiliency® and generate a flow of projects ethical banks can finance. Visualizing and breaking the ties that bind procurement patterns to campaign finance enhances the democratic process and changes the insider cultures of Washington, state capitols and local politics.

Bruce Cahan

Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).

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