Metro Manila is one of the world’s most congested urban regions, where long commutes, unsafe streets and fragmented transport governance shape everyday life. While the vast majority of residents rely on public and informal transport, planning and investment has historically favored private cars, sidelining the needs of commuters and workers who keep cities moving. 

The Move As One Coalition — a national civil society movement of more than 140 organizations and 77,000 individuals across sectors — emerged in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a citizen-led petition calling for safer streets, protected bike lanes and emergency support for transport workers. What started as a volunteer-driven campaign quickly evolved into a broad coalition of commuters, transport workers, planners, youth leaders and advocates working to reframe mobility as a shared civic concern.  

Supported administratively by the WeSolve Foundation, the Move As One Coalition combines accessible public messaging with rigorous policy and budget analysis. The coalition operates independently of government while engaging closely with career officials, legislators and municipal agencies to influence transport decisions. Its approach emphasizes lived experience alongside technical evidence, ensuring that people left out of many transport policy decisions — such as low-income commuters, women, persons with disabilities and transport workers — have a seat at the table.

The Move As One Coalition has helped secure major policy and funding wins, including nearly $1 billion in public transport investment, enabling large-scale bike lane programs, national service contracting for public transport, the launch of the country’s first bus rapid transit system and reforms to improve worker pay and protections. The coalition also tracks budgets, procurement and on-the-ground delivery to ensure commitments are implemented as intended, while supporting local leaders and communities to translate policy gains into tangible improvements in their cities.

A core focus of the Move As One Coalition is long-term change. Through its Young Mobility Leaders Program and a growing network of locally led initiatives, the coalition is building a nationwide pipeline of advocates who are advancing inclusive transport reforms in cities across the Philippines. Together, these efforts demonstrate how a citizen-led coalition can shift narratives, influence governance and embed people-first mobility into everyday civic life. 

There is no prior existing relationship between the project and WRI. 

Nairobi’s rapid growth has not been matched by investment in public space or social infrastructure. In many dense, lower-income neighborhoods, residents lack safe, accessible places not only to learn, but also to gather and connect. The city’s public libraries — once intended as civic anchors — fell into decades of neglect, becoming physically degraded, under-resourced and largely disconnected from everyday life. 

Book Bunk is reversing that trajectory by restoring and reactivating Nairobi’s public libraries as inclusive civic institutions. Led by Book Bunk Trust, a Nairobi-based nonprofit working in partnership with Nairobi City County, the project rehabilitates historic library buildings and transforms them into vibrant, multifunctional “Palaces for the People.” The renovated libraries are free, trusted and open to all, serving as places where learning, well-being and community life intersect.  

Book Bunk begins with deep community engagement. Before any restoration or programming decisions are made, staff work with residents to understand hyperlocal needs, barriers and aspirations. This process ensures that each library responds to its neighborhood context while contributing to a shared citywide vision. To date, libraries in Eastlands and Kaloleni — areas long excluded from sustained public investment — have been restored and reintroduced as safe, dignified public spaces.

Restoration addresses both physical and social access. Buildings are upgraded for accessibility, ventilation and sanitation, while digital infrastructure, modernized collections and assistive technologies expand who can use the space and how. Environmental sustainability is built into redesigns through solar power, rainwater harvesting, low-energy lighting and outdoor green spaces that offer rare pockets of nature in dense urban areas and help address colonial-era environmental injustices.

Programming is central to daily life in the libraries. Educational support, creative arts, digital skills, health clinics, free meals and childcare are woven into a flexible framework that responds to community priorities. By bringing learning, care and creativity together under one roof, the libraries reduce barriers to participation and foster trust and belonging.

Book Bunk’s libraries serve as anchors of public life — places to study, seek care, share meals, create and connect. The model is expanding within Nairobi, including the restoration of the McMillan Memorial Library, the city’s oldest library, and nationally through the mapping of more than 1,000 public library sites. The project shows how investment in shared spaces can drive healthier, more inclusive and more resilient cities through stronger civic fabric. 

There is no prior existing relationship between the project and WRI. 

Makassar is a coastal city in Indonesia experiencing rapid urbanization. Climate risks, flooding and inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure intersect most acutely in informal settlements. For residents of these neighborhoods, home to almost half of the population, unsafe water, fecal contamination and limited drainage are daily realities that undermine health, access to opportunity and dignity. Conventional water infrastructure solutions can seem too costly or impractical in dense, flood-prone informal settlements, leaving residents exposed to many preventable health risks. 

Revitalizing Informal Settlements and Environments (RISE) was created to address these risks. Led by Monash University and implemented in partnership with the City of Makassar, Hasanuddin University and local agencies, RISE delivers affordable, on-site water and sanitation solutions through simple, decentralized systems and community-driven design. The project transforms the physical and social conditions of informal settlements through improvements such as water purifying wetlands, rainwater harvesting, elevated walkways and safe public spaces.

At the core of RISE is a nature-based, water-sensitive approach that combines interventions like decentralized sanitation, climate-adaptive drainage, rainwater harvesting and wastewater treatment, designed and adapted for each neighborhood. These integrated systems clean water, reduce flood risk and improve urban conditions while functioning within the tight spatial constraints of informal neighborhoods. Raised pathways and improved drainage also enhance everyday access to and from neighborhoods, particularly during heavy rains.

Community engagement and co-design are central to the project’s success. Residents work alongside designers and city officials to identify priorities, map contamination pathways and shape solutions that respond to local needs, land tenure realities and people’s lived experiences. This process builds ownership, strengthens trust and enables communities to engage more effectively with local government.

RISE addresses sanitation alongside broader urban challenges, including public space, safety and accessibility, ensuring that infrastructure investments generate multiple benefits at once. The result is not only improved health outcomes, but stronger relationships between communities and institutions responsible for long-term service delivery.

RISE has transformed conditions across six settlements in Makassar and is shaping how the city approaches informal settlement upgrading generally. With additional sites identified locally and demonstration projects underway internationally, including six sites in Fiji, RISE shows how cities with large informal populations can improve health and resilience through inclusive, evidence-based, community-led urban transformation.

There is no prior existing relationship between the project and WRI. 

Loja, a fast-growing mid-sized city in Ecuador’s southern Andes, is surrounded by significant ecological assets — rivers, forested hillsides and areas of high biodiversity. Yet for years, these green spaces were fragmented, degraded and unevenly accessible, limiting their ability to support public health, climate resilience and everyday mobility of residents. Parks existed in isolation, river corridors were polluted and many neighborhoods lacked safe, connected access to nature. 

Sistema Verde Urbano (“Green Urban System”) addresses these challenges by organizing urban development around an integrated system of green infrastructure. Led by the Municipality of Loja, the project links parks, rivers, peri-urban hillsides, urban agriculture areas and mobility corridors into a single, citywide network that guides land use, climate adaptation, public space and transportation planning.  

At the heart of Sistema Verde Urbano is a network of more than 600 hectares of connected green areas, structured around the Zamora and Malacatos rivers and the wider watershed they sustain. Through regional watershed management, Loja has protected peri-urban forest lands, improved river health and safeguarded the water sources that supply nearly all of the city’s drinking water—turning rivers once associated with pollution and flooding into foundations of a safer, healthier city.

Sistema Verde Urbano is supported by strong institutional coordination across planning, environment, mobility, public works and water agencies, with technical expertise from the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja and long-term collaboration with GIZ. Community participation is embedded through neighborhood leadership structures, ensuring that residents help shape design, stewardship and use of green spaces.

Embedded across Loja’s planning and climate frameworks, Sistema Verde Urbano has transformed green infrastructure into a city-making tool that aligns health, mobility and watershed protection within a single vision. More than 200,000 residents now benefit from improved access to nature, safer mobility routes and healthier public spaces. As other Andean cities look to Loja’s experience, the system demonstrates how mid-sized cities can place nature at the center of urban development through coordinated planning, governance and implementation, while delivering tangible benefits for people and communities. 

There is no prior existing relationship between the project and WRI.