Giving Compass' Take:

• Governing magazine examines two new books on how U.S. cities have taken the lead when it comes to social innovation, though the article warns that things may not be as rosy as some suggest.

• While there are plenty of success stories across the country (such as Pittsburgh's rise as a technology hub), many areas are still struggling with income disparity and other ills. How can nonprofits and policymakers learn from what works?

• Read about the organizations making a big impact on smart cities.

What if the national political culture is just as bad as most of us believe, but another corner of the political system is steadily getting stronger?

That’s a reassuring enough idea in these times that you can understand its potential appeal, and there have been two books published this year making essentially the same argument: Federal and state government may be a mess, but local governments are an increasingly positive force, innovating and solving problems that would have been beyond them a generation ago.

James and Deborah Fallows, after four years visiting localities around the country, wrote in Our Towns of “an intensity of local civic life that generally escaped any outside notice.” Meanwhile, Bruce Katz and the late Jeremy Nowak were arguing in their book, The New Localism, that the conventional wisdom that “cities are powerless, mere creatures of the state” is wrong. “Federal and state governments, for the most part, are no longer in the problem-solving business,” the authors write. “They have dealt themselves out of the equation through a combination of dysfunction, incompetence and hyperpartisanship. … As politics has become nationalized, problem-solving has become localized.”

Read the full article about cities as the new laboratory for democracy by Alan Ehrenhalt at Governing magazine.