Bloomberg LSE European City Leadership Initiative

The Bloomberg LSE European City Leadership Initiative is a leadership programme for European mayors and their senior teams, led by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the London School of Economics and Political Science with the Hertie School in Berlin. It extends to Europe a model Bloomberg Philanthropies first built with Harvard University, on a simple argument: local government is where the hardest problems land, and where solutions have to be real.

The inaugural cohort runs nine months, October 2025 to June 2026, built around residencies in London and Berlin between periods of work at home. Each city arrives with a domain and a challenge of its own — noise in Kraków, air quality in Sarajevo, transport exclusion across South Yorkshire, affordable housing in Madrid — and works on it alongside the other twenty-nine through sessions on leadership, innovation and delivery.

Thirty cities were selected from 698 European cities above 100,000 residents, of which 282 were invited to submit an expression of interest. The final list was weighted for geographic balance, city size, political diversity and administrative tradition, and runs from Madrid at 3.5 million to Limerick at just over 100,000 — some 22 million residents in total. Specialist partners are brought in to work with cities on their individual challenges.