This story originally appeared at Citiscope, a nonprofit news outlet that covers innovations in cities around the world. More at Citiscope.org.

In April 2015, this aging industrial city an hour north of Washington, D. C., suddenly rose to the top of national newscasts. A young black man named Freddie Gray had died after suffering injuries to his spine while in police custody for a minor offense, and the city had begun to boil.

For weeks, protesters took over neighborhoods and major thoroughfares, venting long-standing outrage over what they saw as an unfair and racially biased system of law enforcement and criminal justice — not just in Baltimore but in cities across the country. Baltimore officials eventually imposed a 20-day state of emergency. By the time it was lifted, years of animus had been laid publicly bare, and all Baltimoreans were left trying to figure out how to heal and move forward.

For many residents of this majority-black city, the death of Gray, 25, was deeply personal. Law enforcement said he had been picked up for possessing a knife deemed illegal under local law, although it remains unclear why officers sought to stop him in the first place. Either way, while riding in a police van, Gray somehow became injured so badly that he fell into a coma and subsequently died. Six officers were charged in the death, although none ultimately was convicted.

The death, which remains the subject of litigation, came just as national attention had turned to the subject of police shootings of black men, often by white officers. Controversially, the U.S. government does not keep track of shootings by police officers, but according to a media database, police killed 991 people in the United States in 2015. More than a quarter of those killed were African Americans, constituting more than double the black share of the U.S. population. Such statistics helped fuel the rise of a nationwide movement — Black Lives Matter — that is keeping access to justice for all in the U.S. public dialogue.

The SDGs are permeating the city’s work. That kind of 'diffusion' takes time but is probably more sustainable since it happens more organically.

Now, academics and advocates in Baltimore seek to use the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), of which the United States is a signatory, as leverage to create stronger systems of accountability in the city. Over the past year and a half, an initiative called the USA Sustainable Cities Initiative — Baltimore has worked under the umbrella of the University of Baltimore, with guidance from a national U.N.-affiliated group.

Recently, they released a set of recommendations that organizers hope will help address some of the simmering frustration that led to the Baltimore riots in the first place. In particular, supporters are looking to work with city administrators to bolster gaps in critical information on topics such as pre-trial detention, poverty and decent work that can inform city policymaking going forward. Data, they say, is the missing ingredient in Baltimore’s equitable development.

The city’s new mayor, Catherine Pugh, endorsed the initiative upon assuming office in December. "As we continue to engage community stakeholders and residents in collaborative problem solving," she said in a letter, "it is crucial to not only agree on common goals for our community but to also publically provide relevant data to measure our progress."

The new recommendations don’t focus on the mere presence of data: They’re also looking for ways to regularly push data into the center of ongoing debates about urban development, to inform citizens, empower community groups and, ultimately, guide public policy and investments.

"There were so many processes going on in Baltimore after the unrest that our job wasn’t to convene but to look at what they were already doing and to use the SDGs framework to tie them together," said Seema D. Iyer, a researcher at the University of Baltimore’s business school and a key point person for the SCI-Baltimore project.

"If you truly want your work to mutually yield common results, you have to continuously communicate about what it is that you want. This process gave us that framework to continue to communicate with each other."

More data for (and from) citizens

The SDGs, which went into effect last year, commit 193 nations to a range of aims in hopes of giving government, business, philanthropy, academia and civil society common paths to channel their development energies and funding. The goals take a broad definition of "sustainability" to cover social and financial components, in addition to the more common environmental concerns. Among them is an unprecedented international goal around access to justice, a core component of Goal 16.

The framework’s focus on access to justice has garnered attention across the United States (PDF) and internationally. But it found particular resonance in Baltimore. The city has emerged as an early and a notable case study in the international effort to "localize" the SDGs — to make a high-minded global framework deeply relevant at the local level.

The SDGs were adopted at the United Nations in September 2015, a few months after Gray’s death. It was around that time that a few local and national groups started to look at how the new goals could be implemented in Baltimore.

Baltimore is suggesting a set of new indicators that will help cities keep closer tabs on local progress.

The city became one of three pilot projects in the USA Sustainable Cities Initiative, led by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a technical group of experts. (The other SCI cities are San Jose, California [PDF], and New York City.) Community outreach in Baltimore was facilitated in part by a national group called Communities Without Boundaries International.

A robust conversation around citizen-generated data already had been growing in Baltimore for years. And SCI-Baltimore was able to bring in a central player, the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA), housed at the University of Baltimore. For a decade and a half, the alliance has been producing reports and creating metrics by which citizens can keep track of various aspects of the city’s development on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis — around health, education, crime, culture and more.

But before the death of Freddie Gray, the BNIA never had tackled certain issues.

"Baltimore had just experienced civil unrest the likes we hadn’t seen in 40 years," said Iyer, who has overseen the BNIA since 2011. "And that shined a glaring light on the fact that our work didn’t have indicators around peace and justice."

SCI-Baltimore served as both a reason and a means to have a new, structured discussion around all that makes up sustainability in Baltimore, Iyer said.

"We’re always looking to figure out what better indicators might exist — that’s what we do all the time," she said. "This project helped us to think about other indicators that we might not have thought about before. But for the SDGs, [BNIA] wouldn’t have been able to have this discussion."

Since 2015, a series of working groups and community-engagement processes have debated the meaning of sustainable development in Baltimore and how the SDGs could assist in that vision. The result was the recent recommendations given to the mayor’s office in hopes of influencing city policymaking in the future.

While national governments agreed upon and adopted the SDGs, cities have been quick to take notice. There are several reasons why.

First, it is widely acknowledged that much of the success or failure of the SDGs will take place in cities — all 17 of the goals, in one way or another, touch the work of local authorities.

Second, mayors are coming to see the SDGs as a way to deliver on their own pledges, with the possibility of accessing national or international funding from governments, foundations and multilateral institutions linked to the goals.

And third, the SDGs offer a point of leverage and legitimization for citizens seeking to affect local policy and priorities. This is clearly the thrust of the Baltimore project.

56 tracking indicators

So where did the project end up? One key element was simply to track what Baltimore is already doing and to offer tweaks.

For instance, the city’s first sustainability plan was introduced in 2009 but had not been updated since then (an update is underway). Likewise, a community-led initiative called Baltimore 2030 already had been put in place to respond to anger following Freddie Gray’s death. Efforts are taking place to harmonize those plans with the aims of the SDGs.

The core of the project was debate and eventually agreement among the community groups, academics and other members of the initiative on locally relevant measures — or indicators — to track progress toward the broad aims of the 17 SDGs. There also was a public engagement component. In July, at an annual event known as Baltimore Data Day, citizens, activists and local officials voted on a draft slate of indicators. They posted sticky notes and wrote messages on posters detailing each SDG; their feedback is an important component of the new report.