

Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.
Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”
Yeah, real “efficiency” would come from standardizing tools and procedures, getting rid of “shadow IT”, making annual budget requests more flexible (ie if we don’t use it this year we won’t get it next year), and empowering the workers to make more decisions and initiatives without involving committees, managers, etc.
They are not doing that. It’s not about efficiency, it’s a libertarian crusade to strip out anything valuable from the public sector and leave what’s left to rot.