There isn’t much evidence that existing cities want innovation.
And that's across quite a lot of cities in the US and Canada.
Most families who can afford to are willing to pay a huge premium in order to not share walls with a neighbour, even if it's only a few feet of grass and adds a longer commute.
Whereas most of the opposing sentiments I can only find as talk by random accounts online... and not in actual behaviour.
Democracies are, by definition, ruling by the median intelligence of the group, thus cherry picking a smaller set of the population, you can advance more complex ideas and solutions - hence efforts such as in OP's article.