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Above: The family lounge area at Pop-Up Pool in Philadelphia, a 2015 Knight Cities Challenge winner. Credit Monica Peters. Civic innovators from across the country submitted more than 4,500 ideas to this year’s Knight Cities Challenge. That’s a lot of ideas. More importantly, that’s a lot of people who care enough about their city to sit down and write about what they want to do to make it more successful. Picking a set of finalists from that field is a daunting and difficult task. After two months of reading and deliberating and receiving invaluable advice and support from more than 40 grantees and experts who we called reviewers, today we’re announcing 158 finalists in this year’s challenge. The finalists have until the end of January to submit full applications. We’ll review those applications and the recommendations, budgets, renderings and other supporting documents that come with them, alongside another set of reviewers and Knight’s board of trustees. I’m sure we’ll have an even tougher time deciding who actually ends up winning this year’s challenge awards. Detroit and Philadelphia have the biggest number of finalists with 20 each. And for the second year, Detroit also had the best response to the challenge with 767 total applications.