Cities! The current glossy magazines whet appetites by assessing the competitive appeal of cities around the world: what’s tops for this and that among London, Paris, Vienna, Shanghai, Sydney, San Francisco, Berlin, Stockholm. Rome, New York. Our international cities present an amazing picture of human brilliance, imagination and enterprise that we take for granted.
I have long been an urbanaholic, my entire life lived in extraordinary creations called Montreal, Boston, Manhattan, city regions defined by the people they attract, the quality of the ideas they generate, the innovation they spur and the opportunities they create. As a developer, I’ve been a builder many times but recently I’ve had a special experience — a metaphorical view of the urban panorama provided by the perceptions of Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution and the Aspen Institute’s Jennifer Bradley, authors of “The Metropolitan Revolution .”
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The urban preponderance increased due to the continued rise of great metropolitan districts. More than half of our population resided in cities by 1930, that year’s census data revealed. The “headlong rush into the cities” was noted by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1940. By 2050, three-quarters of the people in the world will live in urban areas, Katz and Bradley note. In the developing world, a million people move to cities and metropolitan areas every five days — yes, days!
“Many of us sleep in one jurisdiction, work in another, go to movies or concerts or games in yet another, and cross countless lines on a map as we go about the business of raising families, earning money, and enjoying the innumerable small pleasures of the everyday,” not to mention the energy, diversity and social life of cities. The communities we live in, they add, are “connected to many others by systems and structures that we take for granted … miles of tracks, roads, water pipes, electric cables, and fiber optic lines; a web of agreements about pollution, public services, construction and taxes,” not to mention ; crisscrossing strata of local governments, school districts and so on. Two-thirds of our population lives together in metro areas as a myriad of different communities, dreams and aspirations, but they create a common culture and sustain the economy. It will surprise many to know that 2.6 million more poor people live in suburbs rather than in central cities.
The metro areas occupy only 12 percent of our land mass, Katz and Bradley point out, but the concentration of networks of innovative firms, science parks, talented workers, entrepreneurs and clusters of supportive institutions, generates two-thirds our national gross domestic product. Eighty-two percent of inventors granted U.S. patents between 2005 and 2012 lived in one of the 100 largest metro areas, they report. At the same time, rapid demographic change confronts metros with aging populations, congestion, crime, terrorism and climate change. Infrastructure, past the breaking point, puts pressure on life in the high-density areas typified by New York and Chicago, they write. People are drawn to cities by decent amenities — see San Francisco — as well as by jobs, so smart city leaderships define and enforce zoning areas that respect human scale, human cultural aspirations and entertainment. There have to be thoughtful limits to sanction a foundry or megatower in a quiet residential area that is destructive of the human values, as well as a betrayal of the moral impulse of community. Unless the metros deal with these challenges, they won’t be solved, extending bad news for the suburbs too since the well-being and fortunes of cities and suburbs are closely tied.
Leading metropolitan areas are more or less on their own since the federal government is in deep freeze. Katz and Bradley emphasize the paradox of regional drive and national inertia: “On the one hand, the United States has grown a network of metropolitan economies and metropolitan politics that are endowed with assets, rich in leadership, and fundamentally oriented toward problem solving and progress. On the other hand, we have a federal government (and unfortunately a hefty number of states) that is paralyzed by ideological division and driven more by short-term political gain than long-term national progress.”
The good news is the metros have many residents who are risk-takers who think positively. Federal gridlock frustrates them, especially as national and state governments seem driven, Katz and Bradley write, by two-year political cycles which are misaligned with “social or market dynamics.” Cities think in the long-term. Metros like New York, San Francisco and Chicago are making substantial investments in an effort to attract researchers and boost innovative firms. Many metros are overhauling their community college systems to prepare students for quality jobs.
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That’s not all. “Metros like Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago are largely self-financing the building and retrofit of their own transit systems” and reviving inner city areas. How are they doing this? By providing good schools, safe streets and decent housing. They see these as investments to generate wealth and share prosperity — the public investments that are the dirty words for too many pols on the right.
Once, metropolitan areas relied on the federal government “to finance infrastructure, housing, innovation, and human capital.” Now they can’t wait. Today more and more are making transformative investments in the public goods that undergird private investment. City leaders are open to informal interactions, Katz and Bradley note, as opposed to the more “formal interactions of legislatures and bureaucracies.” They have enough people to make a difference but they are still small enough to impart a sense of community and a common purpose. As described by Katz and Bradley, this is nothing less than a metropolitan revolution, the inversion of the hierarchy of power.
Michael Bloomberg sees the big picture. Speaking to the Economic Club in Washington D.C. in 2012, the then-mayor of New York said: “As a result of the [federal] leadership vacuum, cities around the country have had to tackle our economic problems largely on our own. Local elected officials are responsible for doing, not debating; for innovating, not arguing; for pragmatism, not partisanship. We have to deliver results at the local level.”
The country’s 50 biggest metro areas are all planning now how to achieve growth targets in 2040. They are not isolated. They are attuned to the variety of their economies so they can leverage their specific assets and attributes.
In cities, as Katz and Bradley write, good policy is good politics. The leaders live daily with the consequences of their decisions. You have “public-private financing of advanced transport and energy infrastructure; upgrading the education and skills of a diversifying workforce; attracting foreign-born talent and assimilating immigrants, [and] engaging globally on the seamless movement of people, goods, services, ideas, and capital.”
They understand and are aware of the new developments in science and technology. Universities in metropolitan Boston and San Francisco are expanding high tech education as well as engineering and research and development. New York had fallen behind so in 2010 Bloomberg and Robert Steel, his deputy mayor for economic development, announced a brand new Applied Science campus. The city has leveraged $130 million in public dollars to attract $2 billion. It will pay dividends as it has done in the Boston and the San Francisco Bay metro areas because they could recruit the people who worked in or graduated from top-ranked science and university engineering departments. Why is Google in California? Its founders attended Stanford. Look at Silicon Valley. It has a “cluster of professors, researchers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, intellectual property attorneys, and engineers who learn from one another, trade ideas, and hop between companies,” Katz and Bradley observe. New York will benefit from having the sixth largest proportion of talented foreign-born residents.
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Immigration is a casualty of the Republican nomination circus. Almost 95 percent of immigrants live in America’s metros, the authors report. “Over the next forty years, immigrants and their descendants will be responsible for virtually all of the growth in the U.S. labor pool” as well as its diversity, which can greatly benefit this country. Immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a new business and individuals with advanced degrees are three times as likely as a U.S.-born counterpart to file patents, Katz and Bradley report. Think of those immigrants who founded or co-founded companies such as Yahoo, Google, Intel and eBay. Forty percent of the Fortune 500 were founded or co-founded by immigrants or their children. What is more, “studies show that the presence of immigrants can increase wages for U.S.-born workers, in part because immigrants complement, rather than substitute for, the skills of native-born workers.” Immigrants own one million small businesses in this country, according to Katz and Bradley, accounting for 4.7 million jobs.
It is right to protect borders, but the immigration debate should focus more on how we can do better educating the children of immigrants and those from lower-income families. Researchers reveal that “the quality and level of education attained by lower income children is substantially below those for children from middle- or upper-class families,” the authors note. Not to mention drop out rates that are four times higher for students from low-income families than high-income families. And the percentage of these low-income students who attend college immediately after high school is significantly lower than their wealthier counterparts, 49 percent compared to 78 percent.
As Katz and Bradley demonstrate, we need not be held hostage to the 537 elected national officials and the near 8,000 in state governments. We can draw on the energies of a nation of 322 million people with hundreds of thousands of individuals playing active participatory leadership roles in their communities and cities. America is a metropolitan nation taking control of its own destiny.
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