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August 12, 2008
US “citistates” and the election
During the presidential primaries, few candidates spoke much about urban issues. No one seemed to acknowledge how reliant the US economy is on its cities. Although a few blogs attempted to bark about this, the mainstream media and therefore most American voters largely ignored this omission.
The Brookings Institution is hoping to raise the profile of metropolitan areas in this election year. According to Peter Harkness at Governing Magazine:
Now, as the general election contest gets under way, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has embarked on an ambitious and clearly well-funded bid to change the way we look at the country and its economy, with the hope of influencing the debate during the campaign and then policy making by the new administration and Congress.
The message goes like this: The top 100 metropolitan areas cover only 12 percent of the national land mass but are home to about two-thirds of its population and its jobs — and even larger shares of “innovative activity”: 78 percent of its patents, 75 percent of those with graduate degrees, 79 percent of air cargo, 94 percent of venture capital funding, and so on. In all, they generate three-quarters of the gross domestic product.
Add in more than 200 other smaller metro areas, and we truly are looking at a metropolitan nation. Peirce puts it in context: “As economic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world’s top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater than Taiwan or Switzerland.” And so, he says, citistates are how “our world is now organizing itself” away from an old way of thinking (federal, state, local) to a new way: global, regional and neighborhood.
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Brookings concludes, we are ignoring the economic engines that give us the prosperity we now enjoy: our metro areas.
Harkness notes that currently too many politicians and policy developers in Washington DC do not seem to grasp how important America’s urban spaces are to it’s economic present, not to mention future.
Some challenges are state and local as much as national responsibilities. K-12 education is the prime example. Without offering every child a chance to gain a good educational start in life, the US and its cities place a significant drag on the country’s ability to compete in the future with all the developing and developed countries world wide that are able to offer this to young citizens.
Looking at education as a metropolitan or “citistate” issue is important, as is noting the infrastructure deficit along with the tendency for federal politics to support automotive transport and not transit (or walkability.)
Harkness is rightly skeptical about how much success they will have. However, we can only hope the Brookings Institution’s efforts will put urban issues — broadly defined — on the national and state level agendas. The American economic recovery and national future depends upon it.
If they fail, my social science fiction from last year may not be so far fetched.
Topics: resident attitudes, national politics, urban history |
August 12th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
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