The Unexpected New Reality of Everyday American Life. Here at the tail end of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of Americans-four out of five today, and, twenty years from now, probably nine out of ten-have, often without quite realizing it, moved into a new kind of home. There are 273 of these new home bases in the country, and they occupy between five and ten percent of the American landscape. They're oversized, often blob-like-many of them a hundred, or over two hundred, miles wide, and still getting bigger, usually pushing outward at a rate of five miles or more every ten years. They never quite existed before and haven't popped up yet on road maps. They'll probably endure for at least a hundred years-because they are at once our principal economic engines (they already generate 83% of America's income) and the basic building blocks of the new global economy. As such, they're the one bridge we've got that can carry us through the twenty-first century. Right at the moment, on the other hand, they're definitely a fixer-upper.
Metropolitan areas, urban regions, city-states-these unexpected new places don't even have a single, agreed-upon, generic name, and they're certainly still in the market for one with some zip to it. The largest individual regions are still a long way from dreaming up new names for themselves, but, without squinting, we can already see the outlines of what a generation from now may be Baltington and West Fort Miamidale Beach on the east coast; Los Diego on the west coast; and Milwago Bend hugging the shores of Lake Michigan.
Can these new homes become happy homes? Probably no one's ready to pledge allegiance to them yet, but making sense of them is certainly one of the paramount tasks of the years immediately ahead-they are our communities; our most intensively used landscapes; the places where the work we do and the things we make either will or will not be globally competitive. Oversimplifying only a bit, coming to terms with these outlandish, unlikely, unprepared-for places and places-in-formation seems to be a four-step process, and thus somewhat easier to handle than a full recovery program. At first, the oddest thing about hearing that the odds are four-to-one that you're part of a metropolitan area is that you don't seem to have moved anywhere at all-because, looking around you, what you still see is the city you live in, or the suburb you moved to, with neighbors near by and strangers farther away. The next step, odder still to some people, has to do with beginning to experience the fact that ultimately there is no jumping ship in an urban region, because like it or not we're all still in the same boat. It may continue to feel like us and them for some time to come, but in many basic ways there is in fact only "we, the region" for hundreds of miles around us. We share the same fortunes, good and bad. We suffer from many of the same afflictions. And we share in the same treasures and inheritance.
"New regionalist" research, as it's called, itself still almost a brand-new field of study by American economists, social scientists, and environmentalists, has even in its initial findings dramatically set forth the extraordinary extent to which, just below the surface, city and suburban lives are intricately intertwined-almost like two trees sharing the same root system: The economic clusters of the kind of strong industries that can advance prosperity are drawn to regions with sparkle, rather than specifically to either cities or suburbs; they want their employees to derive added benefits both from big-city culture and from suburban greenery (a way of doing business sometimes known as the "three paychecks" plan).
At the same time, within individual regions, it's been seen that suburbs prosper only when the cities they surround prosper, and that those cities that already have better-paying jobs are the kind of cities that can most quickly generate still more jobs, thus further boosting the local suburbs they're so strongly meshed with. Throughout the country, three-fifths of suburban income is derived from cities, so it's not surprising that half of suburban families send at least one family member to work in a city. Suburbanites also still turn to and rely on the cities' great strengths-almost half send their children to colleges in cities, and two-thirds make use of city hospitals when they need major medical care.
More surprisingly still, suburbs get safer when cities get safer-thanks, for example, to what law enforcement officials are calling a "ripple effect," the crime-fighting tactics of the last two mayors of New York City, a Democrat and a Republican, have also brought crime rates down in many of suburbs and smaller cities near New York, thus benefitting nineteen million people, not just the seven million in New York City itself. "Across the region," according to the New York Times, "there are more police officers on the streets, and a new eagerness to try new policing techniques" that "bring officers in closer contact with residents."
City people and suburbanites breathe the same air and drink the same water, and, in these actions, and throughout their daily lives, have voracious impacts on ecosystems around the country, and even around the world. Julia Parzen, author of one of the companion papers at this session, and one of the principal investigators in this area, points out that although our metropolitan areas themselves occupy only a minute portion of the planetary surface, the people in them consume an enormous amount of the earth's resources-diverting vast quantities of water, using most of the trees felled, and generating the bulk of the world's wastes, toxic and otherwise. Urban regions, she concludes, must bear direct responsibility for "much of the harm now done to the earth."
The Second Step Leads Directly to the Third. As people in urban regions begin to experience the fact of their indissoluble interdependence, their "interwoven destinies," as Henry Cisneros, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development has eloquently put it, they also start to see the commonality of regional problems, distortions, and inequalities-all the things that have gone so wrong during the last fifty years when, as we can see in retrospect, we were both inventing today's metropolitan areas and at the same time not yet recognizing or celebrating regions as places with their own separate identity. As a consequence, even while we were building these regions and moving into them, we also spent a lot of time not working to strengthen their connectedness, or balance their strengths.
The most glaring and inescapable regional problems are themselves intertwined-sprawl, for instance, which undercuts American competitiveness, brings with it crawling traffic (or congestion), and leaves behind stalled and fallen communities, both abandoned brownfield industrial sites and residential neighborhoods with only 40% of their original housing stock, or less, still standing. All of these are themselves conditions which undercut competitiveness-and they're only getting worse. Traffic flows in metropolitan areas, already slowed, will move at half their current speeds ten years from now. And "no other advanced industrial nation," notes one scholar, "has allowed cities to deteriorate to the same degree."
Meanwhile, the brawling, or border wars, between communities within regions, as cities and suburbs fight among themselves to steal the jobs that already exist from each other, squanders billions of dollars in local resources that could be used to heal wounded areas-and, worse, makes enemies of future partners by perpetuating the illusion that cities and suburbs are separate places. It's no wonder that problems like these are resistant to conventional solutions-after all, they are the product of conventional solutions: It's hard for land use and transportation policies to support each other, when, conventionally, land use is coordinated at the local level, and transportation policies are thought through at the state and national levels. The fundamental condition of markets, according to new research by business scholars, is not so much competition as "coopetition," a cycle in which competition and cooperation alternate and complement each other. But it's been difficult for governments to cooperate, when we keep creating so many more of them-especially on the local level, where there are now thousands of small municipalities, and more than 28,000 local special districts, boards, authorities, and commissions with jurisdiction over schools, sewers, parks, or police.
And yet, when people begin to recognize the regional size, scale, and nature of the problems that permeate their lives, something unexpected, unusual, helpful, and hopeful begins to unfold: In the first place, it's actually easier to hold regional problems in the mind, turn them over, and tease them apart, because at this scale they're now big enough, or complex enough, to show their interconnections, and "Three E" unity, as it's sometimes expressed, meaning that these are problems that simultaneously present economic, environmental, and equity (or social) issues that have to be tackled together before progress can be made. And yet, big as they are, they're still small enough to yield to practical, and even makeshift and ad hoc solutions. Richard Levine, writing after the First International Ecological City Conference, put it this way: Metropolitan areas may be "the largest unit capable of addressing the many urban architectural, social, economic, political, natural resource, and environmental imbalances in the modern world, and, at the same time, the smallest scale at which such problems can be meaningfully resolved in an integrated and holistic fashion."
The second realization, almost instantaneous with the first, is that "I can't solve this myself-because it affects too many people." And then you start to look around for who those "too many people" might be, meaning, specifically, those regional neighbors, both close at hand and at some remove, who, because they have been equally affected, have also left their doors and are now out in the region, scouring it-looking for you.
These are the stirrings from which the third step, America's new regional action partnerships, springs. Julia Parzen's accompanying paper makes it plain how unlikely and how unpredictable these action partnerships must seem to anyone who can't see the underlying strengths and urgencies that tie regions together. Almost anyone can be the convener, or the "champion," as she says, of such an action partnership-the person who first picks up a phone or gets into a car to go looking for a team of other people representative enough to see all sides of a problem and motivated enough to stay with it. It can be a banker or a bureaucrat; a mayor or a maverick. Sometimes an organization takes the lead-a for-profit company, a non-profit alliance, a foundation devoted to giving money away. Many of the champions are community groups, some suburban, some inner city, that previously have had a narrower focus, concentrating only on, say, affordable housing or water quality.
Scholars have already coined a name for this phenomenon: "Governance," it's called, or governing without government, or as a supplement to government, through "self-organizing, interorganized networks," which are "characterized by mutual trust and adjustment," and which "complement markets and hierarchies." It's not coercive, or top-down, or in the hands of hidden agendas. On the other hand, you can't just call it a bottoms-up approach, because although no one is excluded from taking part, it's as much a sideways and a diagonal approach as it is anything else. It's-governance. In America's metropolitan areas, self-organizing action partnerships have been tackling the toughest questions they can find, including economic cluster strategies, workforce development, sustainable development, citizen empowerment, and ecosystem management. The partnerships have had their problems, as Julia Parzen acknowledges: They are still at a tender stage, identifying opportunities, finding a common language (you have to recognize your own biases and prejudices before you can park them at the door). So far they have successfully been "reinventing planning processes, engaging citizens, and developing thoughtful strategies which have relatively broad support." But they "have not yet mobilized substantial resources," and, as of today, "most have not had much impact on core issues like sprawl."
The Fourth Step. Which brings us to the fourth and potentially most important step in the business of helping regions make sense-a matter of reorganized, or self-organized, regions reaching beyond themselves to form a series of ongoing, higher-level, problem-solving partnerships with the other forces whose destinies are interwoven with theirs, state governments and two arms of the federal government, Congress and the administrative agencies of the executive branch. To get things started, one such partnership arrangement is proposed here-a series of affiliations between regions and the executive branch agencies of all cabinet departments that administer domestic programs-but it is meant to be a model for, and should soon be accompanied by, regional affiliations with state agencies and with interested groups in Congress, both regional delegations and committees that consider and oversee domestic legislation.
While regions have been inventing themselves, the federal government has been just as busy reinventing itself, with the result that a new federalism and an expanded localism may now finally be able to find common ground. Regional alliances are not looking for handouts, but for friends; and the federal government, as it learns to live within balanced budgets, is no longer in the business of throwing money at problems. It's now in everyone's interest to spend the money that's budgeted in ways that actually make a difference to people's lives. In the past, federal officials found it no easier than anyone else, in and out of government, to recognize and deal with regions as distinct and coherent places, and often, as a result, no one noticed that whole regions, and not just cities, suffered from post-war transportation and housing programs that on many occasions gave far-from-balanced assistance to suburban development.
At the same time, the federal government was the first group in the country to give the precursors of today's regions any standing at all; in 1910, the Census Bureau first looked beyond city limits to gather information about what it then called "Metropolitan Districts." And in recent years, various federal agencies, as Clem Dinsmore's accompanying paper elegantly shows, have been reaching out to regional problem-solvers, either on their own, or in teams of two or three. There have been marked successes in the three areas that Clem and Julia refer to as "smart people," meaning useful information; "smart regulations," meaning being flexible about how something gets done, if the result is an improvement over past performance; and "smart money," meaning spending money wisely, so that it solves several problems at once, or addresses the "Three E" impacts of a need in tandem. Federal agencies are still rather new at this-they've had less practice cooperating and networking with each other than groups out in the regions have had. Furthermore, they have yet to set up a single shop in Washington that metropolitan areas can deal with, whatever their questions, nor do federal field officials who actually do their work within regions hold regular get-togethers to compare notes or coordinate policies.
Two Timelines. The present proposal looks forward to two dates-five months from now and five years from now. Let's say that in five months, the executive branch takes two actions: the President issues an executive order ratifying the new reality of everyday American life, and requests that his agencies work with metropolitan areas and make sure that the programs they administer assist regions-as-a-whole, rather than exacerbate the imbalances that threaten their stability. Let's say, too, that the President, in order to give this idea a field test, asks his Community Empowerment Board, or some other agency, to choose six to twelve urban regions that have already set up their own problem-solving action partnerships that the executive branch, in a pilot program over the next five years, can now establish specific working affiliations with.
Several questions arise:
* Would your area be interested
in participating in such a program?
* If it would, what form
of federal help would actually qualify as "help"?
*
Can you think of three problems of grave concern to your area that could move
forward with the right kind of federal attention?
* If you
were able to get some coordinated federal assistance, and it was a help, what
kinds of improvements would you like to see your area accomplishing, or taking
on, or beginning to think about in 2002?
As Clem Dinsmore sees it, a new kind of federal participation in regional affairs can strengthen metropolitan areas in several ways that he called the "Three Ls": leveraging is his word for setting up ties that enhance interactions between Washington and regions; linkage means federal actions that strengthen the governance networks that already exist in regions; and learning takes place when the individual capacities and understanding of each player on a regional team of problem solvers are furthered.
You have to remember that, historically, the premise behind regulations has been an assumption, both by regulators and the regulated, that people don't want to do things they ought to do, and so they have to be made to do them. But what's the most effective regulatory approach when people voluntarily band together to accomplish something that outstrips the goals promulgated by regulations? That's the hope of a new program in the New York area, where the City of New York, which used to pride itself on having the best tasting drinking water in the world, is on its own initiative working amicably, after a hundred years of antagonisms, with watershed towns and farmers a hundred miles to the north, to protect water quality while promoting appropriate growth. In return, the federal regulator involved, the Environmental Protection Agency, has suspended imposing the only solution it could think of-requiring the city to spend six billion dollars on water filtration plants.
The fundamental problem of post-war urban regions has been that their force fields that organize them have been distorted: cities, which used to be magnets, began pushing out many of those who could afford to leave, while at the same time outlying areas pulled people farther and farther away, into far-flung new orbits from which the old sun could only barely be glimpsed. The most talked-about strategy for reining in push-pull metropolitan development has been to set up urban growth boundaries at the peripheries. But that, while in some areas dramatically successful, sounds like the old regulatory approach-putting a brake on something people ought not to want to do. What about the possibilities of re-magnetizing, and adding value to, the centers of regions? How would you go about this? What experiences could cities start offering five years from now that would make you need to spend more time there, delighting you and putting you at your ease? What would need to happen to make you feel more comfortable in the presence of regional neighbors who up to now have been strangers? What experiences, what sights and sounds, what smells and tastes would attract children, or older people, or visitors?
A lot is at stake here. The twenty-first century will test humanity as no century before it-climates will change, in all likelihood, and oceans will rise. Thousands of species will disappear, and our own will double its numbers. In this country the population will increase by half, and there will be far larger numbers of older people, and the diversity of citizens will make itself known throughout our settlements, rather than being concentrated in large cities, as it is today. We've got to pull together, or we won't have much of a chance. By working on these issues now, in our regions, we can arrive at what will later be truly national solutions.
Of course, since our regions, unforeseen and unforsaken, will remain complex and messy places that will constantly be setting us new tasks, perhaps the third of three goals for five years from now should be: "To set three new goals for the next five years."