New Geography

Category: Policy

  • The Protean Future Of American Cities

    The ongoing Census reveals the continuing evolution of America’s cities from small urban cores to dispersed, multi-polar regions that includes the city’s surrounding areas and suburbs. This is not exactly what most urban pundits, and journalists covering cities, would like to see, but the reality is there for anyone who reads the numbers.

    To date the Census shows that  growth in America’s large core cities has slowed, and in some cases even reversed. This has happened both in great urban centers such as Chicago and in the long-distressed inner cities of St. Louis, Baltimore, Wilmington, Del., and Birmingham, Ala.

    This would surely come as a surprise to many reporters infatuated with growth in downtown districts, notably in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and elsewhere. For them, good restaurants, bars and clubs trump everything. A recent Newsweek article, for example, recently acknowledged Chicago’s demographic and fiscal decline but then lavishly praised the city, and its inner city for becoming “finally hip.”

    Sure, being cool is nice, but the obsession with hipness often means missing a bigger story: the gradual diminution of the urban core as engines for job creation. For example, while Chicago’s Loop has doubled its population to 20,000, it has also experienced a large drop in private-sector employment, which now constitutes a considerably smaller share of regional employment than a decade ago. The same goes for the new urbanist mecca of Portland as well as the heavily hyped Los Angeles downtown area.

    None of this suggests, however, that the American urban core is in a state of permanent decline. The urban option will continue to appeal to small but growing segment of the population, and certain highly paid professionals, notably in finance, will continue to cluster there.

    But the bigger story — all but ignored by the mainstream media — is the continued evolution of urban regions toward a more dispersed, multi-centered form. Brookings’ Robert Lang has gone even further, using the term “edgeless cities” to describe what he calls an increasingly “elusive metropolis” with highly dispersed employment.

    Rather than a cause for alarm, this form of  development  simply reflects  the protean vitality of American urban forms.  Two regions, whose results were released last week, reveal these changing patterns. One is the Raleigh region, which has experienced a growth rate of 42%, likely the highest of the nation’s regions with a population over 1 million. This metropolitan area, anchored by universities and technology-oriented industries, is among the lowest-density regions in the country, with under 1,700 persons per square mile, slightly less than Charlotte, Nashville and Atlanta.

    Unlike the geographically constrained older urban areas, Raleigh’s historical core municipality experienced strong growth, from 288,000 to 404,000, a gain of 40%. This gain was aided by annexations that added nearly 30% to the area of the municipality (from 113 to 143 square miles). The annexations of recent decades have left the city of Raleigh with an overwhelmingly suburban urban form. In 1950, at the beginning of the post-World War II suburban boom, the city of Raleigh had a population of 66,000, living in a land area of only 11 square miles.

    Even here, however, the suburbs (the area outside the city of Raleigh) gained nearly two-thirds of the metropolitan area growth (65%) and now have 64% of the region’s population. Over the last ten years, the suburbs have grown 43%. It is here that much of the economic growth of the Research Triangle has taken place, as companies concentrate in predominately suburban communities such as Cary.

    Yet in most demographically healthy urban regions, the growth continues to be primarily in the suburban centers. One particularly relevant example is the Kansas City area, a dynamic region anchoring what we have identified as “the zone of sanity.” Like most American regions, the Kansas City area is growing, but in ways that often do not resemble the fantasies of urban density boosters.

    KC’s growth pattern is important and could be a harbinger of what’s to come in this decade. Along with Indianapolis, this resurgent Heartland region is expanding faster than the national average. It is also attracting many talented people, ranking in our top ten list of the country’s “brain magnets,” a performance better than such long-standing talent attractors as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Boston. Between 2007 and 2009, the Kansas City region’s growth in college-educated residents was more than twice the rate of our putative intellectual meccas of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

    But despite the wishes of some  in Kansas City’s traditional establishment, this cannot be interpreted as meaning that  the “hip and cool” are being lured en masse to the city’s inner core. Over the past decade, as in most American regions, Kansas City has expanded far more outward than inward. Despite a modest increase in the city’s population of some 18,000 — much of it in the city’s furthest urban boundaries — the city’s population remains below its 1950 high. On the other hand, some 91% of its 200,000 population increase occurred in the suburban periphery.

    Critically, it is important to note that this expansion reflects not so much the growth of “bedroom” communities, but a dramatic shift of employment to the periphery. By far the most important center for this new suburban growth in jobs and people lies across the river in Johnson County, Kan.. Over the past decade, Johnson County has accounted for roughly half of the region’s total growth.

    Johnson County  – which boasts among the highest levels of educated people in the country — also has become the primary locale for many technology and business service firms, with more people commuting into the area than out. This reflects an increasingly suburbanized economic base. Over the past decade the urban core of Jackson County has lost 42,000 jobs, while the surrounding suburbs have grown by 20,000, with the biggest growth in largely exurban Platte County.

    So what does this tell us about the future of the American urban region?  Certainly the expansion of relatively low-density peripheral areas negates the notion of a  ”triumphant” urban core. Dispersion is continuing virtually everywhere, and with it, a movement of the economic center of gravity away from the city centers in most regions.

    But in another way these patterns augur a bright future for an expansive American metropolis that, while not hostile to the urban center, recognizes that most businesses and families continue to prefer lower-density, decentralized settings.  The sooner urbanists and planners can accommodate themselves to this fact, the sooner we can work on making these new dynamic patterns of residence and employment more sustainable and livable for the people and companies who will continue to gravitate there.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Kansas City skyline photo by Tim Samoff

  • Sputnik Moments, Spending Cuts, and (Remember These?) Jobs

    The stand-off in Washington over spending reductions has pushed aside serious discussion about a far more pressing issue:  job creation.

    Granted, the country is long overdue for action on spending cuts. There is much that our government does that we can live without. Bureaucracies’ programmatic lassitude and congressional appropriators’ adolescent-like lack of discipline have contributed to our nation’s fiscal imbalance.

    To be sure, the federal deficit is heading into a crisis zone the likes of which the United States has never seen, and a fairly dramatic policy response is needed to fix it. But one overlooked way to improve the fiscal picture would be to spark economic growth. This is precisely what worked well in the 1990s, something for which both a Republican Congress and Democratic President could legitimately claim credit.

    But the focus on jobs and economic growth has been lost.

    Democratic leadership chooses to focus on a narrow, government-driven idea of job growth, deluding themselves – against the huge weight of evidence – that government can lead the job growth agenda through stimulus. Republicans have made spending cuts the backbone of their jobs growth strategy, and they have embarked on a campaign to convince voters that if we cut enough spending, investor confidence will return, employers will hire more people, and jobs will return.

    President Obama’s Sputnik moment was truly the stuff of science fiction, or at least the Truman Show, in which we all drive our Priuses from our homes to the train station down the street on our way to work or the gym in a carefully planned world that will – voila! – create millions of jobs.  Republicans, for their part, have been primarily focused on non-defense discretionary spending – that part of the federal budget that accounts for only a little more than a third of all spending and which, if you removed all of it, would still leave the entitlement programs intact that add most to our debt and deficit. After the work of the scalpel is done, Republican theory goes, enough space will be cleared up in the economy for Adam Smith’s invisible hand to start generating jobs in an Austrian school-like spontaneous order, which will generate jobs…and so on.

    Now, to their credit, Republicans have begun talking more seriously about introducing entitlement reforms this year that would address the more serious deficit issues. Given the bipartisan nature of President Obama’s debt commission, the plan should get the support of at least some Democratic members, even if the President and Democratic congressional leadership shove it aside.

    But however much GOP congressional leaders might be wising up on addressing the deficit through fiscal restraint, they are AWOL on addressing it through job creation and growth, without which deficit reduction is much, much more painful.

    Voters know this at some level. In a poll of self-identified conservative Republicans at ConservativeHome.com, a site I edit, respondents are eager to see deep spending cuts, but they also give Republican lawmakers low marks on job creation and economic growth. In a poll we conducted last week, nearly half (49 percent) of respondents said they thought Republicans had been doing a good job of pushing for spending reductions, but 69 percent said Republicans were not doing a good job of explaining what they were doing to create jobs. The party of growth and opportunity has not even convinced its most ardent supporters what it is doing on the economy.

    Meanwhile, Gallup’s numbers this past week painted a troubling picture amidst slightly good news. While their survey showed an unemployment drop from 10.9 percent to 9.8 percent in the past year, this came mostly from gains among the most and least educated. Middle America remains pretty much stuck where it was. And then, as if to pour salt in a wound, Gallup released numbers three days later showing deterioration in jobs numbers in February compared to January.

    We can’t keep going on pretending stimulus, on the one hand, and spending cuts, on the other, are a viable economic growth strategy. There needs to be a realistic plan put forward and the party whose candidate figures this out will win the White House in 2012.

    The plan should consist of at least the following:

    First, tax reform. The President’s debt commission put forward some really good ideas. The best idea winning the most bipartisan support is reforming the corporate tax code. Rather than being a giveaway to big business, lowering America’s ridiculously high rate is the most proven way to create jobs. The OECD, not some right wing group, has concluded this after studying the issue across a number of countries. Also, simplifying the tax code by getting rid of costly deductions would help.

    Second, make it clear what being too big to fail means so investors will know, and start putting more capital into businesses that will create jobs. Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago has a good idea about clarifying the current financial reform bill along these lines.

    Third, make energy the central component of a growth strategy. The U.S. has the capacity to become a net exporter of natural gas and to re-start a generation of nuclear power production that would make us less dependent on nonrenewable energy. We would also be greener in terms of carbon emission and would create jobs.

    Fourth, build more roads. Forget about those train tracks. We should be scraping together every unused stimulus dollar and wasteful penny of DOT funding to add lanes of highway to our most congested areas. Facilitating commerce and reducing lost revenue due to traffic congestion will also have the benefit of creating needed jobs.

    This would be a start. Whether anyone will take up the challenge is another issue.

    Ryan Streeter is Editor of www.ConservativeHome.com.

    Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

  • Obama’s High-Speed Rail Obsession

    Perhaps nothing so illustrates President Obama’s occasional disconnect with reality than his fervent advocacy of high-speed rail. Amid mounting pressure for budget cuts that affect existing programs, including those for the inner city, the president has made his $53 billion proposal to create a national high-speed rail network as among his top priorities.

    Our President may be an intelligent and usually level-headed man, but this represents a serious case of  policy delusion. As Robert Samuelson pointed out in Newsweek, high-speed rail is not an appropriate fit for a country like the U.S. Except for a few areas, notably along the Northeast Corridor, the U.S. just lacks the density that would make such a system work. Samuelson calls the whole idea “a triumph of fancy over fact.”

    Arguably the biggest problem with high-speed rail is its extraordinary costs, which would require massive subsidies to keep operating. Unlike the Federal Highway Program, largely financed by the gas tax, high-speed rail lacks any credible source of funding besides taxpayer dollars.

    Part of the pitch for high-speed rail is nationalistic. To be a 21st century super power, we must emulate current No. 2 China. But this is a poor reason to indulge in a hugely expensive program when the U.S. already has the world’s most evolved highway, freight rail and airline system.

    Also, if the U.S. were to follow the Chinese model, as some have suggested, perhaps it should impose rule from a Washington version of a centralized authoritarian government. After all, dictatorships are often quite adept at “getting things done.”  But in a democracy “getting things done” means balancing interests and efficiencies, not following orders from above.

    In China high-speed rail is so costly that the trains are too expensive for the average citizen. Furthermore, construction costs are so high the Chinese Academy of Sciences has already warned that its debts may not be payable. This experience with ballooning costs and far lower fare revenues have raised taxpayer obligations in Taiwan and Korea and added to heavily to the national debt in Japan.

    The prospect of mounting and uncontrollable costs has led governors to abandon high-speed projects  in Ohio, Wisconsin and most recently Florida, where a battle to save the Tampa-Orlando line has begun . In times of budget stress, the idea of building something new, and historically difficult to contain by costs, becomes a hard sell.

    Oddly, the leaders of California, faced with one of the worst fiscal positions in the country, are determined to spend several billions on what Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters has dubbed a “train to nowhere” for 54 miles between Madera and Corcoran — two unremarkable and remote Central Valley towns. The proposal makes the former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ notorious ”bridges to nowhere” project seem like frugal public policy.

    California’s train to nowhere has been justified as part of wider project to construct a statewide system. But the whole idea makes little financial sense: The University of California’s Institute for Transportation describes the high-speed proposal as based on an “inconsistent model” whose ridership projections are simply not “reliable.”

    Equally suspect are cost estimates, which have doubled (after adjustment for inflation) from 1999 to $42.6 billion last year and. A new study says that the project could currently cost close to $65 billion. Costs for a ticket from Los Angeles to San Francisco, originally pegged at $55 one way, had nearly doubled by 2009, and now some estimates place it at about to at least a $100 or perhaps much as $190 — considerably more than an advanced-purchase ticket on far faster Southwest Airlines.

    There’s growing political opposition to the system as well, and not just among penny-pinching right-wingers. Residents and local officials in the San Francisco Peninsula, a wealthy and reliably liberal portion of Silicon Valley, largely oppose plans to route the line through their communities. This includes some prominent liberal legislators, such as San Mateo’s Assembly Jerry Hill, who has threatened to put high-speed rail back on the ballot if costs start to surpass initial estimates. Another Democrat, California Treasurer Bill Lockyer has doubts that the rail authority will be able to sell the deal to potential bond-buyers   due in part to a lack of consistent estimates in ridership or cost.

    So why is Obama still so determined to push the high-speed boondoggle? Largely it’s a deadly combination of theology and money. Powerful rail construction interests, notably the German giant Siemens, are spreading cash like mustard on a bratwurst to promote the scheme. Add to that construction unions and the ever voracious investment banks who would love to pocket fees for arranging to sell the bonds and you have interests capable of influencing either party.

    Then there’s what might be called the “density lobby” — big city mayors, construction firms  and the urban land owners. These magnates, who frequently extort huge public subsidies for their projects, no doubt think it grand to spend billions of public funds on something that might also increase the value of their real estate.

    And finally there are the true believers, notably planners, academics, green activists and an army of rail fans. These are people who believe America should be more like Europe — denser, more concentrated in big cities and tied to the rails. “High speed rail is not really about efficient transport,” notes California transit expert and accountant Tom Rubin. “It’s all about shaping cities for a certain agenda.”

    Yet despite their power, these forces face mounting obstacles. As transportation expert Ken Orski points out, the balance of power in the House now lies with suburban and rural legislators, whose constituents would not benefit much from high-speed rail. And then there are governors, increasingly Republican and conservative, very anxious not to add potentially huge obligations to their already stressed budgets.

    The most decisive opposition, however, could come from those who favor transit spending but understand to the need to prioritize.  High-speed rail is far more expensive than such things as fixing current commuter rail and subways or expanding both public and private bus service. Indeed, the money that goes to urban rail often ends up being diverted from other, more cost-effective systems, notably buses.

    The choice between high-speed rail and more conventional, less expensive transit has already been presaged in the fight against expanding LA’s expensive rail system by organizations representing bus riders. These activists contend that rail swallows funds that could be spent on buses

    Much the same case is being made the San Francisco peninsula. The opponents of high-speed rail on the San Francisco Peninsula are outraged that the state would spend billions on a chancy potential boondoggle when the popular Caltrain commuter rail service is slated to be curtailed or even eliminated.

    One can of course expect that anti-spending conservatives will be the biggest cheerleaders for high-speed rail’s decline. But transit advocates may be forced to join the chorus of opposition, in order to steer   transit spending towards more basic priorities as buses in Los Angeles, subways in New York or commuter rail in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    In an era of tough budgets, and proposed cutbacks on basic services, setting sensible transportation priorities is crucial. Spending billions on a conveyance that will benefit a relative handful of people and places is not just illogical. It’s obscene.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo: Center for Neighborhood Technology

  • Tampa to Orlando High Speed Rail: The Risk to Local Taxpayers

    No sooner had Florida Gov. Rick Scott rejected federal funding for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line, than proponents both in Washington and Tallahassee set about to find ways to circumvent his decision. While an approach has not been finalized, a frequently suggested alternative is to grant the federal money to a local government, such as a city or county or even to a transit agency.

    Eliminating State Taxpayer Risks, Creating Local? In an announcing his decision, Governor Scott cited the substantial risks to Florida taxpayers from cost overruns, the ongoing obligation under the federal grant to subsidize operations and the fact that under certain circumstances Florida might even have to repay the $2.4 billion in federal grants. Any local government accepting the federal money would expose itself to the financial risks from which Florida taxpayers have been exempted by Governor Scott’s action.

    None of these risks is an idle threat.

    (1) Capital Cost Overruns: Based upon the international experience, the eventual construction cost overruns for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line could easily run to $3 billion, more than doubling the price of the project (Note on Extent of Taxpayer Liability, below). In light of the recently reported 50 percent increase in California high-speed rail construction costs, even the $3 billion estimate could turn out to be conservative. The problem is that any local federal grant recipient (city, county or transit district) would be responsible for these cost overruns.

    (2) Ongoing Operating Subsidies: The ridership projections for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line are exceedingly optimistic. This could well lead to a situation in which substantial subsidies are necessary to operate the trains, despite claims of proponents to the contrary. These subsidies would be the responsibility of any city, county or transit district that becomes a grant recipient.

    (3) Federal Pay-Back: If, for any reason, the eventual high-speed rail service levels are not sufficiently high because of lower than projected ridership or if service is canceled, any city, county or transit district could be required to return the $2.4 billion in federal grants. Florida is already paying millions annually for a similar "transgression." In 2009, service reductions on the Tri-Rail Commuter Rail System in the Miami area led the Obama Administration’s Department of Transportation to demand repayment of one quarter billion dollars in grants. Tri-Rail was saved from this obligation only by a multimillion dollar Tallahassee bailout. Proponents have claimed that this rail obligation could be negotiated away for high-speed rail. Why was the Tri-Rail obligation not negotiated away in 2009?

    By rejecting the federal funding, Gov. Scott has inoculated Florida taxpayers against these risks.

    However, there would be no inoculation for any local jurisdiction whose commissioners or city council accepted the expensive "gift" of federal funding for the high speed rail line. Their taxpayers would have to pay. The very financial viability of any such jurisdiction could be at risk.

    The Risk Could Revert to State Taxpayers: Eventually, the risk could be again be visited upon state taxpayers as a local government facing virtual bankruptcy would doubtless seek a bailout in Tallahassee, repeating the Tri-Rail experience, though much more expensively. Moreover, canceling a half built project, which might be tempting as costs escalate above projections, would simply not be viable. The political pressure to complete the project, at whatever cost, could prove to be overwhelming.

    Delusions About Private Responsibility for Cost Overruns: Some proponents claim that these huge obligations can be somehow transferred to the private builder/operator that is selected for the project. Nothing like this has ever happened in public-private partnerships around the world, and for good reason. Companies do not stash away billions of dollars for cost overruns.

    Further, the winning bidder will be a consortium of other companies, established with limited liability by larger companies. The consortium would abandon a project it could not afford sooner rather than later. Any bankruptcy of the builder/operator would be limited to the consortium and would not extend to the parent companies, leaving the local taxpayers to pay.

    There is no escaping the fact that the taxpayers of any city or county accepting the federal money would be providing financial guarantees to an international infrastructure industry that has left a "train" of huge and unanticipated financial obligations around the world in its wake (Note on Cost Escalation, below).

    Believing in Santa Claus? Public officials, and most recently Orlando Mayor Teresa Jacobs, have indicated support for high-speed rail if private and federal funds pay for it, and state and local taxpayers aren’t exposed to liability. This is a wise position, but untenable. Expect Santa Claus to arrive in the midst of a Florida summer before that, with a sleigh full of billions.

    —-

    Note on Extent of Taxpayer Liability: This $3 billion is in addition to the already committed $280 million of taxpayer funding. Proponents of the high-speed rail line have assumed that the $280 million would be the limit of taxpayer obligations. As this article shows, the $280 million could be a "drop in the bucket" compared to the likely eventual taxpayer liability.

    Note on Cost Escalation: An international team of researchers led by Oxford University Professor Bent Flyvbjerg has found in Megaprojects and Risks: An Anatomy of Ambitionthat similar projects routinely cost far more than taxpayers and other funders are told. They also attract fewer riders and generate less revenue (which can require operating subsidies). The Flyvbjerg team implies that these "lowball" (our term) projections are not accidental but all are the result of "strategic misrepresentation," (their term) which project promoters employ to increase the potential that projects will be approved. The researchers also refer to "strategic misrepresentation" as "lying," which is an exceedingly strong term for academic research and is reflective of the strength of the conclusions.

  • The Rest of the Story on Krugman and the Economy

    Paul Krugman really doesn’t like the possibility that there is a structural shift in employment, because it weakens the argument for the massive Keynesian spending spree he’d like to see the government initiate.  To that end, he published this piece on his blog February 13th.

    Before we go on, some readers may wonder what a structural shift is and why it weakens the argument for Keynesian spending.  A structural shift is when employment permanently shifts (well, as much as anything is permanent in economics) from one economic sector to another, say from construction to healthcare.

    The reason that a structural shift weakens the Keynesian’s argument is that moving workers from one sector to another takes time.  They may need retrained.  They may need to move to another location.  Think of our construction worker moving to health care.  He or she probably doesn’t have the skills to be immediately employable in health care.  Some sort of education or training has to happen first.

    This poses a problem for Keynesian expansionists, because their argument is that the only problem is a drop in aggregate demand (consumer spending) brought about by….well, animal spirits.  Since there is no real problem, government can increase spending (it doesn’t matter what you spend the money on.  You could dig holes and fill them back up), fool the consumer into thinking she is better off, and voilá, aggregate demand goes up with the government spending.

    Problem solved.  It’s a beautiful thing.

    However, spending can’t solve the problem of unemployment brought about by a structural shift.  It takes time to retrain the affected workers.  There are things government can do to speed the process, but spending willy-nilly is not one of them.

    Hope that clears things up.  Let’s get back to Krugman’s piece.

    He claims that unemployment in every sector has just about doubled since the recession began, and that this is proof that no structural shift is going on.  He has a nice chart to show the increase in unemployment by sector.

    There is a problem though.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics—the same source that Krugman claims originated his data—reports that construction jobs fell by 2 million, or 26.7 percent, from December 2007 through December 2010, while education and healthcare jobs grew by1.2 million, or 6.5 percent.

    This appears to contradict Krugman’s data, but it is possible that both sets of data are true.  If they are both true, then Krugman is being no less dishonest than if he created his numbers out of thin air.
    If Krugman is telling the truth when he presents a graph showing that unemployment approximately doubled from 2007 to 2010 in both the construction and the education and healthcare sector, then is must be that large numbers of unemployed construction workers migrated to being unemployed education and healthcare workers.

    There is no other possible explanation.

    This, of course, completely contradicts Krugman’s argument.  If his data are true, he’s using data that confirms a structural shift to argue that there is no structural shift, by neglecting to disclose the jobs data I’ve disclosed above.

    Krugman is not a dumb guy.  He has a well-deserved Nobel Prize for his work on international economics.  He has a career of looking at data, in depth and with insight.  His failure to provide the entire story has to be considered something besides an oversight.  We have to conclude that he’s purposely being deceitful.

    I don’t know why a guy with all of Krugman’s gifts and accomplishments would use data deceitfully.  It is a shame, though, that an economist at the top of his profession and with the New York Times bullhorn uses that bullhorn to confuse instead of to enlighten.

  • Regional Efficiency: The Swiss Model?

    Given that no one likes Switzerland’s banks, coo-coo clocks, high prices, smugness, dull cities, cheesy foods, or yodeling, I realize that it is too early to speak politically about “the Swiss Model.” But it needs to be pointed out that while the European Union evaporates and Homeland America goes for broke, the world’s second oldest democracy (1291) has trade and budget surpluses, a multi-lingual population, a green network of trains and buses to every village, excellent public schools, and a federal-style government that is closer to Thomas Jefferson’s America than the bureaucratic monarchy that gives the king’s speeches in Washington.

    Yes, the Swiss recently voted against the construction of minarets (NIMCP or “not in my cow pasture”) and for the eviction of immigrants convicted of serious crimes. (Would you vote “for” protecting the immigration rights of the rapist next door?) But a quarter of the students in Geneva’s public schools are foreign, and—in the age of focus groups and slick pollsters—the democracy remains in the hands of its citizenry, for better or for worse, which every two months votes on the referendums of the critical issues. On this month’s ballot is gun control.

    A mythical Swiss story involves a man on a morning bus, chatting with someone standing near him, exchanging pleasantries about work and the weather, and discovering that his commuting friend is also the president of the Swiss confederation.

    I had a similar experience. I had arrived at the Geneva Press Club on my bike, and discovered that the woman sitting near me was also the president, Micheline Calmy-Rey. To be clear, she was at the front of the room, and I was in the audience. But her unassuming manner was that of a bus commuter, and had she walked into the room unescorted, I would not have marked her as the leader of the country.

    In a way, she is not. To be president of Switzerland is to be the head of a seven person federal council, whose members are apportioned according to the political parties in the parliament. Real power in the country remains vested in the villages and in the twenty-six cantons. Think of the Swiss president as the unlucky committee person who has to keep the minutes.

    After the European revolutions of 1848, Switzerland adopted a federal constitution, in part modeled on the American system, although instead of the imperial presidency (which Jefferson called “a bad edition” of the Polish king), the Swiss went for an executive council. Benjamin Franklin had the same idea earlier for the U.S., but lost out to the more presidential Adams and Madison.

    Each year, the members of Switzerland’s federal council draw straws for the presidency and the other executive offices, such as the portfolios for justice, sport, and economics. Technically, the chief executive is composed of the entire collective.

    Recent presidents include Hans-Rudolph Merz and Doris Leuthard (often the Swiss president is a woman). The Merz administration, however, proved the limits of a referendum democracy in the fast-paced, somewhat dictatorial age of globalization.

    From the German-speaking part of the country, and regarded by his critics as a small town politician, Merz had the misfortune to horse trade with Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi. The diplomatic row began when Hannibal, the son of the Libyan president, was arrested in a Geneva hotel for having mistreated his servants.

    No one in Geneva doubts that Hannibal Qaddafi’s servants were treated little better than Arab slaves. The staff at the posh hotel reluctantly called the police to intervene. Warming to the Ali Baba-like themes of the crime, the local press published Hannibal’s mug shot, and the crisis was off to the camel races.

    After picking up two Swiss businessmen in Tripoli with expired visas, Father Muammar — Qaddafi, that is — threw them into solitary confinement and vowed to release them only if the Swiss punished the Geneva police, apologized to Hannibal, and groveled inside the colonel’s tent.

    Agreeing to Qaddafi’s terms, because the great Swiss trait is accommodation, Merz flew to Tripoli, thinking he had a Clintonian deal to return triumphantly to Bern with the Swiss hostages.

    Instead, the colonel-for-life lectured Merz on the finer points of visa legislation, and the Swiss president flew back to Bern with only the hostages’ luggage, which had been loaded onto the presidential executive jet. The hostages had to serve humiliating prison terms, and a grateful nation watched Merz retire at the end of 2009. A government of “sapeur pompiers” (volunteer firemen) is not without its comic charms.

    As she was then minister of foreign affairs, Calmy-Rey was not blameless in what the press calls the “Affaire Qaddafi,” but that didn’t prevent her from becoming president this year, her second time in the position.

    At a press conference, she admitted, in so many words, that a rotating federal council perhaps wasn’t the best way to deal with erratic strongmen. Her actual words were much more diplomatic; she suggested that the council had lacked the “resources” to manage the crisis.

    In person, I liked Calmy-Rey much more than I expected. Her image in the press is as a glad-hander, someone unwilling to tell Swiss detractors to stick it. She wore a head scarf to meet Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    In person she’s thoughtful, well spoken, conversationally direct, up on the details of government, ever-so-slightly humorous, and modest, as if she were mayor of a small commune, which is another way to understand Switzerland.

    I have been in Washington press conferences, and they are like a Versailles levée compared with a Swiss question-and-answer session. Calmy-Rey shared the modest dais with two officials and the head of the press club, as if they were panelists at a Rotary meeting.

    Her formal remarks were confined to a budgetary review of the pluses and minuses of supporting “international Geneva,” the sprawling network of UN-related organizations that have come to roost in the city. At the cost of billions, laid on in office infrastructure and tram lines, the hope is that peace becomes part of the Swiss brand.

    Everyone in the room who wanted to ask a question did, and Calmy-Rey stayed as long as it took to recite the liturgy on Brazilian floods, Middle East protest riots, banking secrecy, bilateral relations with the European Union, Kosovo’s future, nuclear Iran, building plans at the United Nations, Armenia and Turkey, the surplus of the federal budget, and more, until the room felt like a class eager for the break.

    The conference hardly made the daily papers. The only sound bite was her answer to a question about whether the Swiss were prepared to give asylum to the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange. Calmy-Rey gave a broad, politically evasive smile, and said, in somewhat fractured English, “We cannot give what we have not been asked to give.”

    Meaning: Neither Assange personally, nor any government, had approached the Swiss to grant him asylum. If I had to guess, I would say the Swiss would pass on granting asylum to Assange, just to avoid more aggravation with the Americans, who routinely use the Swiss as punching bags on banking secrecy and their nonaligned status in world affairs. In another context Calmy-Rey said, “We know we’re alone,” and that was a weakness in dealing with Qaddafi.

    I found Calmy-Rey realistic and self-effacing on Switzerland’s diplomatic nether world. The country has to straddle “international Geneva” and its many world agencies with another Swiss impulse, which, in the words of George Washington, is to avoid “foreign entanglements.”

    Switzerland has come through the recent economic horrors with its budget in surplus ($3 billion), and without any of the Euro debts that followed the long weekends in Ireland and Greece. Power remains in the cantons and the communes, which decide what to teach in the schools, how much tax to collect, and who lives in the villages.

    Refreshing, as well, is that the Swiss president can travel in a motorcade of one (I noticed that her driver is a woman), if not on the bus. When Calmy-Rey was in her first term as president, my daughter Laura was in high school. One night at dinner she described shopping after school in a discount department store. In the checkout line she stood next to Calmy-Rey, who, by herself, was buying a blouse.

    Photo by Juerg Vollmer; Micheline Calmy-Rey, Zuerich, 2009

    Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical essays. He is also editor of Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Switzerland.

  • Why Duany is Wrong About the Importance of Public Participation

    One of the news stories circling lately is an interview with Andres Duany where he asserts that public participation requirements are too onerous to enable great work to be done.   Early in my career I worked as a public historian and historic preservation specialist, so rather than launch immediately into my opinion, let me tell you a true story.

    In the 1950s, business owners in downtowns across the country became agitated over the fact that their central business districts were facing a double challenge: increasing amounts of traffic congestion and increasing competition from new suburban shopping centers.  One of the towns feeling these challenges was Green Bay, Wisconsin, which had a very energetic and forward-thinking business leadership circle. 

    The good men of Green Bay did what most forward-thinking leaders do when faced with a fearful challenge on the horizon: they hired a consultant.  The consultant they chose was Victor Gruen, an architect who had recently gained fame designing the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall, in Edina, Minnesota.  In the couple of years that had lapsed since the Southland Mall plans hit the streets, Gruen had become a celebrity – the Andres Duany of his day. 

    In a 2006 article for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell described Gruen as “short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair and eyebrows like unpruned hedgerows.” Gladwell summed up Gruen’s impact pretty succinctly:

    Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype. For a decade, he gave speeches about it and wrote books and met with one developer after another and waved his hands in the air excitedly, and over the past half century that archetype has been reproduced so faithfully on so many thousands of occasions that today virtually every suburban American goes shopping or wanders around or hangs out in a Southdale facsimile at least once or twice a month. Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall.

    Gruen asserted in Green Bay, as he did in dozens of other cities in the 1950s and 1960s, that the key to solving downtown’s competition challenge was to completely separate vehicular traffic from pedestrians.  By massively widening Main Street at the north end of the commercial district and completely enclosing the core of the existing commercial district, all of downtown’s problems would be solved.  All the plan required was money and a willingness to be unsentimental and practical.

    You don’t have to be Duany to understand what happened.  It took 20 years for Gruen’s vision to become some form of reality, and during that time the City’s business and political leadership –and its planning staff – stuck to Gruen’s plan as diligently as the real world constraints of financing and private development would allow.  

    By the time it opened in 1977, the new Port Plaza Mall and associated parking lots and garages had obliterated acres of downtown buildings, dislocated a hundred residents.  It sent dozens of businesses to liquidation or to the far edges of the newly-sprawling city where many of them are located today.  If Gruen considered the collateral damage of grand ideas at all, I wager he simply viewed them as the price of progress. 

    All of this might be tolerable from a strict economic standpoint if Gruen’s grand plan had worked.  It didn’t.  Port Plaza Mall was a money-loser from virtually day one.  By the early 1980s, Port Plaza was doing so poorly that the City took the advice of another consultant and bulldozed another full block of buildings to add the magic third anchor, which they were assured was the way to fix the mall’s ails.  By the early 2000s, that anchor was gone. 

    Green Bay, like many other cities that drank the downtown mall Kool-Aid, continues to struggle with a downtown that is dominated by a windowless, dispiriting, too-vacant hulk where its heart should be.  Meanwhile, the region’s former skid row, right across the Fox River within eyesight of the mall, has become the hottest urban neighborhood in the region, and the winner of a Great American Main Street Award. 

    This isn’t simply a story about the virtues of historic preservation.  Gruen’s idea didn’t fail because Green Bay wanted old buildings or because the people who lived and worked in those old downtown buildings did something to undermine the plan.  Like most people of that era, the majority of the City’s leadership and residents placed their faith in the expert and in the concept of progress.  Any gut misgivings they may have had were pushed aside.  The plan was made by a national expert, right?

    Gruen’s mall failed because he envisioned and sold an ideal solution without giving any attention to economic realities, and without consideration of the myriad of unforeseen factors and unintended consequences that could, and did, develop.  Gruen stood at the beginning of an era, and there was no way anyone could anticipate how the world would change in a few short decades.

    The greatest failure of Gruen’s plan was that he did not recognize or acknowledge that his Grand Vision could very well turn out all wrong.     

    We should have learned by now that our Grand Visionary Designers are not infallible. Our landscapes are littered with Grand Visionary Architecture that was supposed to fix something, or create Something Big. And so few of those grand visions ever came out the way they were promised, or managed not to create a new set of problems.  Never heard of Port Plaza?  That’s because there are Port Plazas of one flavor or another in virtually every city in the country.  Some are malls, some are stadiums, some are brutalistic, forsaken parks.  You can pick them out easily by their Grand Design ambitions and their total lack of life. 

    Our failure to learn this lesson is a blot on architecture and planning.

    This history is exactly why Duany is wrong about the importance of public participation.  Public participation is important not just to try to get people to go along with our vision, to give us a chance to yell loud enough to drown them out, or to allow us to demonstrate the superiority of our Grand Vision over their piddling little concerns.  When residents resist a new development  – even when they supposedly “don’t like change” – it doesn’t take many questions or much effort to develop a real understanding of their concerns and their point of view.   

    We fail consistently to realize that the locals are there every day and we are not. Local residents have a level of detail and a critical perspective that can make the difference between whether a proposed project supports the health of the community or creates a new burden.   Much of the time, the real concerns of the residents of an area have to do with nuts and bolts issues that can be fixed with relatively little effort or accommodation.  It’s possible that local resistors might have good reasons why the proposed change is a bad idea.  If we don’t enable and empower them to speak, we have made the same mistake as Gruen and we are likely to create a similar legacy.

    Understanding the real reasons why people oppose a project requires the willingness to do so, the humility to listen, and the internal fortitude and self-assurance to admit that possibly, oh just possibly, we don’t know everything that there is to know.   That is the real mark of wisdom.

    Duany and other marquee designer types have the privilege of maintaining a distance from the dirty work of making a project functional in real life. Don’t overlook the work of the nameless landscape architects and architects who are hired by the developers after the big name architects are paid, have gathered their glory, taken their big checks and left.  It is those highly competent, highly talented professionals who deal with the Grand Architect’s ignored steep slope under that proposed building or those planting beds that will block other drivers’ vision of the charming landscaped driveway emptying out onto a major intersection.  

    Ah, little stuff. Who cares?

    If the people who live around a proposed development oppose a development, chances are those people know something that is important to the health of their neighborhood and the larger community. If we think that we know more than to have to listen to them, then we are no better than little Napoleons in big capes, creating monuments to our hubris that our children and grandchildren will have to clean up. The lessons of the damage caused by our ignorance are all around us.