By Alex Pearlstein, Director of Projects.
Today’s blog could easily be a novel; I won’t deny that this subject is done short shrift by a cursory examination of why some cities succeed while others fail. Indeed, there is probably no “magic formula” to illuminate this topic just as the reasons why some people succeed and others don’t cannot be explained away by one or two key moments or traits. However, what has become clear in the two dozen or so communities I’ve worked with for Market Street is that the prime determinant of a city’s success is, without a doubt, the quality of its leadership. Leadership defines the assemblage of what I’ll call for want of a better term, a community’s “DNA” – that essence of how it operates, the policies it enacts, the projects it develops, the attitude it demonstrates towards change and newcomers, the image it has of itself internally and externally, etc. All of these elements mix together in a giant stewpot of vision, strategy and action to define a city’s current and future realities.
Sometimes it’s just a certain sense you get when interviewing local stakeholders, public or private, elected or citizen, rich or poor, black or white. A sense that this place “gets it.” Topics of discussion are focused less on past conflicts and petty disagreements and more on future potential and transformative change. Sioux Falls, South Dakota is such a place. I’ve rarely experienced such a like-minded conveyance of hope, love of community, desire for inclusiveness and excitement for change from input participants. At various times during Sioux Falls’ public input process, I found myself having “Stepford moments”; can this community really be this harmonious and progressive? Turns out, I really believe it is. I have absolutely no doubt that Sioux Falls will follow an upward trajectory, even if cross winds occasionally blow through and shift them temporarily off course.
Most planning types and “city watchers” can think of several examples of cities that at one point in their development were essentially equivalent towns, poised to assume the mantle of “regional capital.” These towns usually had a strong base of industry, a desire to grow and a host of valuable assets. Atlanta is one example of a community that was able to outpace its potential competitors to become capital of the “New South.” Atlanta was able to largely overcome the paralysis of racial politics, corruption, in-fighting and community dysfunction by moving forward boldly with game-changing projects such as Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (still its top economic growth engine), a comprehensive interstate system, downtown development, aggressive business recruitment, nurturing of higher education at Georgia Tech, Georgia State and Emory, and other significant efforts. Mayor Ivan Allen integrated the city’s schools before the federal government forced him to do it. A succession of white mayors sought partnerships with the black community just as a succession of black mayors has leveraged the business community to advance key projects and policies. Atlanta was “the city too busy to hate.” Other cities have struggled with one, or in several instances, many of the same issues Atlanta faced but haven’t found a way to overcome them.
The city I now live in, Des Moines, Iowa, is a place that “gets it.” Again, the dynamic is hard to define and describe other than the fact that its DNA informs a strong, progressive growth. Things get done here, whether it’s a new arena, sculpture park, riverwalk, new bridges over interstates and rivers, a recently-funded downtown transit hub, “complete streets” policy, expansion of a city-supported homeless-services center, affordable-housing development… the list goes on and on. One top ranking after another on “best place to…” lists seems to be proof that the world is taking notice.
I happened upon a description of early Des Moines. Here’s an excerpt:
“With the election of progressives Jonathan P. Dolliver of Fort Dodge to the U.S. Senate and Des Moines attorney Albert B. Cummins to the governorship, Iowa became the flagship of progressive politics…. By 1907 attorney James G. Berryhill had succeeded in replacing the old ward system with an efficient commission form of government with councilmen elected at large and each supervising one area of the city administration. Patterned after the 1901 ‘Galveston Plan’, the new ‘Des Moines Plan’ gained national prominence. The idea was civic minded business elites would provide honest and efficient service where ward style cronyism and waste had prevailed.”
Crafting community DNA is not an overnight process. As in Des Moines, it is seeded, nurtured and rooted over generations. I’ve yet to see tangible evidence that a “DNA re-definition” is possible in a meaningful, sustainable way. If anyone has an example of a city/region that has completely reinvented itself and righted a sinking ship, I’d like to hear about it.
As an example of a city/region that seems to honestly be trying to reweave the helixes of its community DNA, I present to you Cincinnati, Ohio. I’ve recently become obsessed with Cincinnati (it’s just what I do; it’s not the first city obsession I’ve had, nor will it be the last. Hey, a guy’s got to fill the off hours, right?). Once heralded as the Queen City, Cincinnati was a major inland metropolis when Chicago was still a rough-and-tumble outpost of slaughterhouses and brothels. The Queen City was the “Paris of the West” – a town with breathtaking natural beauty and a stunning built environment. Famously, however, Cincinnati once dug miles of subway tunnels only to abandon the project when funding ran out. Perhaps that was an early indication of a wealth of vision but a deficit of leadership. Many have puzzled at Cincinnati’s recent stagnation despite a dizzying wealth of urban riches. A great city-focused blogger (The Urbanophile) summarizes this anomaly much better than I could. I propose that dysfunctional DNA might explain some of this conundrum.
Cincinnati has long been known as a conservative, “closed-off” place. Mark Twain once reportedly said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times." In the late 1980s, protest over a local showing of an exhibit by artist Robert Mapplethorpe made international news as the instillation resulted in the unsuccessful prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, on charges of "pandering obscenity.” While the vast majority of U.S. cities are rapidly diversifying with influxes of domestic and international immigration, Cincinnati has defied this trend. A University of Cincinnati report commented, “The very low numbers of foreign-born population in the Cincinnati region is a sign that our local labor market has been dangerously isolated from the national market.”
Race relations in Cincinnati have always been notoriously strained, with segregation an unspoken rule. In 2001, toxic relations between blacks and whites in Cincinnati finally reached the boiling point with large-scale riots breaking out in traditionally black neighborhoods after a lenient sentence was given to a white officer who had shot an unarmed black man in the back. Suddenly, Cincinnati’s dysfunction was broadcast on TV screens across the nation and world for all to see. The riots have seemed to spark a real soul-searching amongst Cincinnati leadership and an honest pursuit of reconciliation and change.
An effort called ''Neighbor to Neighbor'' was launched as a five-month series of neighborhood meetings that tried to get people talking about why Greater Cincinnati was divided by race and how to address the problem. The city also launched a program called the Neighborhood Enhancement Program, a 90-day, collaborative effort between city departments, neighborhood residents and community organizations focused on developing neighborhood assets. In 2007, the Cincinnati Police Department initiated the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), a multi-agency and community collaborative effort designed to quickly and dramatically reduce gun-violence and associated homicides. CIRV is a partnership among multiple law enforcement agencies (local, state and federal), social service providers, and the community at large. Most recently, the steadfastly conservative Cincinnati business community has bucked convention by showing its support of the city’s gay pride parade, with banners promoting the event draped from downtown light poles. A massive riverfront redevelopment project called The Banks, complete with a park project designed to rival Millennium Park in Chicago, has broken ground along the Ohio.
Despite all these efforts, recent Census projections show that the city and its economy continue to languish. If community DNA can indeed be changed, it is most certainly a generational pursuit. Cincinnati’s efforts at redefinition must be more than idle talk; eventually there will need to be real action and results. As leadership may have mutated Cincinnati’s DNA, so must it now evolve the city into a more adaptable and sustainable organism. Until people smarter than me have decoded the “urban genome,” success will still have to be directed, not programmed.
So, until my next city obsession takes over, I’ll be watching you, Cincinnati! I wish you the best of luck and godspeed.