Month: January 2020

Who Does What in Society?

Posted on by jabittan
The New Localism by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak is titled as if it were a new development in local governance and problem solving, but the authors suggest that New Localism is really more of a return to historical problem solving and idea formation. Over the last few decades, the national government has captured more attention and focus in national media and public debates about problems, policies, and solutions. However, it has always been the case that the place where people actually experience and live out any problems, policies, or solutions is in a local context. We have all felt the disparity between regions when an economy is “strong” or “in free-fall.” We know that things can be great for our neighborhood, but a total train-wreck in the next, town, or even just a few blocks away.

 

Katz and Nowak reassert the importance of local action and problem solving. The authors describe a current phenomenon in the United States where people, businesses, non-profits, foundations, and civic groups are rediscovering local authority and collaborative institutions to achieve meaningful goals at the local level where people live and experience the problems we actually face.

 

Katz and Nowak write, “Correcting the confusion over who does what in societies is an essential act of civic education and a necessary first step toward national progress.”

 

Countering the intuition that solutions must be national is an important first step toward addressing our real problems. Learning what it means to be connected and organized locally to implement solutions quickly with the support of the public and private organizations is the heart of New Localism. Deferring action toward higher levels of government is effectively an abdication of the authority and ability of local actors to make changes that work in their region. A standard playbook and actor chart cannot be developed across all cities and communities, but each individual community can rediscover the impact that local individuals and local businesses can have moving our societies forward.

 

What the quote also addresses is the confusion we have over who can and should take action in problem solving. It is easy to think that a problem is the responsibility of someone else and that some other governmental agency or some other public actor will step in to make a change. It is hard to remember that it is the people experiencing the problem and living in the area where the problem exists who are the ones that can best respond. Businesses often complain about regulations or public decisions, but don’t always make the investments in the institutions which make those decisions. Citizens often complain about an issue, but don’t often form a group or make decisions that would actually address the issue. We don’t have a good sense of how the public can work with government or how communities can organize around a solution to make the places we live better places to be. Everyone is busy and under a lot of pressure, so learning how things work and taking the time to be involved is understandably challenging, but bringing visibility to the roles that we need citizens and businesses to play in problem solving is important as we rediscover what local governance looks like.

City Power

Posted on by jabittan
Where does power and authority come from? I think this is an interesting question to ask ourselves. What is it that makes a nation, a state, a city, or an institution powerful and authoritative? Thousands to hundreds of years ago we solved this question by outsourcing – we decided that a divine being had vested power and authority in a single individual. Today, what creates authority for our mayor, the supreme court, and our nation is not divine, but public trust, cooperation, and economic prospects. Building society with these blocks isn’t always perfect, but it has managed to work for humans for a few hundred years now.

 

Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak look at the implications of the authority and power philosophy I described above in their book The New Localism. They write, “The power of cities and counties is not like the power of nations or states. It is grounded in markets and civics more than in constitutions or charters.” The authors make a split between the local and national in terms of how power and authority play out to create a social structure of trust. Nations and states tend to be based on written charters agreed to by relatively diverse populations. Cities and local counties tend to be based on shared values, experiences, and backgrounds with shared economic prospects and motives being the ultimate binding glue.

 

I think there are two things that we can understand about national versus local systems from the description provided by Katz and Nowak. Nations and states, with authority grounded in written constitutions and charters, have a more permanent and stable feel to them. changing something in a drastic manner requires a change to the written founding documents. This gives national and state governments more structure and a form that is more likely to endure longer into the future, but at the cost of making them rigid and hard to adapt to changes in the economy, in social preferences, and other trends.

 

As a contrast, city and local governments, which are based more on shared interests, engaged civic actors, and local economic contexts are more flexible and adaptable to trends, changing social preferences, and new economic developments. This gives local and state governments the flexibility that is needed to take advantage of new innovations and technologies. It allows the governments to solve problems through the power of collective action, but it also leave them vulnerable to wild swings in economic fortunes and broader sociopolitical forces.

 

While nations are able to define their populaces and establish binding rules for citizens across decades or centuries, cities often find it hard to create structures and institutions that are guaranteed to last as long. City populations are more prone to leave when things go south, and the strength of institutions can be greatly diminished when the population falls and a few actors exert undue influence in local decision making. Nevertheless, humans seem to be drawn toward cities and seem to be willing to reinvent cities on a continual basis. This creates the dynamic power that cities are exerting today to solve problems and address global challenges that seem to be paralyzing nations.

Outpacing Design

Posted on by jabittan
The United States of the American Revolution and of 1787 (the year the US Constitution was written) was dramatically different than the Untied States of today. The 1787 Constitution written for that time was meant for the country and the world in which the country existed during our nation’s young independence. Our nation today in many ways does not resemble the nation of 232 years ago, and in many ways has moved far beyond what the Constitution was imagined to deal with.

 

In New Localism authors Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak look at the ways in which the American economy and American governance are changing and co-evolving and what that means as we move forward. With regard to the Federal Government and Constitution they write, “Programmatically, the basic architecture of the American Federal Government is in contrast to the fact that American demography and wealth are metropolitan.” 

 

At the time that our constitution was written, our nation was more agrarian than industrial. Wealth was tied up with land owners who had vast plantations and farms. Many of our founders, like Jefferson even though he was absent when the Constitution was written, praised bucolic values and had an almost romanticized notion of the good life being one of space, freedom, and simple farming lives.

 

Our nation today has moved far away from the view of the nation that our Constitution was designed for. We have outpaced the imaginations of our framers and the way we live and the lives we romanticize are far different than the visions of the framers. American cities are dynamic engines of productivity and economic growth today, while American farms are often forgotten, have become large conglomerates, and are often stuck in a battle between hiring cheap immigrant or low skilled labor and automation. For the time being, government is reacting by not reacting. Instead of changes and adaptations at the Federal level, we see a shift in governance and problem solving to the local level. The shift involves not just local government, but new networks that have come together in an adaptable framework to include actors and groups outside government. This is helping, for the time being, cities and metropolitan areas to respond to the challenges of the world today with new and innovative solutions, helping our nation which has outpaced its design adapt to a new, globalized world.

Institutional Reinvention

Posted on by jabittan
I have written a good amount about the importance and value of institutions. The systems and structures, both formal and informal, that create appropriate venues for discussion and help shape our norms and rules are crucial to our culture and to the development of society and knowledge. In The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak discuss ways in which rediscovering institutions within American cities is leading to a rebirth of metropolitan areas. Large cities are important because they pull people together, unite them around local problem solving, and produce benefits for the entire society to enjoy.  As people have begun moving back to cities and re-creating them to be more livable and social, they are discovering new institutions and new value in places that had been forgotten and previously experienced periods of disinvestment.

 

The authors write, “Placemaking uncovers the inherent value of a community and redefines its potential by integrating its historical identity with contemporary uses. As American cities lost population and dynamism, many of the grand institutions and buildings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fell into decline or disrepair. Late twentieth-century place-making rediscovered what still existed and repurposed it for a new era.”

 

This quote provides encouraging notes about reinventing and returning to valuable institutions, and also a cautionary tale about deserting institutions. When we have physical structures in place and enough people to remember institutions from that past which had served us well, we can always return to those institutions and even find new ways to use them and incorporate them into our lives. However, if we chose not to support our institutions and allow them to decay, they can languish and sit in disregard, becoming more of a headache than a valuable tool.

 

I think this is true for any type of institution, be it a physical institution such as a library, or a non-tangible institution such as a value of equality. For various complex reasons (some sensible like finding clean playgrounds for children and some not so wholesome such as new forms of racial segregation) American cities experienced a period of declining populations as (primarily white middle and upper class) citizens abandoned city centers for outlying suburbs. Katz and Nowak argue that this weakened the institutions that had made cities thriving places and had originally helped them grow and develop. Negative stereotypes of city centers persisted and while they may have been economic engines, they were not the cultural and in many ways not the institutional centers they had once been. New Localism is in some ways a return to the institutions of cities that had been abandoned in the past. As cities gentrify (a challenge in itself that is still tinged by racial disparity) they are becoming more attractive places to live, and the institutions which had once served city populations are being reinvented and reinvigorated.

 

We should recognize the positive in this story and celebrate and strengthen those institutions which fuel progress, improve our lives, and help promote equality and democracy. We should look at the squalor that cities and their institutions were put through and avoid throwing many of our modern institutions through those same tortures. We should remember that our suburbs are valuable as well, and support the populations and institutions of suburbs as people begin to move from suburbs and rural areas back into dense cities. This creates a two (or maybe three) front situation in terms of protecting and strengthening institutions, and the lessons we learned from abandoning and rediscovering and reinventing city institutions can help us navigate this new challenge brought about by New Localism.

Cities and Environmentalism

Posted on by jabittan
Cities can look like dirty places with no greenery or living plants among the concrete, asphalt, and towering buildings. At the same time, however, cities can be much more efficient and environmentally friendly than rural or suburban places. I live in the Western US and we expend a lot of energy just to move things from one place to another. A lot of the energy we produce just goes into moving water around. For us to get from our homes to our places of work can require a lot of driving by ourselves in a car. And because the West has so much open space, we have built large neighborhoods with houses spaced out from one another, requiring more concrete for sidewalks, more asphalt for roads, and more copper for electric lines.

 

The amount of resources needed to build suburban and rural connections between people is much greater than the per capita need within cities. As Jeremy Nowak and Bruce Katz write in The New Localism:

 

“The linkage between culture and cities also has to do with environmental sustainability and how its associated values translate into imperatives to re-purpose legacy places. Cities are ideal places for environmental stewardship, which is important to the culture: urban dwellers are not as car dependent as people in the suburbs, and urban life can be more energy efficient. Urban dwellers can use public transportation, walk, or ride a bicycle to work. Thus urban civic activism based on retrofitting the older built environment emerged in concert with an environmental ethos.”

 

I live in Nevada which is a state with a lot of rural space. I live in one of the two major metropolitan regions, but in the smaller of the two and toward the outskirts of town where the suburban starts to give way to the rural. I currently have an incredibly long car drive to work. The people I live around generally don’t seem to be as worried about environmental concerns, or if they are, then like me they may chose to ignore them or to accept living with a feeling of guilt because our way of life is in some ways very costly and resource demanding. The challenge is that it is hard to change and do much about our environmental impact, and we like our space, our quiet neighborhood, and our affordable homes.

 

People who live in the middle of a city don’t have as many of the same barriers to living a more energy efficient and environmentally considerate life as I do. When car reliance is less pronounced, it is easy to go without a car and decry the damage done by cars to our environment. When you spend less time in traffic and have more ability to use your time, you can engage in more pro-social and pro-environmental movements. Given the state of climate change, this is a positive aspect to cities. People can live more efficiently and be more inclined to advocate for a more environmentally considerate way of life. A shift in what we view as a good life (away from the picket-fence-two-car-garage-and-a-dog-in-a-yard to a life of greater connections in a city with less individual space) is a change in values, and is something that is leading to a revival of city centers and urban societies across the country. As networks and connections matter more and more, living close to people and having more interactions is becoming more valuable than having one’s own space and things.

 

Another important aspect in Katz and Nowak’s quote is the focus on rebuilding and re-purposing. Cities have existing infrastructure that needs to be updated as people move back into and begin to redifine their cities. This gives cities the chance to establish themselves as cleaner and better versions of what they have always been. The way that streets, buildings, and open spaces are used can be reimagined during this transition, allowing them to become more environmentally sustainable and more economically inclusive. This helps reduce the overall carbon footprint of city residents and helps them become places where people can actually live, work, and enjoy their time.

Immigration and City Rebuilding

Posted on by jabittan
I find myself in an interesting position when I think about immigration in the United States. I don’t have incredibly strong or fully informed views on immigration, and I find myself ending up at intersections where competing values push in opposing directions. From an economic perspective I agree with researchers who say that immigration is crucial for our national, and even global economy. From a human rights perspective, it feels imperative that we allow people languishing in terrible situations in foreign countries to have the opportunity to move to the US where their living standards will automatically increase substantially. However, I understand people’s hesitation to change and their fear of outsiders. I don’t want to accept these hesitations and fears, but I know they are real and I see how forcing change and immigration upon reluctant people can have disastrous consequences for society as a whole. I’m not sure how much we should restrict immigration to avoid this backlash, or whether we should just push forward with the immigration our economy needs.

 

What is clear to me is that the United States is not prepared to have this discussion in a reasonable and rational manner at the Federal level. It is my sense that there are more people aligned with the Democrats who are willing to be moderate (as I am) and are willing to compromise on important values such as human fairness, flourishing, and lifting the global poor for what feels like the psychological well being of xenophobic members of the Republican party. I don’t feel the same mindset from people within the Republican party, although this could just be a bias due to my media bubble. My sense is that a feeling of fear has taken root within the Republican party and derailed any reasonable national level discussion around immigration.

 

However, on smaller scales, I think the parties have more parity. In The New Localism authors Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak write, “American cities could not have revived as they have in the absence of large-scale immigration. Moreover, dramatic levels of immigrant entrepreneurship in cities as diverse as Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis are powerful reminders of how cities were built and rebuilt over generations.”

 

On the local level, the individuals who form the parties and drive government, part committees, local businesses, non-profits, and foundations can align on topics such as immigration even though on a national level the same individuals cannot agree. Within the city rebuilding is a continuous process, and compromises don’t have to be absolute and binding forever. At this level, immigration is personal and not abstract, and those who immigrate from outside can bring new ideas, exciting energy, and in some ways a fearless attitude that can help stakeholders align and connect, regardless of their political beliefs. Cities are not static, and this evolving nature allows for a moderate and reasonable discussion around immigration which is helping to fuel the revival of cities and metropolitan areas across the nation. My hope is that  this local level action can percolate upward and help us to have more informed and reasonable discussions on immigration at the highest levels of government in the United States. Sound local governance surrounding immigration with cities and metropolitan regions leading the way can hopefully be a federalist spark to tackle the thorny issue of immigration nationally.

City Strengths

Posted on by jabittan
Cities are incredible organizational units that human beings organically developed long before larger political boundaries and units could be conceived. Cities were the first forms of collaborative human living for our ancestors, before we could think of nations or states. But even though the idea of cities is ancient, they are still dynamic and evolving. In an age where everything is online, where virtual human connections are common, and where goods, services, and products can be obtained from almost any couch in the United States, cities are nevertheless growing. Despite video chat and meet-up software, companies still like to have private offices and there still seems to be value in face to face communication and interaction. Cities, it seems, are here to stay in our globalized and digital world.

 

In The New Localism authors Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak lay out a vision of new structures of governance that hinge on the flexibility, adaptability, and inventiveness of cities. The authors explain why they think cities are natural and fitting leaders to manage globalization and help drive solutions to the problems that face the entire globe.

 

“The ability of local communities in the United States to become effective problem solvers should not come as a surprise. Cities and towns developed in the absence of any intentional federal urban policy during most of the nation’s history. Historically, city building was more of a bottom-up and relatively chaotic enterprise, involving builders and investors, merchants and workers, civic associations, immigration and immigrant entrepreneurs, and local government. It was never the result of a top-down policy so much as it was a self-organizing market and civic practice.”

 

Top down solutions to problems in the United States have not been super successful in recent years. The most pressing problems we face as a planet don’t have a structure that allows them to be addressed in a top down manner. Cities, however, operate best by adjusting to local pressures, demands, and opportunities. In a bottom-up way, cities are well positioned to respond to the challenges the world faces and to develop new technologies, new trends, and new organizational structures that can respond to threats. The chaotic and constantly evolving nature of cities can lead them to be administratively hard to wrangle and can make many of their decisions appear non-rational, but it also allows them to adapt and coalesce around shared goals that can drive the innovation that the planet needs for progress.

New Ideas and Diversity

Posted on by jabittan
One reason why innovative problem solving and action on our nation’s most pressing problems has moved from the Federal government to local governments is because of the incredible diversity of our nation. Each state has its own unique flavor of any given national problem, making a one-size-fits-all approach to national politics incredibly challenging. Within every state we have a variety of cities and regions. Some areas are densely packed and populated, some areas are incredibly rural, some areas have access to natural resources that help with trade and politics, and some areas have incredible universities that attract global talent for education and possible careers.

 

Managing the diversity of our nation, our states, and the cities and regions that power our country is crucial in a new age of globalization. In The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak write, “New Localism is the locus of problem solving that must by necessity be open to new ideas and a diversity of constituencies.”

 

We have diverse populations across our diverse landscape. Not just the issues that matter most to people, but the acceptable approaches to those problems will also vary across individuals and regions. When we start building our solutions at the local level to match our diverse population, we have to be open to new possibilities that align with that diversity. We must find ways to be inclusive if we are going to manage diversity well, and that will necessitate taking a fresh look at problems we have seen in the past.

 

By incorporating our diverse perspectives, and understanding that seeing the problem and the solution as they have always existed will lead to a shortcoming, we can find the new solutions required by New Localism. Standard approaches will break down because they won’t be able to account for diverse views and beliefs, and they will ultimately leave people out. That will cause friction which will ultimately lead to breakdowns in policies and programs. Incorporating local people who understand local conditions is key to developing new programs, new policies, and new approaches to governance to help our cities, metropolitan regions, states, and ultimately our nation thrive in the future.

Institutional Vehicles

Posted on by jabittan
In a public policy class, I had a professor once ask, “What is an institution?” One student responded that another professor once answered that question by stating that an institution was something you could kick. That’s true for some institutions (you can kick the supreme court, the city hall, and the local police department), but not all. We recognize marriage as an institution but you can’t kick it, and you certainly can’t kick equal protection under the law even though you theoretically could kick the actual paper on which the 14th amendment was written. Our institutions are sometimes physical buildings (or housed in them), but they are often processes, ideas, and systemic structures that guide our interactions, thoughts, and societies.

 

Our institutions only exist and function because we chose to place both trust and authority in our institutions. They can only operate when those within them and those who recognize them from the outside are aligned and coordinated together to recognize and legitimize action and outcomes from our institutions. In the book The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak explain what this means as problem-solving and initiative-taking move from Federal levels of governance to local levels of governance. They write, “New Localism refers to multi-sectoral networks that work together to solve problems, as well as the institutional vehicles they invent to get things done.”

 

Coalition building is an important part of politics, but it is also just an important part of life in general. If you want your family to go to Tahiti for the holidays instead of Grandma’s house, then you need to build the right family coalition to get everyone to agree. If you want to work on a specific project in the office, if you want to do a job a certain way, and if you want to reorganize the workplace, you need to build coalitions to get people on board to follow your direction. Coalition building is super complex at the national level, but at the local level where a smaller handful of actors can generate a bigger (relative) push, then coalition building is possible and creating or inventing institutional vehicles to move policy can be a powerful tool.

 

Networks are key in new localism because they open the possible avenues for movement via new institutional vehicles. Connections and shared goals behind key stakeholders make new localism possible with coalitions created through networks of like-minded community leaders. Those who have an interest in seeing reinvention, seeing successful policy development, and seeing adaptable and resilient communities can come together to form new coalitions, pulling people from varying public, civic, and private sector organizations. These groups can then think about the structures shaping our lives, our decisions, and our interactions, and how new institutions can alter the status quo to solve problems in new ways that are unique to a given city, metro, or region.

Ground Level Problem Solving

Posted on by jabittan
Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, in their 2017 book The New Localism, argue that problem solving and policy solutions to our pressing problems will not be found at the national level as we move forward, but rather at the local level. Large, established, and nationalized organizations will be less able to take on the problems of our new economy and evolving societies, but smaller, more responsive, and more local organizations and arrangements can address these challenges.

 

The authors write, “problem solving close to the ground rather than policy-making from a remote national or state capital has the tangible benefit of customization. A local solution can be a more efficient use of resources since it is more aligned with the distinctive needs of a particular place.”

 

Cities and states across the nation have competing and conflicting problems. What might be a major challenge in your city may not be a problem at all in another city. The solutions that would work to address a problem in your city might be completely ineffective someplace else. Economic structures, environmental concerns, resources, and human capital will all shape how a problem can be addressed, and every city and metropolitan region in the nation has a different mix of these variables to use to address challenges.

 

Even within a state, conditions can be drastically different from one region or county to another. I live in Reno, Nevada, and we are having major housing challenges as we receive an influx of companies and employees from the Bay Area in California. Our housing challenges, and the resources we have to address our problem is completely different than the problems being faced in Las Vegas. Introducing policy on a state level to address the issues we face in Reno may cause entirely different problems in Las Vegas housing markets.

 

If you are not going to address problems purely with policy from a state legislature or from Congress, then you need to address problems with local stakeholders and organizations. This includes philanthropic organizations who can back projects that don’t have a clear ROI and would be risky for a government agency to support. Local problem solving also includes local businesses and organizations that can coordinate and align on development goals. Public agencies have a role to play by ensuring that expertise and resources are being used in a way that is consistent with state law and policy. Each group of actors can help coordinate and push different parts of the solutions that individually they could not propel forward. This is what allows local problem solving to be efficient, effective, and innovative in tackling today’s problems.