New subway in Santo Domingo

Photo from Hoy.

It won't get much coverage in North American newspapers, but Santo Domingo's (Dominican Republic) new subway system is open on a test basis, and will begin revenue service next month. It was covered last year in the New York Times, "A Subway: Just What’s Needed. Or Is It?," which discussed criticism of the system's development, because many people felt it was an extravagance, given widespread poverty.

This is an interesting dilemma for public investment. Do you spend money alleviating the pain of the here and now, or do you also invest in your city/state/nation's future--in other words focus development and public monies on investments that have positive economic return, rather than spending that is ameliorative, and in a broad sense, is either return on investment neutral or negative (value destroying).

It's also a thin line to walk, because many public investments end up being little more than cheerleading type events that don't have much positive economic benefit in the long run. I just read a great journal article, "Remembering the Renaissance City: Detroit's bicentennial homecoming festival and urban redevelopment," from the Michigan Historical Review by Julie Longo of the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, analyzing the City of Detroit's promotion of its 275 anniversary (co-incident with the U.S. bicentennial) from the progrowth coalition perspective (great citations although she doesn't seem to rely on either Growth Machine or Urban Regime theory in the piece). It's about failure.

Interestingly, I don't remember much about this "celebration," although I was only 16 years old. It is similar to issues I have to grapple with when I do consulting, when people think that marketing is the issue, when the issue has to do with the quality of the product (the qualities and opportunities offered by the particular place at hand). Detroit's issue then and now wasn't lack of marketing, but of a broken local economy, and an infrastructure and city government built for 2 million people and fewer and fewer residents living in the city with the financial werewithal to pay to maintain it.

Detroit still has a lot of potential, but it will get worse before it gets better, as it transforms its position within the global economy to a more peripheral and partnership role, from once having been a dominant actor.

If your Spanish is better than mine, Hoy, Santo Domingo's daily newspaper, has a fair amount of coverage of the new system. Just enter "metro" as the keyword in the search box. This article, "El Metro atrae a miles de alegres capitaleños" among others, has images of the new system.