Civic culture and organization as an element of community economic resilience

Aaron Renn (Urbanophile) has published a short paper via the American Enterprise Institute, "Culture and Dynamism in Cities."  He looks at the impact of civic culture as an element of how businesses/industrial sectors are organized within their communities, and how this impacts their ability to resilient and innovative in the face of change.

He compares Boston and San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia, and Allentown ("State level initiatives to support center city revitalization in smaller towns," 2014) and Youngstown (and a very small off mention of Los Angeles and San Francisco in terms of the film community's relative disconnection from the local civic ecosystem).

There are some interesting cites, some of which I hate to say I was unfamiliar with and/or hadn't read, in particular Sam Stafford's Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (review).  He concludes by outlining, the "cultural lessons" as three factors key to what I will call metropolitan economic resilience:

• Open networks are superior to closed networks in times of rapid change or major dislocations
• Successful cities feature invested leadership and institution building by elites
• Successful cities value education and reward excellence.

as well as outlining elements that key to changing civic culture:

• Truly understanding local culture
• Incubation of local relationships and networks and rather than focusing on attracting specific industries.

One thing I thought was an omission was a failure to include a fourth example, of Boston, really Cambridge, vis a vis San Francisco and San Diego and the biotechnology industry.

He relied on Saxenian's Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Rte. 128 for the bulk of the comparison between Rte. 128 and the Silicon Valley, when Boston's computer industry was much more focused to large computing and descended in part from MIT's management of Draper Labs and its role in the defense community and industry.

But Boston's economy appears to be much more flexible today, and MIT (and Harvard) are much more oriented to the support of start up businesses than they were in the day of Route 128's ascendence.

Today, Cambridge--home to MIT and Harvard--is arguably the leading center for the biotech industry, functioning in a flexible and "porous" manner comparable to Silicon Valley's place in the information technology business sector ("Alexandria Real Estate’s empire grows in Kendall Square: The area’s life sciences boom puts the developer on top," Boston Globe).

How this came about is worthy of analysis, to further confirm his conclusions concerning cultural lessons and the capacity for change.

Growth Machine/Urban Regime Theories are relevant. In some respects, these conclusions are the roots of the Growth Machine (sociology) and Urban Regime (political science) theories on how the local economic and political elites organize to manage their community ("A superb lesson in DC "growth machine" politics from Loose Lips (Washington City Paper)," 2006) to ensure continued economic success.

Which I wrote about more recently a couple years ago in response to a column by Thomas Friedman where he seemed to think he had discovered the secret to the marshaling of local elite resources focused on revitalization ("Smaller town revitalization planning: No, Thomas Friedman is not a sage," 2018).

Relevant blog entries

-- "The nature of DC's federally-related "business" is coordination, not doing, 2018

In this piece I make the indirect point that the federal government, in terms of supporting metropolitan economic development, is more like Rte. 128 than Silicon Valley.

 While the area has landed a goodly portion of the Amazon HQ2 development, and this will reshape the area's economy, at the same time a big part of Amazon's focus is providing cloud services to federal agencies, which is a less entrepreneurial activity. Relatedly, the federal government is reducing its presence in the DC area, and has reduced its office space by 15% over the past 5 years ("HONEY, WE SHRUNK THE FEDS: The federal real estate footprint is slimming. And it’s leaving some landlords in a lot of pain.," Washington Business Journal).


Ironically, while I stated in the above post that the DC area is less economically innovative because of the federal government, at the same time, the IT industry in particular has been seeded by the presence of the Department of Defense as a funder and customer, which accounts for differences within the region in terms of community economic success and relevance.

-- "Economic dynamism: Northern Virginia ascendant, while DC and Suburban Maryland lag," 2020

For example, IT based in Northern Virginia has a greater economic multiplier and velocity than the health-focused federal research based economy in Montgomery County.

These pieces discuss the place of higher education within a metropolitan economy, the ability to harness higher education institutions for economic development, and the failure to fully leverage this in DC in particular.

-- "Better leveraging higher education institutions in cities and counties: Greensboro; Spokane; Mesa; Phoenix; Montgomery County, Maryland; Washington, DC," 2016

-- "Naturally occurring innovation districts | Technology districts and the tech sector,"

-- "More Prince George's County: College Park's militant refusal to become a college town makes it impossible for the city(and maybe the County) to become a great place," 2015

Separately, yesterday's New York Times has a piece on colleges and universities investing in creating town centers within their communities ("Colleges Invest So 'What's the Town Like?'").

Fundamental revitalization and "not wasting the opportunity of a crisis."  Regardless of what Rahm Emanuel said while he was chief of staff during the Obama Administration ("In Crisis, Opportunity for Obama," Wall Street Journal), the reality is that crises are mostly paralyzing for local governments. 

It's difficult to get consensus during good times and it's almost impossible during bad times. 

That's why Allentown/Bethlehem's comparative success at revitalization is so remarkable.  Or Bilbao's ("Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning").

Coming back from failure is almost impossible.  That's why it's better to be constantly on alert and proactive.

In "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh," I list six elements of successful large scale revitalization initiatives, based in part on a series of articles I wrote about European cities such as Bilbao, Hamburg, Helsinki, Liverpool and Marseille.

Another big difference between continental Europe and the US is that there isn't the same anti-government fervor there that there is here.  In other words, people expect that their local government will take on and address such problems and they don't look to the private sector to lead the change.

While I haven't studied Oklahoma City in depth, it is another example of this kind of approach (The Next American City: The Big Promise of Our Midsize Metros by former mayor Mick Cornett).

The six components of a successful broad ranging revitalization program.  In writing about the various efforts, I drew the conclusion that successful revitalization programs, especially in those cities that were working to overturn serious disadvantages, were comprised of these elements:

• A commitment to the development and production of a broad, comprehensive, visionary, and detailed revitalization plan/s (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool);
• the creation of innovative and successful implementation organizations, with representatives from the public sector and private firms, to carry out the program.  Typically, the organizations have some distance from the local government so that the plan and program aren't subject to the vicissitudes of changing political administrations, parties and representatives (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool, Helsinki);
• strong accountability mechanisms that ensure that the critical distance provided by semi-independent implementation organizations isn't taken advantage of in terms of deleterious actions (for example Dublin's Temple Bar Cultural Trust was amazingly successful but over time became somewhat disconnected from local government and spent money somewhat injudiciously, even though they generated their own revenues--this came to a head during the economic downturn and the organization was widely criticized; in response the City Council decided to fold the TBCT and incorporate it into the city government structure, which may have negative ramifications for continued program effectiveness as its revenues get siphoned off and political priorities of elected officials shift elsewhere);
• funding to realize the plan, usually a combination of local, regional, state, and national sources, and in Europe, "structural adjustment" and other programmatic funding from the European Regional Development Fund and related programs is also available (Hamburg, as a city-state, has extra-normal access to funds beyond what may normally be available to the average city);
• integrated branding and marketing programs to support the realization of the plan (Hamburg, Vienna, Liverpool, Bilbao, Dublin);
• flexibility and a willingness to take advantage of serendipitous events and opportunities and integrate new projects into the overall planning and implementation framework (examples include Bilbao's "acquisition" of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum and the creation of a light rail system to complement its new subway system, Liverpool City Council's agreement with a developer to create the Liverpool One mixed use retail, office, and residential development in parallel to the regeneration plan and the hosting of the Capital of Culture program in 2008, and how multifaceted arts centers were developed in otherwise vacated properties rented out cheaply by their owners in Dublin, Helsinki, and Marseille).