The Citistates Group

The Citistates Group is led by America’s only journalist team focused first and foremost on metropolitan regions and how they position themselves to cope with the demanding economic, environmental, social challenges of the 21st century.

Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson have written Citistates Reports on strategic issue sets facing 24 metropolitan regions, published by over 50 newspapers in the last 20 years. Recently they wrote a series on critical issues facing an entire six-state region -- New England.

The Citistates Group includes a collegial network of Associates with parallel interests — and achievements. Many are public speakers and authors of cutting-edge research and writing in the field.

Activities of the Group — a “virtual” corporation without established offices or staff — are managed by Farley Peters, the group’s organizer and strategist.

For city-watchers interested in cutting-edge ideas, the yearly “Meeting of the Minds” conferences arranged by Gordon Feller of the Urban Age Institute – a key figure in the recent mission expansion of UN-Habitat — are well worth considering.  I attended myself last year’s event in New York and came away with a raft of new ideas and contacts.  Gordon has supplied this link to details about this year’s event.

For an excellent rundown on the world’s slum issues and potential cures, written by our Citistates Associate Associate Anthony Flint at the World Urban Forum in Rio, check his story on Global Post.

Our initial www.Citiscope.org edition also has a “front page” story on model slum upgrading efforts in Brazil – in this case, São Paulo.

Our Citistates Group has been laying plans for a global news service that covers noteworthy experiments, breakthroughs by cities across the globe. The articles will be written by knowledgeable local journalists, supplemented by global experts on the issues they’re covering, tied to new media and tied to state-of-the-art user discussion tools.

On Friday March 26, for an audience of several thousand at the concluding session of the Fifth World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, I was able to make the official announcement.

The text of the announcement is below. For a full taste of what the service will be like, several lead stories included, we invite you to take look at the beta web site — Citiscope.org. It includes the “who, what, when and how” of the new service, which we hope to launch full-bore in the near future.

Remarks to the World Urban Forum

Concluding Plenary Session
Rio de Janeiro, March 26, 2010

Across the continents, today’s cities are coming up with new and intriguing solutions to the massive problems cities face in this century. From city halls to neighborhood councils, the wave of originality in amazing.

But the mainstream media too often fails to “get it.” News of cities’ disasters or crises or scandals get coverage. But there are rarely reports of original, noteworthy innovations — stories that could lead to inventive adaptation in other cities, whether they’re next door or across oceans.

We think the gap imperils cities’ learning and progress. In close cooperation with the World Urban Campaign, assisted by Cities Alliance and UN-Habitat, we’ve developed a new global news service — we’re calling it Citiscope.org.

Our goal: to report regularly on cities’ notable new approaches and solutions on every issue from climate adaptation to local food self-sufficiency to slum upgrading. Professional journalists in the breakthrough cities will be invited to write the stories — objectively, clearly, for worldwide dissemination.

We’ll aim for a constantly growing global reader base. And media worldwide will be invited to pick up the reports.

The website, again, is Citiscope.org. Please check out our first group of stories. Submit story ideas yourself. Help us tap the world’s top expert commentary, seek out inventive links, help inventive NGOs spread word of their star experiments, track the vital urban trends — and make a real difference for this Century of the City.

An important message for metro region watchers:

The Urban Institute has inaugurated a new reporting site –www.MetroTrends.org — to provide updates, keep tabs on how metropolitan America is faring.  The site provides up-to-date indicators of social and economic conditions and trends in metro areas nationwide, along with thoughtful commentary on what they mean for workers, families, businesses, and neighborhoods.

Here’s how the Institute describes its effort:

Our aim in launching MetroTrends is to fuel evidence-based debate about the nationwide impacts of recession and recovery, critical differences among metropolitan regions, and persistent or emerging disparities among population groups.

MetroTrends debuts with indicators from seven national data sources — the Decennial Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics.

For each of these sources, we provide downloadable Excel files with selected indicators calculated for the nation, all metros nationwide, the top 100 metros pooled and stratified by region, and each of the top 100 metros. These downloadable files make it easy to access meaningful indicators, consistently defined over time and across metros.

In addition, MetroTrends kicks off with five expert commentaries, exploring interlocking trends in employment growth, mortgage lending and house prices, earnings and material hardship, immigration and diversity, and the well-being of children. These commentaries highlight cross-cutting challenges, dynamic conditions, and differences between metros in both current conditions and trends.

MetroTrends will be continuously updated with new data, additional datasets, and fresh commentary.  Over the next 3 months, you can expect to see: house price index data for the 4th quarter of 2009; Current Employment Statistics data through December 2009; monthly updates of LAUS data; indicators and commentary on health insurance coverage rates by metro area; and tables, graphics, and commentary focused on featured metros