Citistates Group

When Curt Johnson and I came up with the “citistates” term a decade ago, we didn’t have raging San Diego fires in mind. But now, somewhat to our amazement, San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Richard Louv is writing of how San Diego, with an outpouring of timely civic will and agreement across the borders of its many local agencies, could react creatively to the fire disaster it’s just endured and become “America’s most fire-resistant citistate.”

Louv’s column, published November 9, is written as if the date were five years from now and suggests substantive breakthroughs the San Diego community could have taken to gird itself against future (and surely predictable) fires. One would be a new regional fire authority empowered to fashion a coordination plan for the area’s myriad of 64 agencies that have fire-fighting responsibilities. It would be accompanied by an expanded joint-protection agreement between San Diego County and Tijuana, underscoring the citistate’s bi-national character. And in 2004, passage of a Rural Lands Initiative to put some of the area’s fire-prone back country areas off limits to new development.

San Diegans, in other words, would be coalescing to act like a grown up world region, realistic about its challenges, willing — even in the face of inevitable opposition from some local fire agencies and rural home-builders — to make basic changes to protect itself for future times. For Richard Louv (who in fact is an Associate of our Citistates Group), that spells civic capacity. Which is precisely the point: think in broad and imaginative ways and the word “region” falls a bit flat; instead your talking about a place that employs its skills, engages its people to move forward — a citistate.

Recently we’ve heard complaints about the “region” word — especially when it gets expanded to “regionalism,” which to many suggests ideology. And certainly not the concept of an aware, intelligent metropolitan area that is ready to think strategically, develop and build economic opportunities for all its peoples, invent a sustainable environmental future, and adapt governance to real-world needs.

With “citistate,” Curt and I thought we were pretty smart to come up with a new word rooted in rich history of human settlement but related to modern reality– As we suggested for the lexographers:

Citi•state — n. — A region consisting of one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence.
Hist. Similar to city states of antiquity (e.g. Athens, Rome, Carthage) or medieval times (e.g. the Hanseatic League), except that modern citistates engage in instant electronic communication and capital transfer, and are the chief recipients of world population growth.

But perhaps now, we should insert the thought of civic will or capacity. Because the last decade has made it crystal clear: citistates need to be activist, to take responsibility for their own future — and precisely on issues like the San Diego fire phenomenon.

We do know that we’re onto a better term than the Europeans’ oft-repeated word for a big metro region — “conurbation.” Or, heaven forbid, another term that’s sometimes been surfaced — “poly-nucleated metropolitan agglomeration”! Citistate bespeaks the big true region. It calls for civic competence and imagination. It remains our nomination for a global century of rapidly growing and evolving entities — some with tens of millions of peoples — which will be the home for vast majorities of the world’s peoples. Citistates will be a crucible of critical decisions, through the 21st century, and if the human race is lucky enough to survive the perils of our times, well beyond.