The Citistates Group

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

The Citistates Group invites your ideas on a challenging new project.

The focus: how we can connect the world’s cities, their leaders and citizens, to share more effectively their hopes and goals, and the leading experiments that they’re forging?. The need’s growing more critical as the world’s urban population, which just last year passed the 50 percent mark, heads for 70 percent urban by 2050.

Our belief: the innovations are out there! But they are buried in specialists’ “silos.” And most serious: neither traditional “mainstream” media, nor web sites, nor the “bloggesphere” take them into much account. Conflicts, disasters, personalities, alarming incidences of corruption get the lion’s share of attention.

We feel the answer to this is good journalism – story telling about experiments in cities (whether official or citizen-initiated) based on verifiable facts, balance and credible resources. Pointing honestly to the problems and limitations of the new approaches. With engaging writing that focuses on people’s lives, actions taken and impacts they make.

We’re realistic: cities’ economies, political styles and cultures differ; rarely can an experiment in one city can simply be “replicated” elsewhere. But elements of new experiments may fit, and the ingenuity and spirit behind the efforts in one city may spark fresh new thought and innovation in another.

We have some modest support to develop this concept for a global audience from UN-Habitat and Cities Alliance. And we plan to have an operational plan and a website ready for feedback before the World Urban Forum in Rio next March.

Here is our broad concept right now –

A website with up to four major news stories a week, written by journalists across the developed and developing world. The stories will be short enough (800-1,000 words) for easy reading. They will be enhanced by a variety of “new media” elements to peak and keep reader interest and prompt other Internet, broadcast and newspaper pick-ups around the world. Expert observers will also be invited to add brief commentaries to the stories, placing the experiments in their global context. Stories will be accompanied by a variety of creative links to relevant web sites for anyone with a further depth of interest in the topic.

We are now meeting with a variety of key players we believe have some interest in how this concept can be perfected and advanced. But we need much broader feedback and thoughts before we figure out our options.

As readers of our Citiwire columns and an interest in our Citistates Group, please offer your insights on how we move forward – either as a comment added to this blog, or in an e-mail to Neal Peirce (npeirce@citistates.com) or Farley Peters (fpeters@citistates.com).

And many thanks!

Peirce Receiving Scroll of Honor Award

No sooner was Citistates Group Chairman Neal Peirce awarded the prestigious UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour at the World Habitat Day celebrations in Washington, D.C., in early October, than he was off to Barcelona to participate as a steering committee member of UN Habitat’s World Urban Campaign focused on sustainable urbanization.

En route, Peirce prepared his column on the importance of the United Nations World Habitat Day that had been held for the first time in the United States, noting both the event and the disturbing lack of U.S. media coverage. Arriving in Barcelona, he also toured the inventive 22@Barcelona project, a world-leading neighborhood revival project, interviewing the leader of the effort for his next column.

If that wasn’t enough, Neal along with Citistates colleague Farley Peters, networked with participants at the World Urban Campaign steering committee meeting to gauge interest in a new journalism project focused on desperately needed innovations and breakthroughs in cities across the world.

With the strong interest and support of Nicholas You at UN-Habitat, Kevin Milroy of Cities Alliance, Gary Lawrence (the ex-Seattle planning director now a senior executive with Arup), Gordon Feller of the Urban Age Institute and others, the Citistates Group is now moving forward to develop a business plan for the journalism project.

The World Urban Campaign’s major goal is a series of consciousness-raising steps to “elevate the importance accorded to sustainable urbanization in global, national and local policy and decision making,” looking forward to the Fifth World Urban Forum, focused on “The Right to the City- Bridging the Urban Divide,” scheduled to take place in Rio de Janeiro, March 22-26, 2010.