The Citistates Group

Neal Peirce’s weekly column dated November 23 points to emerging research that should pull the props from under the assumptions still made by most city officials — that the path to progress lies in population growth.

Setting aside this shopworn proxy for prosperity, economists Robert Weissbourd of RW Ventures and Christopher Berry of Harvard University claim that cities should look to a very different source for future success. Their research findings, unveiled at the annual meeting of CEOs for Cities in Chicago, showed that population growth is not the predictor of prosperity people assume it to be. A better marker: the more college graduates you attract the better chance you have to be a successful region.

Peirce points out that places like Cincinnati showed gains in prosperity without getting bigger in population. Only Austin, Colorado Springs, and Charlotte got both bigger and more prosperous. And, in general, gains in wealth in places considered cold and rainy outshined income gains in warm, sunny spots.

Peirce’s column, sure to stir up reaction in city management circles, is already drawing comments from the Citistates network.

New York City-based author Alex Marshall notes that “there are jobs in the sunbelt cities, even if they aren’t well paying�.We can’t all be high-income.” Marshall raises an eyebrow over Cincinnati’s new standing. “Cincinnati is certainly not hip,” he says, at least not in the way Austin is. “Maybe Cincinnati’s found a way to be on the positive flip side of Richard Florida’s thesis that hipness matters.”

That comment arouses Scott Polikov in Austin: “We are struggling with the costs of Florida’s thesis down here in the hippest of hip cities, Austin, where the bohemian class (to which the creative class is supposedly attracted) cannot afford to live anymore now that the creative class has made it. ”

If the Weissbourd-Berry premise holds up against the scrutiny it’s bound to attract, watch for cities to start shifting the rules of engagement. They’ll find out whether their pool of college graduates is rising, and if it isn’t, what it would take be a “destination” city for the college-educated crowd.

Leaders in some places are already alert to this. Boston has the highest concentration of college and university students of any region in America. At any one time, there are about 300,000 active students. And often cold-and-wet Boston is one of those regions that, had it not been for foreign immigration, would have lost population over the past decade. The Boston Foundation and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce are way ahead on this front. Their own research, released in late October, showed the region losing half of those graduates, and that 80 percent of the reasons were “avoidable.” Even though higher education is essentially an export industry in Boston, losing half the graduates strikes leaders there as alarming.

St. Louis has already heard enough alarm bells about its future. Its leaders are hot on this talent trail, having commissioned a combination of Joel Kotkin and William Frey to do a special study on talent retention. By interviewing “ex-pats” who went to other places, they’re already seeing some of the Weissbourd-Berry trend, says Dick Fleming, head of the Regional Commerce and Growth Association.

Maybe this is just another competitive scramble for assets. But doesn’t this feel more like a logical 21st century competition than the race for big boxes and businesses borrowed from neighboring states?

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.