Citiwire.net -- 6/11 -- Neal Peirce and William Stafford

Dada Mail » Citiwire.net » Archives » Citiwire.net -- 6/11 -- Neal Peirce and William Stafford

Date: June 11th 2009

“Welcome to Citiwire.net! Our Citistates Associate Bill Stafford has been a true pioneer of citistates thinking — I remember him coaching me to “think metro” well over 35 years ago. Bill was predicting my future and I didn’t know it! His column this week looks at the economic side of today’s emerging metro-national-global connections. … My column this week, from a recent trip to Berlin, is focused on an effort, combining neighborhood outreach and inventive woman power, to help alienated and disconnected Turkish families reduce their isolation and integrate better into life of their new nation. It’s a kind of model applicable here and in many developed world nations obliged to work with immigrant populations of dramatically contrasting cultural backgrounds.” -- Neal Peirce

Berlin’s Remarkable ‘Neighborhood Mothers’

By Neal Peirce

For Release Sunday, June 14, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

BERLIN– Red scarves, bright smiles, focused training — those are the trademarks of Berlin’s “Neighborhood Mothers” campaign, an effort to mobilize woman power to break the walls of isolation surrounding immigrant communities.

Turks, originally thought of as temporary guest workers, have flowed into Germany for 50 years and rarely returned home. At 2.8 million, they’re the country’s largest immigrant group. But they’re also the least well integrated — Germany’s worst educated, worst paid, and most jobless population group.

The fault is partly Germany’s own — not just isolated xenophobic attacks on immigrants (which the government condemns), but slowness in granting Turks basic citizenship rights. German political leaders didn’t recognize, until the late ’90s, the need for active social programs to help Turks integrate.

Urban-Metro-Global: Our New Economic Imperative

By William Stafford

For Release Thursday, May 11, 2009
Citiwire.net

For 17 years I’ve been privileged to organize Seattle region delegations of dozens of business and civic leaders on study missions to citistates around the world.

Such heavyweight global regions as Shanghai, Munich, Dublin, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Melbourne, London, Singapore, and most recently Abu Dhabi and Dubai, have all been targets of our missions. The effort, still unique among U.S. regions, has been led and coordinated by my organization, the Trade Development of Great Seattle, an affiliate of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

What each visit has underscored for us is how central cities’ hopes, fortunes, and place in the world are tied to those of the entire metro regions around them.

To receive this Citiwire.net dispatch with new columns weekly, click here.

Our mission... to reflect a new American narrative. From a 20th century of cheap energy, endless automobility, burgeoning suburbs, threatened cities. To a challenge-packed 21st century: resurgence in our cities, but fast-rising energy costs, perilous carbon emissions, deepening have-have not divisions. The weekly release includes Neal Peirce’s column for the Washington Post Writers Group, as well as a guest column by one of the seasoned urban professionals in the Citistates Group.

<< Previous: Citiwire.net -- 6/4 -- Neal Peirce and Beth Siegel

| Archive Index |

Next: Citiwire.net -- 6/18 -- Neal Peirce and Roberta Brandes Gratz >>

(archive rss , atom )

Welcome to Citiwire.net! It's about America's cities today -- opportunities, challenges, including Neal Peirce's weekly column for the Washington Post Writers Group and a parallel commentary by one of his valued Citistates Group colleagues.