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Citistates: How Urban
America Can Prosper in a Competitive World (1993)
By Neal Peirce, with Curtis Johnson
and John Stuart Hall
Available through
www.amazon.com.
Click here for details.
As the world turns
into a global entity, the United States has becomes
a bona fide metropolitan nation. The 1990 census
painted the picture of this accelerated pace of
urbanization in striking numerical colors: Slightly
more than 50 percent of us live in the 39 U.S. metropolitan
areas with populations of more than a million people.
By contrast, the mid-20th century census uncovered
only 30 percent of the U.S. population living in
14 metro areas with million-plus populations.
But citistate realities
don’t just apply to the larger regions —
the New Yorks, Los Angeles, Chicagos, Bostons of
America, the Berlins, Londons,Hong Kongs, Shanghais
of the globe. All metropolitan regions face stiff
competition and challenges. Include the United States’
metro regions under1 million people and the count
exceeds 80 percent of the nation’s people.
To put a human face
on this fast-paced urbanization, three members of
the Citistates Group — Neal Peirce, Curtis
Johnson and John Stuart Hall — coined the new
term “citistates.” In their words, citistates
are “not just the center city, but the entire
metropolitan region - the ‘real city’
made up of center city, inner and outer suburbs,
and rural hinterland so clearly and intimately interconnected
in geography, environment, work force, and surely
a shared economic and social future.”
The transformation
is apparent across the Atlantic, where Europeans
have begun to describe their continent as a hodgepodge
of powerful citistates- from Manchester to Stuttgart,
Lyon to London, Milan to Marseilles. Like U.S. citistates,
these metropolitan regions are making economic and
cultural transactions with little regard to their
own nation-state governments.
The Citistates Group
associates see a shift in thinking from the familiar
governmental paradigm — federal-state-local
— to one focused on function: global-regional-neighborhood:
- Global because
critical issues have worldwide implications —
global warming, economic restructuring, rapid
global market repercussions.
- Regional because
the metropolitan areas, or citistates, share areawide
transportation systems, media outlets, medical
assistance, goods, services, even crime. Peirce
argues that the success of the regional system
— on every measure from workforce preparedness
to the quality of the infrastructure — determines
how competitive and successful the citistate will
be for all its citizens in the long run.
- Neighborhood
because it is on the personal, community level
that escalating U.S. social problems can ultimately
be dealt with.
Citistates includes
six case studies based on Peirce Reports for the leading
newspapers in Phoenix, Seattle, Baltimore, Dallas,
St. Paul and Owensboro, Ky. These popularly written
analyses examine each region’s special problems
and suggest potential solutions tailored to the local
situation. The goal in each series is to identify
ways out of a region’s dilemmas by tapping civic
energies— forward-thinking talents and skills
in business, civic, academic sectors — to create
a more sustainable citistate in the next century.
In his review of
the book, George Knight, executive director of Neighborhood
Reinvestment, took note of the role of neighborhoods
in civic renewal. “Peirce gives full credit
to community-based development organizations for
revitalizing some of America’s most devastated
neighborhoods.”
The book’s wind-up
chapter includes a 8-point formula for “citistate
cohesiveness and strength.”
(Click for a summary.)
— Craig Anthony
Thomas
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