Following is an article from governing.com. It resonates with me in terms of the creative class and industry clusters, not to mention the metro/regional angle. There were things that jumped out at me but when I tried highlighting the phrases that I liked best, it got applied to the entire paragraph. Nonetheless, take a look and feel free to comment if anything strikes you too.
Cities and their surrounding suburbs are the new building blocks of an economy both global and local.
Forget about states, cities and counties.
They are so yesterday. What's in now is metro. No, it has nothing to do with sexual orientation or furniture design. We're talking about metropolitan areas: the cities along with their environs — including their suburbs, their exurbs, even some of the surrounding rural areas that are tied to the center by employment or commerce.
For decades, urban affairs columnist and author Neal Peirce has trumpeted the underappreciated importance of "citistates," which he defines as "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."
Now, as the general election contest gets under way, the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program has embarked on an ambitious and clearly well-funded bid to change the way we look at the country and its economy, with the hope of influencing the debate during the campaign and then policy making by the new administration and Congress.
The message goes like this: The top 100 metropolitan areas cover only 12 percent of the national land mass but are home to about two-thirds of its population and its jobs — and even larger shares of "innovative activity": 78 percent of its patents, 75 percent of those with graduate degrees, 79 percent of air cargo, 94 percent of venture capital funding, and so on. In all, they generate three-quarters of the gross domestic product.
Add in more than 200 other smaller metro areas, and we truly are looking at a metropolitan nation. Peirce puts it in context: "As economic actors, citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world's top economies, just ahead of Australia,Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea,greater than Taiwan or Switzerland." And so, he says, citistates are how "our world is now organizing itself" away from an old way of thinking (federal, state, local) to a new way: global, regional and neighborhood.
The first of two reports from Brookings notes that "we are part of a highly networked global economy in which the world's major metropolitan areas generate an outsized share of world output. Politics, custom and language continue to separate us into individual nation-states; but trade, migration and investment link Seattle more closely to Shanghai than to Sacramento."
The problem is that Washington doesn't get it. Federal officials see only one economy, or occasionally perhaps 50 state economies; the population is divided into 435 congressional districts. The feds "adopt policies that betray no understanding of how our metropolitan dominated economy works," the Brookings report argues. "And they saddle metropolitan leaders with fragmented, diffuse programs that ignore how thorny public policy programs interrelate and spill across state and local borders."
Investments Needed
We're paying a price for this myopia. Productivity is slipping, the supply of scientists and engineers has stalled, research and development funding has declined and patent activity is faltering. K-12 education is underperforming; higher education for the first time on an international scale is slipping. Growth patterns are creating a situation where we're gobbling up farmland, increasing commuting times well above population growth, and pushing more tons of greenhouse gases into the air.
In short, Brookings concludes, we are ignoring the economic engines that give us the prosperity we now enjoy: our metro areas. To rectify that, it advocates investment in education and training, particularly for new immigrants; in infrastructure to move people, goods and ideas; and in amenities — libraries, museums, public spaces — that draw people into urban centers. And Brookings advocates changing the intergovernmental relationship so that it's more holistic and flexible. Of course, "investment" is code for "more federal aid," and so recommendations for a National Innovation Foundation and a Cluster Information Center will be viewed skeptically by Congress.
Washington has neither set a national vision nor any standard for achievement, the report said. It does not lead in areas such as immigration and carbon emissions, where metro governments need guidance. And it doesn't step aside where it ought to, one reason transportation policy still is biased toward cars and not mass transit.
I'm dubious when any group that doesn't command money or votes tries to affect the campaign debate, but Brookings may well exert some influence this year. Only 10 days after the think tank convened a large crowd at a Washington hotel to hear its recommendations, Barack Obama spoke in Miami to the nation's large-city mayors. In language similar to the two reports, he said Washington should "stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America."
But the presumed Democratic nominee also made it clear that, save for infrastructure help, mayors shouldn't expect increased aid out of his administration. The federal debt, he said, is too deep.
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