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07 Jul 09

Finally, A CEO Speaks Up on How to Renew America - HBR Editors' Blog - Harvard Business Review

Timely.
QUOTE
Immelt exhorted Americans to give up the notion that the U.S. can make it as a services-led, consumption-based economy, where "a mortgage broker is pulling down $5 million a year while a Ph.D. chemist is earning $100,000."

The country must refocus on manufacturing and R&D and must strive to be a leading exporter, he said. He announced that GE was opening an advanced manufacturing and software technology center outside of Detroit near the headquarters of Visteon, the auto parts maker that recently sought bankruptcy protection.

Coincidentally, "Restoring American Competitiveness," an article in the July-August special issue of the Harvard Business Review makes the same case about the importance of manufacturing. It warns that the erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base is seriously undermining the country's ability to innovate. (So much for the idea that we can succeed by letting other countries manufacture the products we invent!)

In his speech, Immelt offered a vision for how the business and government together can revive the economy and solve grand challenges such as clean energy and affordable health care. "We should welcome the government as a catalyst for leadership and change," he said, calling for a "real public-private partnership." (This from a self-described "Republican and free market guy.")
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This article fits nicely with Konrad Yakabuski Globe & Mail article, "Canada's Innovation Gap." http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/canadas-innovation-gap/article1203108/

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Canada's innovation gap - The Globe and Mail

Insightful (and often cutting) article on the status of innovation in Canada. Stephen Downes responded in a blog post, http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/07/innovation-in-canada.html, basically agreeing, saying that we need a bit of free market and a bit of government direction as well, and that we (Canadians) need to wean ourselves from our corporate overlords.

In an aside, the G&M journalist (Konrad Yakabuski) notes that Canadians already log more work hours than Americans and are workaholics compared to Europeans - who innovate more and therefore, because they work smarter, don't need to work harder. As it happens, I was just wondering about Canadians and partying/ sociability over the beginning of July (what with Canada Day and Independence Day). Canadians are far less social than Americans, in my experience. For Canadians, sociability and partying means getting drunk - it always has, for as long as I can remember. Americans in this respect are actually the kinder, gentler people. Is it because of work?

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innovation canada globeandmail productivity technology resources economic_development konrad_yakabuski

Barring an extension of the workweek - Canadians already put in more hours than Americans and are virtual workaholics compared with Europeans - innovation is the only sure way for Canada to be more productive. It is the key to maintaining our standard of living and providing increasingly costly public services for an aging population.
"Canada is not being productive because it's not being innovative," said Robert Brown, chief executive officer of Montreal-based CAE Inc., the world leader in aircraft flight simulators and training. "A lot of innovation occurs at the interface with the customer. But when you look at the make-up of Canada's economy, with so much dependence on resources, there is less contact between [our biggest] companies and end users."
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- Strong governments in Asia and Finland, on the other hand, have been able to resist the self-interested demands of individual sectors, and have implemented country-wide innovation strategies that, while not without hiccups, ultimately increase the size of a country's economic pie over time.
- The consequences of this global power shift could show up in lower pension benefits, substandard health care and rickety infrastructure for future generations of Canadians. Early signs are already apparent to discriminating eyes, such as those of Mr. Curtis, a former chief economist in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
  
  "We are declining relative to many other parts of the world," he said. "You don't really feel it unless you're cosmopolitan and travel a lot. You now stay at the three-star hotel instead of the four. But our cities - and the country as a whole - are quite clearly relatively less well off than before."
- Where he sees languor in our policy apparatus, CAE's Mr. Brown detects an aversion to interventionist industrial strategy among governments. But as Canada has relied on the free market - auto bailouts notwithstanding - to determine its champions, governments elsewhere are actively nurturing their own winners.
  
  "We seem to believe the free-market system will work, but no one else operates that way," Mr. Brown said. "If you rely only on market forces, you are going to react to what others are doing, rather than anticipating what is going to happen."
- Research will become increasingly important to the competitiveness of Canadian auto plants as a strong loonie and wage concessions south of the border wipe out much of the edge they once held over U.S. facilities. But Washington's promise to provide $25-billion (U.S.) in loans to companies there to help develop more fuel-efficient cars threatens to widen the already gaping research chasm between each country's auto sector.
  
  "Without comparable support in Canada, manufacturing capacity could follow the funding, taking engineering work and suppliers with it," warns the Academies report.
  
  Still, foreign ownership is not the biggest reason for Canadian companies' R&D deficit. Despite a disproportionately large resource sector, compared with other developed countries, Canada has been a laggard when it comes to developing technology used to extract or process resources, or to blunt the environmental impact of such activities. Alberta's vow to plow $2-billion (Canadian) into the development of carbon capture and storage technologies is a start, but hardly a game-changing one.
  
  "The failure of Canada to develop global export leaders in advanced machinery and equipment for the resource sector is one particularly telling indicator of the country's innovation shortcomings," the Academies report concludes.
- The Finnish Miracle is an example of an economy emerging from the pits to overtake those it used to envy. It's hardly the first. In 1982's The Rise and Decline of Nations, economist Mancur Olson advanced the idea that countries whose economic foundations have been suddenly shaken or destroyed subsequently tend to grow and innovate faster than more stable nations. The reason? Such crises break the hold of vested interests on government policy makers; dramatic change becomes a question of national survival.
- Mr. Olson cited the industrial resurgence of Japan and Germany in the postwar period to explain his thesis. While Japan and Germany prospered in 1970s, the economies of other developed countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, became bogged down in interest group politics, resulting in "institutional sclerosis" and slow growth.
  - But Germany and Japan (Germany in particular) also had a huge influx of post-war aid (Marshall Plan), which enabled them (Germany in particular) to rebuild its infrastructure. - on 2009-07-07
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- Economically, we just muddle on

11 Feb 09

The HBR List 2009 - "Breakthrough Ideas for 2009"

QUOTE
This year’s HBR List includes ideas that we think are more useful than fanciful, more immediately practicable than speculative. Although we began compiling and winnowing contenders many months ago, we nonetheless did our best to anticipate the context in which you now read them. Thus some of the articles you’ll find here comment directly on the economic crisis, but most of them address other matters that business leaders must contend with: strategic decision making, tapping new markets, finding and keeping top talent, harnessing network effects, dealing with disruptive technologies and business models.
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harvard_business innovation ideas 2009

09 Feb 09

Where Real Innovation Happens - Forbes.com

"...don't follow the money. Follow the excitement. The people inventing the future are doing so just because it's fun."

www.forbes.com/...breakthroughs_0203oreilly.html - Preview

tim_oreilly innovation

01 Jan 09

The Frontal Cortex : Urban Innovation

Jonah Lehrer discusses Ed Glaeser's recent post in the NYT blog on NYC and why it's "America's most resilient city." Lots of great points, interesting comments thread, too. Closing line by Lehrer nails it.

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jonah_lehrer frontal_cortex urbanization creative_class innovation talent edward_glaeser

This is why I smirk when I read about cities like Orlando, Florida trying to jump start innovation with a bevy of tax credits for high-tech businesses. These places don't need more tax credits - they need more coffee houses and crowded sidewalks.
- well said! - on 2009-01-01
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13 Dec 08

Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria? « Robertrandall’s Weblog

Rob blogged about Amsterdam's re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.

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robert_randall drugs socialcritique drug_addiction education innovation risk youth comments

20 Nov 08

Toward Society 3.0: A New Paradigm for 21st century education - SlideShare

Slide show presentation from John Moravec, U. of Minnesota, on getting schooling (? education) into the 21st century and into a 3.0 mode.

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slideshare education web2.0 innovation john_moravec educationfutures

16 Nov 08

Faster horses in the age of co-creation, by JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta blog)

Thought-provoking blog entry in Confused of Calcutta (JP Rangaswami) about innovation, focusing on the role of the user in co-creation (customer choice and voice, eg.).

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jp_rangaswami socialtheory confused_of_calcutta cocreation innovation

I was part of the Do Not Dumb Down group, by the way. But that was nearly thirty years ago, I had just trained to become a callow economist, and my head was full of strange ideas. Ideas like merit goods. Ideas that allowed us to get to a point where, in many nations, Nanny State Knows Best. Where it was apparently considered normal to visualise a class of people who knew better than other classes of people.

Now, as I look back on those times and those discussions, I wonder at myself. Was I that arrogant? What residue of that arrogance do I carry now?

Why am I sharing all this? To make the point that for many years, even for centuries, it was considered normal for customers to have neither voice nor choice. That it was considered normal for one group of people to decide what other groups of people could have, should have, would have.
We’ve had choice for many years now, but it’s been vendor-dominated choice. Modern, more sophisticated, more elaborate versions of Any Colour You Want As Long As It’s Black. Nowadays it’s more akin to Any Colour You Want As Long As It’s Mine. People consider it normal to ask questions like “So what’s your lock-in?”. How do you enslave the customer? Will you come in to my parlour, said the Spider.
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- When it comes to voice, Nader and his crew did their bit, but it took the Cluetrain gang, Chris Locke et al, to get me going. Making me realise the problems caused by building walls between firms and their customers, the stupidity of Fortress Enterprise. That was then followed up by people like Esther Dyson explaining how the User is in Control, Kathy Sierra entrancing me with Creating Passionate Users, and Hugh Macleod working on the Social Object and discovering the evolution of Blue Monsters, David Weinberger explaining how folksonomies empowered customers, Doc Searls starting up the VRM movement.
- In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to deny customers both choice as well as voice. Capital and land tended to be the scarce factors of production. But that was a very long time ago. In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to deny customers control. Education tended to be scarce, and social status was allowed to be a basis for the bestowal of control. Mummy knows best. In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to believe that the customer didn’t know what she wanted, that when she did know she was wrong, that the customer needed to be educated about what she really wanted, which fortuitously happened to be what you had.
  
  All that was in the past.
  
  Today, the abundances and scarcities that characterise our era are different. The scarcest, most precious resource around is the customer. That customer knows what she wants. If she doesn’t know it, she knows how to find out what it is she wants. She knows it when she sees it.
  
  That customer knows that part of what she wants is to be able to figure out what she wants. She is both consumer and producer, a partner in the process of co-creating value. The senior partner in the process of co-creating value.
- We need to be in the business of providing the customer what she wants when she wants it, where she wants it, how she wants it. We need to focus on making things that the customer wants to buy, rather than trying to get customers to pay for things they neither want nor need.
  
  There was a time when we could decide for the customer. There was a time when we could constrain the customer’s voice and choice. There was a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
- Stuart French said:
  
  “The next hyper-step in this age of consumer intelligence IMHO, is how much longer we are going to require political representatives to make the big decisions for us. But maybe now I’m thinking a little too far out of the box :-)”
  
  I don’t think so- I think it’s a social revolution, not just about consumers/ marketing- whatever you think of Obama’s policies, he won many supporters who voted Republican before, by (at the very least) making them feel like he was listening to their horse preferences. McCain didn’t do anything similar at all. The effect of this “marketing” difference is being widely underestimated by the media, where most things are framed in a primarily political context.
- The question I keep asking myself is “Why do people think that inventors, geniuses and creators of disruption are all *not* to be found in the class of humans called “customers”? What causes this separation? What happens if the tools used by geniuses and inventors and creators of disruption are made available to customers? Won’t we get *more* as a result? or is there a reason to have a holy of holies, a place where customers aren’t allowed to go but inventors can?

13 Nov 08

LED Lamp is Powered by Dirt | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

I wonder whether something like this could be used to power city streetlights? Just stick the poles in the ground, and ...?
QUOTE
Sounding like something out of a science fair project, the Soil Lamp runs on mud. Designer Marieke Staps says that the metabolism of biological life within the soil produces enough electricity to power the lamp’s LED bulb. The mud is housed within copper and zinc cells that conduct the electricity produced within the wet soil. Maintenance is simple - pour a little water in the dirt, and the lamp will keep going.
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psfk lighting environment innovation

10 Nov 08

Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators - Umair Haque

As usual, a brilliant essay by Umair Haque on Obama's win and what business can learn from it in terms of innovation.
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Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday's political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday's corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.

Obama presidential bid succeeded, in other words, as our research at the Lab has discussed for the past several years, through the power of new DNA: new rules for new kinds of institutions.
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1. Have a self-organization design. What was really different about Obama's organization? We're used to thinking about organizations in 20th century terms: do we design them to be tall, or flat?

But tall and flat are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think - spatially and literally - in two dimensions: tall organizations command unresponsively, and flat organizations respond uncontrollably.

Obama's organization blew past these orthodoxies: it was able to combine the virtues of both tall and flat organizations. How? By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.
2. Seek elasticity of resilience.
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- What happened when McCain attacked Obama with negative ads in September? Such attacks would have depleted the coffers of a 20th century organization, who would have been forced to retaliate quickly and decisively in kind. Yet, Obama's organization responded furiously in exactly the opposite way: with record-breaking fundraising. That's resilience: reflexively bouncing back to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources.
- 3. Minimize strategy.
- 4. Maximize purpose. Change the game? That's 20th century thinking at its finest - and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world.
- Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
- And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can. You must maximize, stretch, and utterly explode your sense of purpose.
- 5. Broaden unity.
- Obama intuitively understands a larger truth of next-generation economics. Unified markets are what a world driven to collapse by hyperconsumption is desperately going to need. We're going to need not a hundred different kinds of razors - and their spiralling costs of complexity and waste - but a single razor that everybody, from the slums of Rio to the lofts of Tribeca, is overjoyed to use.
- 6. Thicken power.
- 7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal.
- That seventh lesson is the starting point for tomorrow's radical innovators - because it's the thread that knits the others together. And it's where you should start if you want to use these seven rules to start building 21st century institutions - whether businesses, non-profits, social enterprises, or political campaigns.

06 Oct 08

AURP Releases National Strategy for Building America's Communities of Innovation

AURP (Association of University Research Parks) "offers a series of urgent recommendations for the U.S. Government, so that it can more precisely support American innovation and American innovators with both economic and policy-based changes." (See article for proposal targets.)

Does this apply to university research parks in Canada, too?

Interesting references to the importance of place and the creative class.

See this PDF for "The Power of Place": http://www.aurpcanada.ca/pdf/AURP%20The%20Power%20of%20Place_Final.pdf (via www.aurpcanada.ca)

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aurp innovation research university technology_parks creative_class place_making

From establishing the first research park in
the world, to building world-class research universities and federal
laboratories while pioneering technology transfer and patent reform for
public-private research partnerships, the U.S. has led the world in attracting
research talent, funding scientific advances, and commercializing new
discoveries.
The United States is losing ground competitively. The ambitious entrepreneurs
and scientists who are willing to invest time and money into an idea are being
lost at a staggering pace to other countries. These foreign governments provide
incentives for this U.S. human capital to uproot and move. These individuals
find that the challenge of surviving in a foreign country is outweighed by the
tremendous economic benefit these foreign communities provide.
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- At the present time, the U.S. is losing ground because we do not provide the
  Place for the Creative Class to prosper. We have left the responsibility
  of creating Place to local communities, many of which cannot bear the
  speculative burden of creating Place without governmental financial
  support.
- Our proposal targets the following:
- · Creating American Innovation Zones to drive the creation of modern research
  and development collaboration;
- · Expanding the availability of visas for skilled researchers; and
  
  · Encouraging in-migration of foreign start-ups through “soft landing”
  programs.

03 Oct 08

WATT: World's 1st Sustainable Dance Club (SDC)

Page for WATT, Rotterdam's Sustainable Dance Club. Includes a really cool video (one guy, quoting verbatim, talks about how we're "leaving the tree hugger age" and moving into a whole new era that embraces innovation etc.). Found via Inhabitat (see http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/10/02/sustainable-dance-club-opens-in-rotterdam/), which includes more images.

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10 May 08

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? - New York Times

Creating new habits = essential for innovation; old habits remain, but can be lessened (if bad,eg.) by new habits.
QUOTE:
...brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
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This reminds me very much of SEED magazine's 2006 article, The Reinvention of the Self," by Jonah Lehrer, which profiled the work of Prof. Elizabeth Gould.
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/02/the_reinvention_of_the_self.php?page=all&p=y

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psychology brain habits innovation success business

21 Apr 08

The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks

includes an excellent slide share presentation

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canada innovation competitiveness mobile wireless telcoms thomas_purves wirelessnorth

22 Dec 07

SDTC The Funding Gap

SDTC = Sustainable Development Technology Canada; this particular page describes the Innovation Chain, particularly in Canada. Points out its weak spots, very interesting.

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canada funding innovation research sustainability technology

20 Dec 07

BLDGBLOG: Church of God, Elevator

- starts with a great story about Mark Twain, and asks a trenchant question about the adventurousness (or absence thereof) in architectural design today

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architecture bldgblog innovation montreal

- - Chartres, not Montreal... - on 2007-12-20
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When Mark Twain visited Montreal in 1881, he said that it was the first time he'd ever been in a city "where you couldn't throw a brick without breaking a church window." Montreal, you see, has lots of churches.
Twain was then told, however, that the city would soon build another church – and perhaps another, and another – and "I said the scheme is good," Twain responded, "but where are you going to find room? They said, we will build it on top of another church and use an elevator."
Church of God, Elevator.
Does this off-the-cuff remark from a 19th century novelist exhibit a more adventurous sense of space and structure than the buildings which pass for architectural design today?
- - ha! brilliant good old Mark Twain! - on 2007-12-20
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How Should We Be Thinking About Urbanization? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

A "quorum of smart thinkers" discusses what problems and opportunities majority urbanism presents, "What effects has it had on our local and global culture? Economy? Health?"

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alan_berube cities dolores_hayden edward_glaeser freakonomics innovation james_kunstler opinion robert_bruegmann urban_development

Most observers tend to extrapolate current trends and assume that what we see now will continue moving in the same direction — ever-larger cities, etc. I don’t see it that way. The global energy predicament now gathering around us will synergize with climate change to produce a very different outcome.
- - of course he has to say that, since he has staked his speaking career on "the long emergency"...
  - Kunstler drives me nuts. - on 2007-12-20
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Some of our cities will not make it. Phoenix, Tucson, and other Sunbelt cities will dry up and blow away. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over. Other mega-cities will have to downscale or face extreme dysfunction.
- - it's obvious that he used to write science fiction, too - on 2007-12-20
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- The suburbs, for the most part, are toast. They have three possible outcomes in the twenty-first century: as slums, salvage yards, or ruins.
  - - see previous comment - on 2007-12-20
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- Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Kennedy School of Government:
  - - his entire text is worth highlighting! - on 2007-12-20
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- A central paradox of the twenty-first century is that declining communication and transportation costs have made cities more vital than ever.
  - - I wonder how the declining transportation costs aspect would sit with Kunstler, who would presumably counter with "just you wait, that'll be over soon"... - on 2007-12-20
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- In the developing world, cities are the intellectual gateways between the human capital of India and China and the markets of the West. In the developed world, cities have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence over the last 25 years as the density that once made it easier to move hogsheads onto clipper ships now serves to spread knowledge in finance and new technology.
- Globalization and the death of distance increased the returns for being smart, and you become smart by hanging out with smart people. As such, cities remain important because they create the intellectual connections that forge human capital and spur innovation.
  - - an important aspect here is that "smart" also means smart in different ways, and as Aristotle said (paraphrase): a city is composed of many different kinds of people (ok, he said men, but we mean people), and it's that rubbing up against difference (and tolerance) that makes cities so very valuable.
    - disagreement is good - on 2007-12-20
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- Cities sometimes have a bad reputation because of their association with problems like poverty, pollution, and disease; but this association does not imply causation.
  
  Cities are full of poor people because cities attract poor people, not because cities make people poor. Millions of the least advantaged come to urban areas not because cities are bad for them, but because cities are good for them.
  - - exactly! Or, in the West's case, because the poor can expect to access services that they wouldn't get in less urban places - on 2007-12-20
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- There is no doubt that the general process of industrialization and growth adversely impacts the environment, at least initially, but cities shouldn’t be blamed for every smokestack. Cities are not factories. They are the concentration of people at high densities, and that concentration is pretty green. After all, we use a lot less energy when we cluster together in cities than when we spread throughout the country and drive hundreds of miles each day in commuting.
- Humans are a social species, and our greatest achievements are all collaborative. Cities are machines for making collaboration easier. Thus, I am delighted that our planet has become increasingly urban.
  - - well said. - on 2007-12-20
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- Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago:
- In the long run, however, the policies were probably less important than the eventual result — an equally massive move from the cities back into the countryside. In virtually every affluent nation on earth, the old Nineteenth-century industrial cities have exploded outward, allowing densities to plummet at the core as residents move further and further out into low-density suburbia and a very low-density exurban penumbra around that. The city of Paris today has a third fewer residents than it did a century ago, and the suburban and exurban territory around it leapfrogs more or less from the English Channel to Burgundy. In this process, the very distinction between urban and rural has all but disappeared as citizens in almost every part of affluent societies are able to participate in what is essentially an urban culture.
  - - that's a very interesting (and different) way to characterize sprawl... much more "organic," with interdependencies...
    - have to think about this one... - on 2007-12-20
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- Of course, this huge outward migration of people has caused problems, just as the migration to the cities did. And public authorities have once again tried to slow or halt the process, now pejoratively called “sprawl,” often with the explicit aim of preserving the distinction between the urban and the rural. This effort is likely to be just as futile as the effort to stop people from moving into the cities, and just as likely to be counterproductive. No one knows what the next chapter of urban history will bring, but if there is any lesson to draw from what has happened to date, it is that abstract ideas about the proper form of settlement, whether urban or rural or hybrids we can’t yet imagine, tend to lag far behind the reality on the ground.
- Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale and author of Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000:
- Old divisions between “city” and “countryside” have become misleading in urbanized nations like the U.S. “City” in the U.S. today really means “metropolitan region,” because we are a predominantly suburban nation. After almost two centuries of peripheral urban growth, American suburbs have overwhelmed the centers of cities, creating urban regions largely formed of suburban parts. By 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural areas combined.
- For years, when urban historians wrote about the “city,” they meant the center, the skyline, downtown. Suburbs were left out of traditional “city biographies” emphasizing economic development, population growth, and the achievements of business leaders. Everyone knew that large suburbs existed and had something to do with the process of urbanization. But most historians thought they were less significant than the city center: spatially, because they were less dense than centers; culturally, because more of their attractions involved nature than architecture; and socially, because their daytime activities involved women and children more than men.
  - - that's an excellent precis! - on 2007-12-20
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- Because of prejudices about density, high culture, and gender, suburbia resisted scrutiny for decades. It evaded both art historical analysis (based on the aesthetic assessment of outstanding buildings), and urban analysis (based on demographic and economic statistics).
- Today, Americans need to come to terms with the urbanized landscapes we have created. As Harlan Douglas, a perceptive sociologist, defined the urban region composed of suburbs in the 1920s, “It is the city trying to escape the consequences of being a city while still remaining a city. It is urban society trying to eat its cake and keep it, too.”
- Since the mid-1930s, the federal government has encouraged green field development on raw land outside of urban centers, usually through tax subsidies rather than direct spending. These incentives account for extended metropolitan expansion promoted by “growth machines” — alliances of bankers, developers, and business leaders profiting from hidden federal subsidies for suburban development.
- Excessive green field growth lies behind the national energy shortage and the mortgage crisis. Using federal incentives to constantly expand urban peripheries with commercial and residential development has had serious consequences. Reliance on imported oil, pursuit of war in the Middle East, and the credit crunch shaking Wall Street suggest that wise patterns of urban land use are more important to economic well-being than many Americans recognize.
  - - really well put; another reason to remediate brown fields and build on them; conserve greenfields. - on 2007-12-20
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- Alan Berube, research director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program:
- The way the U.N. — and most economists — look at it, a city encompasses not just the political geography that lies at the heart of an urban region, but the entire surrounding metropolitan area that functions as an economic whole. So New York isn’t just the five boroughs (population 8.2 million), but the enormous labor market that extends from Rockland County upstate, west to the Poconos, east to Suffolk County, and south to the Jersey Shore (population 18.8 million). What separates us from the world’s developing nations (and many developed ones, too) is that most Americans who live in these “cities” or “urban agglomerations” would describe themselves as living in the suburbs.
- But if you live in Westchester County, N.Y.; Cobb County, Ga.; Lake County, Ill.; or Collin County, Tex., would you really have a reason to be there if it weren’t for New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, or Dallas?
- Regardless, the same economic forces that are attracting people to large urban regions in the developing world apply here in the U.S. (and really always have). Firms and workers derive benefits from co-locating in large metro areas, in that they can each find a better “match” with one another given a greater variety of options. Big urban areas can cost-effectively support critical infrastructure like international airports, passenger and freight rail, and wireless networks. And urban proximity generates spillovers across workers, firms, and universities, embodied in the “network innovation” that powers areas like Silicon Valley (and in the venture capital that is its lifeblood). The result: big places are getting bigger. While the nation’s 100 largest metro areas (containing at least half a million people) contain 65 percent of U.S. population, they have captured 76 percent of its recent population growth. No wonder; as Ed Glaeser has argued, urbanization makes us more productive and, in the end, wealthier.
  - - the benefits of co-location - on 2007-12-20
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- My colleagues at Brookings and I have argued that in light of this reality, we ought to begin to tackle critical national challenges — on economic growth, education and skills, infrastructure, and the environment — with a keener eye toward the big, complex, messy, metropolitan way in which the majority of Americans (and now, our global counterparts) live their lives.
  - - interesting -- argues for the importance at fixing infrastructure *because* the Friedman model ("the world is flat" and it matters not where you live) isn't going to become a reality any time soon. Quite the opposite. - on 2007-12-20
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- Kunstler is a nostalgic fear-mongerer. Why are we listening to the opinions of a guy who was a theater major in college?
  - - that's what I ask myself, too... - on 2007-12-20
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