FoSCI Winter Dialogue 2/23 Recap
A recap of our FoSCI Winter Dialogue “The Promise of Small Cities: Gateways to the Future” between Alan Berube of The Brookings Institute and Ben Forman of MassINC on February 23, 2021. Video link of the event can be found at the bottom of this recap.
2021 feels like a landmark year.
It’s the year we'll hopefully emerge from this pandemic; the year when, for the first time, we’ll finally see climate become a key policy driver on both a local, state, and federal level; and it’s a year when small cities, many of which have been severely pinched by the economic crisis, will have to find their way forward in the world.
On the one hand, we’re seeing people move out of mega cities in search of the affordability, the livability, the community, and the flexibility that smaller cities offer. The nature of work is also changing rapidly. For many jobs you’ll now be able to work remotely, away from the large cities that have traditionally dominated the core industries. Yet these demographic shifts in populations and workforce also raise the issue of equity, for when we talk about a beckoning renaissance in these smaller cities, who exactly are we talking about?
Small cities are flexible spaces but they also have to reckon with many of the same problems their larger counterparts struggle with—inequity, homelessness, unemployment, aging populations, public health, and neighborhood disinvestment—yet they must do so with much more limited budgets.
This requires small cities to be innovative, to lean into community and civic networks. To try things out. And many of these small legacy cities have a host of assets at their disposal, particularly when it comes to sustainable planning. What was once considered a liability—open space near urban cores, abandoned factories, latent canals, alleyways & railway corridors, dense downtowns—all invite reinvention during this time of resilience.
Helping us to figure out this complicated equation—how small cities can harness all of their assets while also navigating the pitfalls of multiple health, economic, racial, and educational crises—we were joined for our winter dialogue by Alan Berube of The Brookings Institute and Ben Forman of MassINC. Both have spent most of their careers studying small and midsized cities and few have thought more deeply about these communities.
Alan Berube
Ben Forman
ALAN BERUBE, senior fellow and deputy director at the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institute, started with the premise that place matters and can have enormous effects on young people's economic future, even independent of other factors.
The Opportunity Atlas
He showed us the Opportunity Atlas which maps stark outcome disparities for kids growing up just a few miles apart. He also pointed to disparities in the job market in cities of varying size, with large cities showing more job growth in the last twenty years than smaller cities, largely due to "the winner take all" phenomenon of the tech industry.
Given all the media and research attention on large cities, Mr. Berube asked: Why study small cities? They are surprisingly consequential. About one-in-ten Americans (32 mil) lives in a legacy county. And legacy infrastructure is both ripe for further smart urbanization and also represents a robust sustainability opportunity.
"We're not going to build our way out of climate change," said Mr. Berube. There's also great potential for strides in the struggle for equity in small legacy cities—these cities were the traditional end points for much of the great migration and the site of decades of ongoing systemic racism.
"But by the same token I think small cities must become focal points for a national effort to close our enduring racial divides," said Mr. Berube.
In his 2019 report, Berube defines smaller legacy communities by places that had at least 20% jobs in manufacturing in 1970, that have struggled to transition to new industries, and that have an urban centerof between 20,000-200,000. Mr. Berube gathers data at the county level, in part because this is where the the more robust data sets are but also because these legacy cities are entangled within their urban/suburban/rural transects. Nationwide, Mr. Berube found 141 legacy communities that met these criteria, most concentrated in the Northeast and the Midwest.
These cities face a number of common challenges, including the tech sector job drain towards larger metro ares, the lack of scale, patterns of out-migration, and embedded structural racism. At the same time, some of these challenges can also be viewed as assets, for many of these cities posses a strong sense of place, character, and history, and it is precisely their manageable scale that gives them this character, accessibility, and affordability. Small interventions can have large effects in smaller cities.
Some smaller legacy cities like South Bend, IN or Wilkes-Barre, PA have forged strong alliances with their resident higher education institution, which need not necessarily be a tier-one research university. Small cities' proximity to larger markets allows flexible work situations for residents, and studies show that smaller cities' demographics are now shifting, often towards a younger, more diverse populations.
Mr. Berube offered some models of partnerships that are forging local solutions across multiple sectors, including Fund For Our Economic Future in Northeast Ohio, which launched The Two Tomorrows, a plan identifying eight indicators for accessible and inclusive development. This plan has been utilized by a number of community foundations, including Elevate Akron and Strengthening Stark.
"It's even more important to forge local partnerships and engage multiple sectors—public, private, civi, philanthropic—in smaller legacy cities where the resources and the capacity in any one given sector are limited," said Berube.
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BEN FORMAN, Research Director at MassINC, works for what is perhaps the country's preeminent state-level organization when it comes to studying, guiding, and networking smaller legacy cities, or "gateway cities" as they are called in Massachusetts.
There are twenty-six gateway cities in the state, many of which are regional centers in their own right. These gateway cities, many with canal and mill infrastructure, hold a quarter of the state's population, yet they have been traditionally overlooked in larger development models. When MassINC produced their report on Gateway Cities in 2007, many gateway city mayors subsequently formed a coalition which then lead to the Gateway Cities Legislative Caucus and a series of bills around gateway city development.
Much of MassINC's research work is on the relationship between satellite gateway cities and the workforce being siphoned into larger urban centers like Boston, what's called "an agglomeration shadow." Yet Mr. Forman pointed out that work patterns are changing in Massachusetts—job growth used to be largely driven by private vehicle commutes, but workers are increasingly utilizing commuter rail and subway infrastructure to get to and from work. Massachusetts has over four-hundred miles of commuter rail and many of the terminuses of the system are located in Gateway Cities.
Mr. Forman proposed a new way of thinking of the commuter rail as a "regional rail" system—not just as a mode for the traditional commute to-and-from the large city, but as an interchange between smaller cities, creating the European model of the "polycentric region." In this model you have multiple smaller urban centers connected by reliable, robust public transit. MassINC has thus done a lot of research around "transit-oritented development" including the potential sustainability and equity outcomes of such design.
Mr. Forman then offered a few case studies of how Gateway Cities around Massachusetts have remagined their legacy infrastructure, including Worcester City Square, which transformed a dormant mall into a vibrant, human-scale street grid, the Hamilton Canal Innovation District in Lowell, MA, which activated both the canals and mills of the city into a dense, multi-use neighborhood, and New Bedford, which has invested heavily in its port into a center for Offshore Wind.
Infrastructure revitalization aside, Mr. Forman stressed the need for social investment as well, whether it is in supporting public colleges and universities in these gateway cities or establishing assistance networks for immigrant populations that bring with them an entrepreneurial spirit but often run into systemic stumbling blocks when growing their businesses. This need has become particularly acute during the pandemic.
"When we think about what our economic development priorities are in gateway cities," said Mr. Forman. "We have to think about our investment in human capital first and foremost."
Our conversation and Q&A was wide reaching, touching upon legacy cities with absent public transportation, shifting models of economic development in a sustainable age, how to promote pocket density and walkability, the role of the suburbs, the need to maintain and support cultural institutions in small cities, how apprenticeship might work in these communities post-Covid, how cities might lean into church and faith-based institutions in the absence of small-town newspapers, and what small colleges can bring to downtowns.
To see the full video of the event, click on the video image below.
See you around the block. We're all in this together.
Reif Larsen
Founder, Future of Small Cities Institute
This event was presented in collaboration with TAP, the NY Upstate American Planning Association, the Troy Innovation Garage, the Community Foundation, and the Capital District Regional Planning Commission.