Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, February 7, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for “junketeering”?

Just possibly. “Gotcha” stories about foreign travels are still feared by mayors. But they’re dangerous anachronisms. Our cities’ economies and wellbeing actually require inventive foreign connections. Trade opportunities and enriching local economies still top the list. But new considerations are flooding in — for example the well-advertised global competition for the footloose young professionals, looking for “live” local scenes and cultural diversity.

The hands-down American regional leader on learning from abroad has been Seattle with its array of highly export-oriented firms. For 17 years Seattle has sent sizable delegations (70 or more) of business, political and civic leaders to see first-hand how a major foreign city and region really “clicks.” I’ve personally accompanied three of those visits — to Sydney, Hong Kong and Berlin — and discovered they’re significant eye-openers. Recently Seattle delegations have visited such cities as Fukuoka and Abu Dhabi — hardly our grandparents’ world city list.

In contrast to yesteryear’s idea that we Americans “know it all” and don’t need foreign input, there’s growing awareness — appreciated by boardrooms and city halls, growing more slowly in popular awareness, that today’s global standard for successful leadership is “go look.”

Last year my colleague Tim Campbell, board chair of the Urban Age Institute, conducted a survey of 16 high-income world cities. Every one of them had sent out high-level delegations to metropolises in other countries. All the cities were engaged in at least nine visits a year, with some making as many as 30.

A top example — Chicago. In a special blue ribbon report, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ranked global engagement, along with continued infrastructure improvement and building human capital, as keys to securing and keeping position among the top ranks of competitive towns worldwide.

The report touted Chicago’s success in global business services, corporate headquarters, worldwide transportation links, attracting the “creative class,” and strong public-private partnerships. But it said the city and region had to keep hustling on such problem areas as public schools, traffic congestion, and the region’s fragmented governance (at least 1,200 separate units with taxing power). Reform moves were urged in all those areas — plus the emerging issue of climate change, in which outside experts rate Chicago’s programs among the best in the world.

The panel also looked forward by calling for a Mayor’s Office of International Affairs to receive visiting delegations and to set priorities for overseas travel by the mayor and other officials. It also urged a distinct budget focused precisely on foreign travel by the mayor and other city officials.
Atlanta is another city gung-ho for international connections — a tradition begun by Andrew Young when he was mayor (1981-89). Returning last year from a trip to Chile for the Americas Competitiveness Forum — an event hosted frequently by Atlanta itself — Mayor Shirley Franklin boasted of her city’s international outreach efforts:

“We’ve established a perfect example of partnership that other cities, even other countries, want to emulate.” Franklin asserted that Atlanta has become “an important gateway for the America’s, and provides a perfect entry point for companies from Europe and Asia to enter the United States.”

But again, success means facing up to serious challenges– among them, in Franklin’s words, “foreign language instruction, improving multi-cultural awareness and diversity, and increasing our focus on math and science.”

An unsurprising set of most globally connected cities — among them New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore and Chicago — emerged in a “Global Cities Index” developed by the journal Foreign Affairs, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

But you don’t need to be “mega” in size to benefit substantially from foreign contacts, Campbell notes in a new report for the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. He cites Barcelona, Charlotte, Portland and Turin as examples of cities that have used foreign travels to gather learning and ideas to help them register major gains over the past generation.

Campbell notes Barcelona’s post-Franco flowering including the 1992 Summer Olympics, Portland’s urban growth boundary and building a street-friendly, transit-oriented setting, Charlotte’s banking advances, and Turin’s strategic planning exercises and economic advances. That doesn’t mean anything’s guaranteed: witness Charlotte’s current crisis of banking shrinkage including the disappearance of Wachovia, one of its top anchors.

But a city that’s “learned to learn” in this global age is far better positioned to recoup, to adapt and move forward. The media and the general public need to take note: face-to-face learning by a city’s leaders isn’t some luxury; rather it’s a competitive imperative.

Note to readers — an excellent companion commentary, by Bill Barnes of the National League of Cities, may be found at the NLC website. The article has a mega-view of U.S. competitiveness in these times, and also pays appropriate credit to our Citistates Group colleague, Bill Stafford, for his years of foresight articulating the need for American urban regions to position themselves for the challenges of the new global economy.

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