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Archive: Bill Dodge

Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide: Hope at Last?

Bill Dodge / Mar 05 2009

For Release Sunday, March 8, 2009
Citiwire.net

Bill DodgeThe bane of our polarized politics is nowhere more evident than in attempts to create effective partnerships among central cities (often politically blue), surrounding suburbs (variations of purple), and fringe rural areas (often red). Even when the logic of seizing common economic opportunities or thwarting common environmental threats is compelling, it’s difficult at best to reach agreements on how to deliver cost-effective services in such fields as roads, transit, sewer, water–indeed almost any critical service area. And when it comes to addressing such social challenges as fiscal inequities between rich and poor jurisdictions, the task borders on the impossible.

And that’s just in more urban regions. Pursuing partnerships between more urban regions (often blue) and more rural regions (often red) is usually deemed politically suicidal.

As President Obama strives to build bridges across the red-blue divide of our politics and society, a key pillar of that strategy needs to be regional cooperation. Read More »

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From Greenfields Frontier to a Renewable Frontier?

Bill Dodge / Dec 12 2008

For Release Sunday, December 14, 2008
Citiwire.net

Bill Dodge In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner bemoaned the closing of the western frontier. Until then, unfettered expansion onto free land had been the nation’s development dream, even though it required forcibly dislocating its Native Americans. By the 1890s Census, however, the unrelenting flow of humanity, along with setting aside Native American reservations, had brought settlement to points across the untamed wilderness of the West. The closing of the western frontier undermined America’s hopes for the future.

This year, 2008, may mark the closing of another frontier–the greenfields frontier. For over a half century, the nation has experienced unfettered expansion of human settlements, urban and rural, onto low cost greenfields.

A piece of earth and a car to drive has been central to the current development dream, resulting in explosive low density sprawl. New communities sprung up so quickly, and randomly, that they overwhelmed city annexation, even if it had been desired. But it wasn’t. Part of the dream was to flee the problems of the cities and set up new, more perfect, communities.

Instead, the new communities grew independently, often with little knowledge of their neighbors’ actions. Typically just in times of crises would they came together to deliver common services, such as sewer and water. Read More »

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