It’s as obvious as the air we breathe, as basic as the fluid geography of a watershed, as clear as the connection between a new highway and the strip shopping centers and subdivisions that cluster nearby.

But then again, the air flowing over city limits and state lines is invisible. And most people don’t stop to think that what goes down the kitchen sink or runs off a muddy construction site eventually flows into rivers or lakes and sometimes into other people’s drinking water supply. Even the idea that road building shapes how we live, work and shop is a foreign concept to most people.

In other words despite city limits, voting districts and state lines on maps, in the real world of air and water, of urban transportation and economies, city regions function in ways our American political systems may not recognize. Although environments, economies and living patterns create very real urban regions, those geographic areas don’t exist in the basic structure of the government of the United STATES. Under the Constitution, states have powers; cities don’t.

So is it possible to invigorate meaningful efforts to manage city regions as regions? Last month I spent several days chewing over that question with some two dozen business and nonprofit leaders, academics, writers and former mayors.

Pulled together by author and columnist Neal Peirce and his Citistates Group, we arrived at the the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico retreat center in Tarrytown, N.Y., with differing viewpoints but a base-level agreement that urban regions are too important to dismiss. But then what?

The concept of “regionalism” has been around for decades, but I have always filed it in the mental folder of “Worthy but Wonky.” Although it’s important, it’s also a topic that tends to make eyes glaze over. Yet the more I learn about cities, the more I see that problems and their solutions don’t stop at the city limits.

The idea that metro regions deserve heightened attention does get more fanfare these days, thanks in part to the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz, director of its Metropolitan Policy Program. Metro regions, Katz preaches, are essential to our national economy. Yet state governments are too often either apathetic about, or actively hostile toward, metro regions.

Peirce recalls that he and his Citistates colleagues have studied 25 cities over 31 years for Citistates Reports, and have heard repeatedly how state governments don’t take metro areas seriously.

On a more optimistic theme, at the conference I heard plenty of good ideas taking place at the regional level. Some — including Silicon Valley, Denver, St. Louis and Portland, Ore. — have metro-wide “greenprints.” Seattle and others have developed region-wide export-import strategies.

In one powerful example, the 10-county Atlanta region has won a long struggle to win a revenue source for its vast transportation problems. “Everyone in the region knew we had a transportation crisis,” Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, explained. The business community helped lead that years-long effort, which finally last year produced a state law to let voters in each Georgia metro region approve a 1-cent sales tax for a specific list of transportation projects. If it passes in July 2012, the Atlanta region’s tax is projected to raise at least $6 billion over 10 years. The project list runs the gamut: MARTA, streetcars, freeway interchanges and bike-ped projects.

One thread ran through many examples we heard: The regional business community took the lead. Businesses know the importance of quality of life, transportation and education. Williams even noted that relocation specialists who help businesses find new sites look at regional cooperation, along with other checklist items.

In today’s grim economy, state governments should recognize their enlightened self-interest in helping, not hampering, their city regions. But that grim economy has pushed the more obviously regional issues of environmental protection and growth planning to the back burner in favor of jobs and economic development.

And local officials in metro regions can be wary of power-sharing. Bill Barnes of the National League of Cities described a common reaction when groups of officials discuss regional-scale efforts. “There’s always a great sigh of relief when I say it’s not ‘the answer.’ ” But then, he tells them, “It’s not the answer. But it is a question.”

And that is where the Pocantico roundtable seems to have coalesced: With or without a formal regional government, smart metro areas will — often led by the business community — start working together.

As Barnes said, a regional approach may not be the answer, but should always be a question. Consider my own city, Charlotte. It has a half-dozen regional transportation planning agencies, none a part of the Charlotte region council of governments. The area has no regional Chamber of Commerce, no multicounty land use/transportation vision. It has no regional strategy for preserving land other than “hope.”

All are challenges for this once-rural and now increasingly urban region. Similar challenges — or others — face most of the country’s metro regions. Barnes described it well: “It’s all part of the messy problem of governance, problem-solving and people working together to do stuff.”

Or to put it another way, we no longer have the luxury of adversarial relations.

Mary Newsom is a longtime journalist and associate director of the nonprofit UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in Charlotte, The views expressed here are the author’s and don’t necessarily represent the views of the institute, its staff or UNC Charlotte, nor those of those of other participants at the Pocantico Conference, or of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, its trustees, or its staff.

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SOFIA, Bulgaria — Residents of this graffiti-pocked capital awoke one recent Saturday to find their controversial Monument to the Soviet Army had been painted to look like Superman, Santa Claus and other American pop-culture icons.

Reactions ranged from delight at the anti-authoritarian creativity to finger-wagging at vandalism to a dour scolding from the Russian embassy. Was it freedom of expression — a witty political statement? Or was it just hooliganism — another example of a culture of disrespect for the city’s deteriorating public spaces?

More than 20 years after the fall of communism, Sofians confront one of the intrinsic tensions found in any democratic society: How to support the creative messiness of individual freedom and free expression without losing a sense of collective order? It’s a tension American society hasn’t yet resolved after 235 years of self-government.

The monument-painting itself highlighted a long-simmering disagreement over the fate of the 1954 commemoration of the Soviets’ 1944 “liberation.” But the vandalism (or artistry, take your pick) also can be viewed as a symptom of a debate that’s less monumental, if you will, but with more significance for Sofians’ daily lives. It’s the city’s inability to find the wherewithal, or the private support, to care for the public places its residents use daily. Many of Sofia’s public places are a shambles, a result of either civic disregard or vandalism — or both. This, too, echoes conditions in too many U.S. cities.

Sidewalks in Sofia can be minefields for the unwary, with crumbling pavers and ankle-deep potholes. Many motorists eschew parking lots in favor of parking right on the sidewalks, the vehicles blocking pedestrians and cracking pavement. (Might Sofia’s mayor take a hint from the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, who for a stunt video in July crushed an illegally parked Mercedes with a tank?)

In central Sofia’s numerous parks, benches are as likely to be broken as to offer respite. In some places weeds are knee-high. Along the pedestrianized Pirotska Street, crumbling concrete installed only a decade ago betrays both shoddy workmanship and slipshod upkeep. Graffiti is ubiquitous.

“Sofia is a beautiful city, but it is shabby and poorly maintained,” city architect Petar Dikov told a group of visiting European and U.S. planners from Johns Hopkins’ International Urban Fellows program. Dikov was ebullient over the charms of the mountain-rimmed city, but frank about the challenges. A factor even more important than municipal funding, he said, is Sofians’ attitude, built over years of socialism. The Soviet era taught Bulgarians to wait for the state to do just about anything, he and others said.

Under communism, public spaces were well maintained but tightly controlled, explained Sofia architect Ivo Panteleev. Rigid orderliness repelled the informal social activities that in freer societies enliven (and sometimes make messes of) public spaces. Communism’s end introduced that messiness, along with the ragged inequity of free enterprise and a city government struggling with maintenance costs.

The unkempt result in Sofia, to the visitor’s eye, can mirror the slovenliness found more and more often in U.S. cities, as governments in the grip of anti-taxation and anti-government conservatives find themselves too strapped to afford even routine maintenance. In those circumstances, a do-it-yourself ethic can be a welcome, if random, palliative for severe budget cuts.

Some of that optimism and a nascent “do-it-yourself” spirit is on display in Sofia. Dobromir Borislavov, 32, is unpaid executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Doctor’s Garden, which aims to improve a century-old former botanical garden. As we walked past a towering boxwood and Borislavov pointed to ginkgo trees and other specimens, he described a generational split. Under communism, he said, “People weren’t even allowed to make a joke about the government. A person was nobody. You weren’t allowed to make any proposals.” Some older Bulgarians, he said, retain those attitudes. To them, repairing a bedraggled park seems like a government responsibility.

Coincidentally, during the Johns Hopkins planners’ conference, a Sofia-born New York planner from the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces led a two-day workshop on improving Bulgaria Square. It’s a concrete expanse surrounding the 1981-vintage National Palace of Culture. A volunteer group of architects had made a cold call to PPS’ New York office, and the call landed on Elena Madison’s desk. Madison, who visits Sofia yearly to see family, is optimistic about the venture. “I’ve been trying to get someone interested,” she said. “It never had any legs. This time around I didn’t even initiate this.”

Madison sees more Sofians stepping up to care for the city’s shared public areas; she described how residents where her parents lived had fixed up and planted flowers in a common area. But she, too, railed at the crumbling sidewalks and scofflaw parking.

It’s clear that solving systemic problems requires more than relying on individuals and can-do volunteerism, however welcome those efforts are. Either the government must step in, or it will in effect abandon parts of the city to weeds, broken benches and unwalkable sidewalks.

In that way, Sofia already resembles parts of too many U.S. cities. My own city, the formerly booming banktown of Charlotte, now fights an unemployment rate that’s been in double-digits for three years running. The public is in no mood for “frills” such as park amenities. When a new greenway park opened last year, Charlotteans grumbled about “waste” because of its clock tower, kiosk and fountains. Rather than raise property taxes, the elected county commissioners over a period of two years chose to slash the park department’s budget by 40 percent and chop its library system almost in half.

Far from Sofia and its battered sidewalks and broken benches, our U.S. sidewalks and streets and parks grow shabby. The other day, on a busy street in my neighborhood, I saw a robust wild grapevine growing in the street, in the sediment at the curb that had accumulated from a lack of regular street sweeping.

In the U.S. our disheveled public realm doesn’t result from any lingering socialist belief that the state will support us. Rather it stems from misplaced faith in free markets — a fundamentalist belief that, regardless of evidence to the contrary, cutting taxes will inevitably spark growth.

Meantime, in schoolyards and street medians, the uncut summertime crabgrass grows waist-high, evidence of our domestically nurtured culture of civil disrespect.

Mary Newsom is a longtime journalist and associate director of the nonprofit UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in Charlotte, N.C. Disclosure: The Johns Hopkins International Urban Fellows Program paid her travel expenses to Sofia.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For people who care about cities, the past 10 years have been good ones. Many of America’s cities are flowering.

Rail transit has been built in places you’d never have predicted, like Dallas and Salt Lake City. People are moving back downtown in search of urbanity. One recent study for the nonprofit group CEOs for Cities found that in large urban regions, since 2000 the number of young college-educated adults living close-in is up 26 percent.

Crime’s down, so people feel safer in the city. With ongoing reform efforts, some formerly disgraceful urban public school systems are improving — another draw. So why did I leave a conference here about the future of cities feeling gloomy? It’s because I’m afraid what Congress and state and local governments are doing will undermine the success cities are having.

Crime is down? Just wait: City governments are slashing public safety budgets. The New York Times’ Michael Cooper told us that Camden, N.J., outside Philadelphia laid off nearly half its police force though it has one of the nation’s highest crime rates. Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego and others last year started “rolling brownouts,” shutting some fire stations each day.

Cooper reported on 2-year-old Bentley Do in San Diego, who choked to death on a gum ball just 600 steps from a fire station. It was empty, its engine that night covering for a station closed in the brownout. It took 9 1/2 minutes for a fire engine with paramedics and equipment to arrive. In Prichard, Ala., pension checks to retired municipal workers stopped in 2009. A retired fire marshal was found destitute and dead in June, his electricity and water cut off. “Prichard is the future,” former San Diego city attorney Michael Aguirre told Cooper.

Governments are slashing transit crucial to many workers’ ability to get and hold jobs. Cooper reported on a suburban Atlanta county that eliminated its bus system, stranding 8,400 daily riders. Local governments are also closing libraries, recreation centers and schools.

Growth will return, sometime, of course. Larry Summers, ex-president of Harvard, ex-Treasury secretary (1999-2001) and ex-director of the National Economic Council for the Obama administration (2009-11) said the economy is coming back. You no longer hear much talk of a double-dip recession, he said, and corporate profits are healthy.

That was hopeful — sort of. But we also heard a fascinating yet worrisome demographic analysis from the University of Utah’s Arthur C. “Chris” Nelson. He titled it “The Decade of Calamity.”

He looked at population trends that affect housing and concluded the country is overbuilt with suburban, single-family houses — and it’s going to get worse as Baby Boomers age and many decide to sell the family house and move to a condo, apartment or assisted living center. Or they move in with the kids.

All those things diminish potential demand for single-family houses. Nelson predicted many states will have more houses for sale than people wanting to buy them. Even in states that his projections showed would escape that fate, weak markets can mean weak home prices and a lower property tax base.

The journalists’ conference — sponsors were the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Nieman Foundation and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design — also heard from Edward Glaeser, a free-marketeer Harvard economist whose book, “Triumph of the City,” makes an eloquent case that cities enrich our world economically as well as culturally, through innovations that arise when smart people work near other smart people.

Someone asked Glaeser what advice he has for cities. He said: “It’s fundamentally about schools. It’s fundamentally about kids. You really want to be investing in children.”

Or not. Or at least, not in many states.

In North Carolina, a General Assembly controlled by Republicans for the first time in more than a century is refusing to keep a temporary, 1-cent sales tax enacted last year, and instead is preparing for deep cuts in the state’s excellent university system, and to the state’s prekindergarten programs. In the state’s two largest cities, Charlotte and Raleigh, hundreds of teachers are likely to get pink slips; Charlotte is preparing to take a cleaver to its local prekindergarten programs, in addition to state cuts.

North Carolina isn’t unique. In Dallas, the public school system’s highly regarded Townview magnet school faces losing 27 percent of its full-time teachers; another excellent magnet school, Booker. T. Washington, faces losing 25 percent of its teachers.

Philadelphia schools may have to eliminate 3,800 jobs — including 1,260 teachers. Full-day kindergarten may end. The Chicago Public Schools, trying to close an estimated $820 million budget deficit, may have to lay off more than 2,000 teachers.

In the Bay Area of California, 11 different school districts have asked voters to OK temporary property taxes to avert teacher layoffs and other education cutbacks.

It isn’t just schools. In North Carolina, the legislature would eliminate a group of special courts — drug courts, family courts, etc. that, by sending criminals to treatment programs, save the justice system money in the long run. It also may cut positions of court administrators, who keep the courts running more efficiently. With less efficient courts, criminals can’t be tried as speedily, and some predict prosecutors will have to drop more charges.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposed budget would cut 18 fire companies and four ambulances, but would end the brownouts in effect since 2009. Sacramento is looking at possibly laying off more than 10 percent of its police force.

In all those cases — and many, many more — significant quality of life measures for cities are being badly wounded.

Weak public education, weak higher education, substandard public safety service and a sluggish justice system. And don’t forget: If you buy a house you may never be able to sell it.

Yep, your taxes will be nice and low. But tell me again why anyone would want to live in a city like that?

Mary Newsom is an associate editor at the Charlotte Observer, mnewsom@charlotteobserver.com P.O. Box 30308, Charlotte, NC 28230-0308. Read her blog, The Naked City, at www.charlotteobserver.com, and follow her on Twitter @marynewsom.

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CHARLOTTE — Last year the global population crested a major ridge. More than half the world’s people now live in urban areas. This is being called the Century of the City — title of a book by my Citistates Associates.

But in the United States, the 21st century may also be the Century of the Suburb — or more accurately, the retrofitted, re-imagined and re-invented suburb.

Sun Belt cities, in particular, are facing a huge, and hugely important, challenge. Places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Orlando and Charlotte saw rapid growth during a time when low-density, suburban development was admired, even required.

Today, whether and how those cities meet the challenge the 21st century will require may well determine whether they struggle or thrive.

First, let’s be clear what I mean by “suburbia.” It can be a fuzzy term. Some use it for any growth at the edge of a city or metro area. Some use it to mean only separate municipalities outside a city, regardless of vintage or form. I’m using it to mean development with a specific pattern, typically built after 1945: single-use zones (stores separated from offices and housing, single-family houses apart from apartments); lots a quarter-acre or more; car dependent.

Millions of people aspire to live in suburbia and when they do, they say they love it Indeed, the U.S. real estate industry has sold Americans on the idea that a house with a lawn in the ‘burbs is the “American Dream.”

Nevertheless, in the coming decades suburbia will pose a growing problem, due to a number of converging factors. Among them are:

Demographics. Several population trends are going to work to favor urban-style, multifamily development. Gen Y-ers (aka the Millennials) have a clear preference, at least at this stage in their lives, for urban living. Meantime, aging Baby Boomers will be selling the family house and moving to condos or apartments. And as age, illness and infirmity start to take their toll, many boomers will have to give up driving. They’re going to want walkable neighborhoods.

As a result of the foreclosure crisis, the single-family home market will be sluggish for years. The nation is already overbuilt on large-lot suburbia and underbuilt in cities. Among many real estate experts who are noticing the dearth of investor interest in exurban development, the Urban Land Institute’s “Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2011″ (drafted by our colleague Jonathan Miller) has this advice to investors: “Avoid commodity, half-finished subdivisions in the suburban outer edge and McMansions; they are so yesterday.”

Fuel prices. Remember when $4-a-gallon gas walloped the economy in 2008? Now gas prices have topped $3 again. They’re likely to keep rising in coming years. Already, transportation is the No. 2 cost for average U.S. households. With pay and jobs sinking, more people are likely to want to live where they can drive less.

Carbon footprint. It turns out city dwellers have a much smaller carbon footprint than folks living amid green lawns with shady oak trees in the front yard. If we’re to avoid creating even more destructive changes in the world’s climate (more droughts, floods, blizzards or heat waves) for our children and grandchildren to live with, more of us will need to live in tight-knit, walkable cities.

Suburbs on the brink. Although some first-ring suburbs are thriving, others aren’t. Many suburban neighborhoods are seeing rising poverty and crime, dead or dying shopping malls and derelict strip centers and big-box stores. Can we just abandon them to blight?

Saturday, I moderated a Raleigh conference, sponsored by the N.C. State College of Design, examining the problem of, and opportunities for, inner-ring suburbs — generally built 1950-1980. The consensus: Cities and metro areas must encourage compact development, not just in their core but in suburban areas. And they need mass transit.

Former Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut, author of Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America’s First Tier Suburbs, said first-tier suburbs are “the place where blight can either be stopped or spread farther out.”

But how do you stop the blight? A prescription from Georgia Tech architect Ellen Dunham-Jones, co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, is to re-inhabit, retrofit and re-green. Reclaim “underperforming asphalt” — surface parking lots that can hold new buildings with stores on the ground floor, offices and housing above.

Building transit is expensive. But Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia pointed out that, when looked at based on 30-year amortization, streetcars cost less than buses. He urges cities to reconsider expensive light rail systems and to divert some of that money to less expensive streetcars. He showed slides of old streetcar rails popping out of the pavement, “wanting so much to be used.”

Do we really want to force our children to inherit vast, blighted ‘burbs? After all, as Marvin Malecha, dean of the NCSU College of Design, put it, the American Dream is not really to own a house, lawn and picket fence. “The real American Dream,” he said, “is that our children will be OK.”

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

CHARLOTTE — Last year the global population crested a major ridge. More than half the world’s people now live in urban areas. This is being called the Century of the City — title of a book by my Citistates Associates.

But in the United States, the 21st century may also be the Century of the Suburb — or more accurately, the retrofitted, re-imagined and re-invented suburb.

Sun Belt cities, in particular, are facing a huge, and hugely important, challenge. Places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Orlando and Charlotte saw rapid growth during a time when low-density, suburban development was admired, even required.

Today, whether and how those cities meet the challenge the 21st century will require may well determine whether they struggle or thrive.

First, let’s be clear what I mean by “suburbia.” It can be a fuzzy term. Some use it for any growth at the edge of a city or metro area. Some use it to mean only separate municipalities outside a city, regardless of vintage or form. I’m using it to mean development with a specific pattern, typically built after 1945: single-use zones (stores separated from offices and housing, single-family houses apart from apartments); lots a quarter-acre or more; car dependent.

Millions of people aspire to live in suburbia and when they do, they say they love it Indeed, the U.S. real estate industry has sold Americans on the idea that a house with a lawn in the ‘burbs is the “American Dream.”

Nevertheless, in the coming decades suburbia will pose a growing problem, due to a number of converging factors. Among them are:

Demographics. Several population trends are going to work to favor urban-style, multifamily development. Gen Y-ers (aka the Millennials) have a clear preference, at least at this stage in their lives, for urban living. Meantime, aging Baby Boomers will be selling the family house and moving to condos or apartments. And as age, illness and infirmity start to take their toll, many boomers will have to give up driving. They’re going to want walkable neighborhoods.

As a result of the foreclosure crisis, the single-family home market will be sluggish for years. The nation is already overbuilt on large-lot suburbia and underbuilt in cities. Among many real estate experts who are noticing the dearth of investor interest in exurban development, the Urban Land Institute’s “Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2011″ (drafted by our colleague Jonathan Miller) has this advice to investors: “Avoid commodity, half-finished subdivisions in the suburban outer edge and McMansions; they are so yesterday.”

Fuel prices. Remember when $4-a-gallon gas walloped the economy in 2008? Now gas prices have topped $3 again. They’re likely to keep rising in coming years. Already, transportation is the No. 2 cost for average U.S. households. With pay and jobs sinking, more people are likely to want to live where they can drive less.

Carbon footprint. It turns out city dwellers have a much smaller carbon footprint than folks living amid green lawns with shady oak trees in the front yard. If we’re to avoid creating even more destructive changes in the world’s climate (more droughts, floods, blizzards or heat waves) for our children and grandchildren to live with, more of us will need to live in tight-knit, walkable cities.

Suburbs on the brink. Although some first-ring suburbs are thriving, others aren’t. Many suburban neighborhoods are seeing rising poverty and crime, dead or dying shopping malls and derelict strip centers and big-box stores. Can we just abandon them to blight?

Saturday, I moderated a Raleigh conference, sponsored by the N.C. State College of Design, examining the problem of, and opportunities for, inner-ring suburbs — generally built 1950-1980. The consensus: Cities and metro areas must encourage compact development, not just in their core but in suburban areas. And they need mass transit.

Former Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut, author of Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America’s First Tier Suburbs, said first-tier suburbs are “the place where blight can either be stopped or spread farther out.”

But how do you stop the blight? A prescription from Georgia Tech architect Ellen Dunham-Jones, co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, is to re-inhabit, retrofit and re-green. Reclaim “underperforming asphalt” — surface parking lots that can hold new buildings with stores on the ground floor, offices and housing above.

Building transit is expensive. But Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia pointed out that, when looked at based on 30-year amortization, streetcars cost less than buses. He urges cities to reconsider expensive light rail systems and to divert some of that money to less expensive streetcars. He showed slides of old streetcar rails popping out of the pavement, “wanting so much to be used.”

Do we really want to force our children to inherit vast, blighted ‘burbs? After all, as Marvin Malecha, dean of the NCSU College of Design, put it, the American Dream is not really to own a house, lawn and picket fence. “The real American Dream,” he said, “is that our children will be OK.”

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom.

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to webmaster@citiwire.net.

Optimists prefer to look forward, not back. But especially during a month named for the two-headed Roman god Janus — a month when state legislatures are convening only to face mammoth budget shortfalls — maybe we all need a clear-eyed look backward as well as ahead.

A look back at the past decade from an Oregon consulting company, Fodor & Associates, ought to get plenty of people thinking about whether some assumptions of the past need re-examining. The report looked at growth rates and prosperity in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas. Its findings may challenge a bedrock assumption for many local and state government leaders, that “growth” in and of itself automatically brings jobs and more wealth.

Fodor looked at 2000-2009 data and found that on a series of measures, fast-growing cities were less prosperous than slow-growing ones. Fast-growing cities had lower incomes and during the Great Recession (i.e. 2007-09) saw greater income drops. He found no correlation between growth rate and unemployment.

I have some quibbles with his methods: His report doesn’t appear to have looked at whether fast-growing cities might, until the recession slammed them, have had greater income growth. Many of the fast-growing cities are in the South, where incomes were lower to start with and where the recession has hit particularly hard.

But Fodor’s point is that this bedrock assumption that growth automatically brings prosperity might not be true after all.

This column shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of the “stop growth” genre of activism. Because metros and economies are complex in ways that aren’t always readily apparent, efforts to restrict growth — like allowing only low-density, single-family subdivisions — can have unintended consequences, such as driving up housing prices. They can result in economic or racial segregation. One town’s efforts to fend off growth can force new growth to sprawl farther out.

I showed the Fodor study to Ike Heard, who teaches urban planning and economic development at UNC Charlotte. He pointed to possible reasons for lower incomes in fast-growing cities: Job seekers, especially the young, who tend to be paid less, and the homeless head for growing cities. High growth areas attract megastores (Wal-Mart, etc.), and their impact tends to depress pay levels for low-skill workers. And where employers can choose from many available workers, they may hire those who’ll work for less.

So while this isn’t an anti-growth manifesto, policymakers everywhere might be well advised that maybe it’s not so smart to pin their state’s or city’s future on a belief that may be only myth — that growth automatically brings prosperity.

It’s particularly ill-advised at a time when so many places’ prosperity seems at risk, and so many governments are staring into a frightening budget abyss. The National Conference of State Legislatures last July estimated that the states’ aggregated budget gap for fiscal year 2010-11 was at least $83.9 billion. And 35 states project budget gaps for the next budget year, estimated at a total of $82.1 billion.

Similarly, the National League of Cities in May found that three-quarters of city officials were reporting that overall economic and fiscal conditions had worsened during the past year, with 22 percent of cities saying they’d already had to make cuts in public safety — usually a last-resort area for budget cutting.

In my city, Charlotte, the local newspaper for which I work has over the past few years run a variety of articles about problems like gangs, crime, foreclosures and high-poverty schools. Maps of the city ran with the articles, and if you layered the maps over one another you’d see they all dealt with basically the same area — an arc almost encircling the downtown, except for the affluent southern quadrant. It’s a collection of neighborhoods the city government characterizes as “challenged” or “transitioning.” And it’s where the city’s growth policies allowed large numbers of single-family-home, suburban-style starter-home subdivisions — subdivisions where foreclosures now cause big problems.

In large part because of those low-income subdivisions, more than half the residential property sales in the county in 2010 involved foreclosed or on-the-brink homes. Similar problems exist elsewhere in the country, of course, in fast-growing Las Vegas, Florida and parts of the Pacific Northwest, among other spots. The foreclosures bite deep into local property tax bases, lowering property values across the spectrum and reducing governments’ ability to provide essential services like public schooling, mental health services and even police protection.

In Charlotte, city policies blessed the building of mile after mile of starter-home subdivisions. While a developer trying to build a mixed-use project at a light rail stop would endure months of bureaucratic torture in order to win the political support for a rezoning, those cheap subdivisions didn’t even require rezonings or City Council votes. That’s because decades ago the city zoned all undeveloped land for single-family, suburban-style subdivisions — no rezonings needed, development on auto-pilot. And the reason, naturally, was to encourage growth — because we all know that growth brings prosperity. Except, apparently, when it doesn’t.

Janus symbolized transitions — from youth to maturity, from past to future. The old god would probably understand what the nation’s once-booming cities need to do now: to look backward with a clear vision, to see which old beliefs and habits need reassessing, so that the future can learn from the past.

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom.

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Six years ago this month Athens was the world’s darling. When the 2004 Olympic Games closed with barely a hitch, it’s likely the Greeks themselves were more surprised than anyone. They had overcome disorganization, global skepticism and procrastination so egregious Olympic boss Juan Antonio Samaranch had to intervene.

The new light rail tram line runs from central Athens’ Syntagma Square to the coast.

But this year, as Greek’s economy cratered, people in Greece and beyond targeted the estimated $10 billion the games cost as a factor in Greece’s woes. “In 2004 people were cheering,” says Lila Leontidou, professor of geography at Hellenic Open University here. “Actually the people lost.”

In addition to the expense, a number of the 30-odd new or renovated sports venues remain closed or underused, losing an estimated $12 million a year. At an empty Tae Kwon Do Pavilion on the Faliron Bay coast — a site the government hopes to turn into a convention center — graffiti speckled the walls, and weeds and condoms littered the concrete. Beside it a wide pedestrian esplanade over a multilane highway was empty of pedestrians. A June Wall Street Journal article on the empty venues was aptly headlined “The Ruins of Modern Greece.”

Do Olympics cities win or lose? That inevitable question arose last year in Chicago, whose unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Olympics found only mixed support. A Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll in August 2009 found 47 percent wanted the games, 45 percent didn’t.

Yet as urban scholars begin to measure the legacy of Athens’ Olympics, if they look only at the costly and visible sports venues, they may miss some more mundane, pedestrian things with more lasting significance. Like pedestrians. And subways.

The Olympics showered money and imposed deadlines on long-languishing projects including new subway lines, a tram and suburban rail. A network of pedestrian-only streets in central Athens included removing autos from several busy arteries to create a broad pedestrian way linking key archaeological sites.

The plaza in front of the Monastiraki subway station in central Athens offers a rare glimpse of the city’s historical complexity. To the right is the neoclassical, 19th-century railway station. On the left is the Tsisdarakis Mosque, built in 1759 under the Ottoman empire, and now used as an annex of the Museum of Greek Folk Art. And looming over all, in the background, is the famed Acropolis. The Olympics brought money and a much-needed deadline to projecs such as the subway and upgrading of the Monastiraki plaza.

The plaza in front of the Monastiraki subway station in central Athens offers a rare glimpse of the city’s historical complexity. To the right is the neoclassical, 19th-century railway station. On the left is the Tsisdarakis Mosque, built in 1759 under the Ottoman empire, and now used as an annex of the Museum of Greek Folk Art. And looming over all, in the background, is the famed Acropolis. The Olympics brought money and a much-needed deadline to projecs such as the subway and upgrading of the Monastiraki plaza. All photos by Mary Newsom.

Some Athenian urbanists will tell you that that bringing everyday people into daily contact with newly visible reminders of the city’s history may have a significant, if intangible, result: Giving Athenians a shared sense of cultural memory.

The role of cultural memory is an emerging topic in urban planning; it drew almost 100 academics, planners and architects to Athens in June for a conference of the Johns Hopkins University’s International Urban Fellows Program. [Disclosure: The program paid my travel expenses to the conference.]

Conference organizer Georges Prevelakis (pictured at left), an Athenian professor of geopolitics at the Sorbonne in Paris, believes that “memory is fundamental to creating a feeling of belonging to society.” In conference discussions as well as interviews, he described its resonance for Athens, a city he and others say lacks a sense of its own history.

Athens, home to the Parthenon, cradle of democracy, lacking a sense of history? Westerners may find that idea outlandish. But a quick stroll around helps even a casual visitor understand. Of course you see the Acropolis and ancient agora. But the 2,000 years that followed the classical Athens of the fifth century B.C have left comparatively sparse physical remains. Athens was part of the empires of Rome, Byzantium and for 400 years, the Ottoman empire. Succeeding waves of occupiers destroyed their predecessors’ architecture. Even the neoclassical Athens of the 19th century fell to 20th-century land speculators. Once you’re beyond the touristy neighborhood abutting the Acropolis, downtown Athens offers mostly undistinguished, Modernist-inspired offices and apartments.

At the Johns Hopkins conference Athenian architect Christos Floros coined the term “architectural cleansing” to describe the ravages. In his view, the city has little sense of itself: “Most inhabitants of Athens do not love Athens as their city.” Prevelakis concurs, describing an Athens that where most residents are newcomers. Athens, he says, is “new city.”

To Prevelakis, the Olympics were worth the trouble, and the money. And even Lila Leontidou, who questions the cost, muses about the regenerative power of the new subway stations: “It’s funny how the metro stations become little hubs of revitalization,” she said. They’re attracting young people, bringing new life to the city.

Today, inside the gleaming new subway stations, Athenians heading for work, shopping or nightlife pass visible reminders of their city’s deep past. The stations display archaeological findings unearthed during construction: jewelry, ancient aqueducts and roadbeds, a Roman-era cemetery and more.

Inside the Monastiraki station, a clear walkway lets you stroll atop foundations of 2,000-year-old houses. You hear running water and see the second-century culvert that turned the river Eridanos into a sewer. Today, at last, a small part of the river flows free once more.

Excavations for the new subway line uncovered numerous antiquities, dating from the eighth century B.C. to 19th century. Many were left on display, such as these foundations dating to the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. Photo by Maggie Barrows.

Excavations for the new subway line uncovered numerous antiquities, dating from the eighth century B.C. to 19th century. Many were left on display, such as these foundations dating to the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.

Seeing that history enhances Athenians’ sense of place and culture, said Leontidou, “It makes people proud … a little bit unintentionally.”

To Dora Galani, that pride has been anything but unintentional. Chair of the Unification of Athens Archaeological Sites, she oversaw the removal of 4,000 illegal billboards, the redesign of 18 streets and numerous pedestrianization projects which she estimates cost some $127 million total.

“The memories and monuments of Athens are not well known by Athenians,” she told the conference. When her now 20-something daughter was younger, Galani said, her schoolmates knew little of the city’s history. But Athens’ Olympics-funded transformation — its subways and newly attractive pedestrian plazas — are changing that. Now, of an evening, the 20-somethings head to the Areopagos Rock just under the Acropolis and watch the sun set over their city.

Even in the dismal economy, Galani is optimistic about the organic regeneration she sees, inspired by subways and walkability and history. “We are at a turning point,” she said. “I really believe we can do things. I used not to say that.”

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom. This article was first posted at Next American City.

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As local politicians across the country get scorched by voter anger over recession-induced budget cuts — laying off teachers, closing schools and libraries and slashing services — perhaps they’ll be more receptive than usual to some powerful and surprising tax revenue numbers.

So what follows is about fiscal prudence as much as it is about smart city planning.

Conventional wisdom, of course, says that to prop up the property tax base, a high-end shopping mall is just the ticket. But when Sarasota County, Fla., looked at where the county government gets the biggest bang for its property tax buck, it found some numbers that may surprise a lot of people.

Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter Katz, speaking to a meeting of Citistates Associates in Minnesota late last month, described a recent analysis of the county’s property tax revenue per acre. He pointed first to residential areas. Not surprisingly, when you work the numbers on a per-acre basis, residential property inside the county’s municipalities offered the biggest revenue per acre — a little more than $8,200 per acre for single family houses within the city of Sarasota. This makes sense, as in-town land values tend to be higher.

Next, Katz showed the results from retail properties. Here comes surprise No. 1.: Big box stores such as WalMart and Sam’s Club, when analyzed for county property tax revenue per acre, produce barely more than a single family house; maybe $150 to $200 more a year, Katz said. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) “That hardly seems worth all the heat that elected officials take when they approve such development,” he noted in a related, written presentation.

Among retail properties, the biggest per-acre property tax revenue in his county, almost $22,000 per acre, comes from Southgate Mall, the county’s highest-end commercial property with Macy’s, Dillards and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores. That’s not so surprising.

But here’s the shocker: On a horizontal bar chart Katz showed, you see that zooming to the far right side, outpacing all the retail offerings, even the regional shopping mall, is the revenue from a high-rise mixed-use project in downtown Sarasota. It sits on less than an acre and contributes a hefty $800,000 in tax per acre. (Add in city property taxes and it’s $1.2 million.) “It takes a lot of WalMarts to equal the contribution of that one mixed-use building,” Katz noted.

Indeed, that three-quarters of an acre of in-town urban-style (14- to 16-story) development is worth more property tax revenue than a combination of the 21-acre WalMart Supercenter and the 32-acre Southgate Mall.

Even a mid rise (up to about seven stories) mixed use building brings in $560,000, and the low rise (up to three stories with residential over retail) brings in over $70,000 per acre — more than three times the return of Southgate Mall.

Katz quipped, “From a fiscal standpoint, this really puts hair on your chest.”

But Katz and the group that worked with him on the tax analysis, Public Interest Projects, Inc., in Asheville (http://www.pubintproj.com/index.php), N.C., went further than just the revenue analysis. It looked at the payback time, in tax revenue, for the infrastructure costs of various types of residential developments. The payback time for a mixed-use condominium building in the heart of downtown was three years. Want to guess the payback time for the residential portion of a multi-use development out at a highway interchange? It was a whopping 42 years.

Nothing involving tax revenues is simple, of course. For instance, what about sales taxes? Obviously that big WalMart and the shopping mall bring in more revenue than just property taxes. But Joe Minicozzi of Public Interest Projects notes, “Generally speaking, there isn’t a heck of a lot of return to the municipality with sales tax — at least compared to the return from property tax.”

And Katz noted that while sales tax revenue can be important to the specific city or town that snags a big retail development, “At the county level such ‘fiscal zoning’ makes little sense.”

Yes, Sarasota County could probably “steal” some commercial development from neighbor counties. “But we’d ultimately do far better to create value through property taxes in smart growth ‘districts,’” he said:

“With a receptive mindset among citizens and elected officials, such places should be infinitely replicable; doing so may actually be easier than trying to squeeze a little more spending out of our citizens’ mostly fixed disposable income.”

Potential tax revenue shouldn’t be the only factor in determining appropriate development for any community, of course — especially not flawed assumptions about which type of development brings in the healthiest tax revenue. And as Katz pointed out, there’s a limited market in most communities for intensive, mixed use development, even if NIMBY opposition were to evaporate, which isn’t likely.

Still, evidence is piling up of the benefits of compact, in-town development compared with auto-centric greenfield development. With a smaller carbon footprint, it’s kinder on the environment. It’s kinder on residents’ waistlines, too, as they’re likely to walk more and drive less. And now there’s evidence it’s kinder to government coffers, as well. And that’s an attribute worth some serious attention.

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ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.

In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.

Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.

In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.

But if we assume all that, listening to conference attendees from places such as Rome, Edinburgh, Paris and Bern, Switzerland, is a bit like getting ice water splashed in your face.

Some of the problems they listed and talked about:

• Under-developed or unused infrastructure.
• Mobility and car-focused development.
• Accommodating immigrants and/or different ethnic groups
• Corruption or maladministration
• The difficulty of infill development, compared with growth on the urban edge.
• Gentrification and other housing problems.
• Economic troubles and unemployment.
• Sprawl.
• Lack of regional cooperation or regional governance.

Not everyone listed all those problems, except, sadly, an architect from Calcutta and one from Mexico City who said, in effect, “all of the above.”

Mexico City, an urbanized area of 20 million (or maybe 24 million — apparently even population measures there are contested) suffers from “overpopulation, pollution, sprawl, corruption, etc.” architect Alvaro Arellano Farias responded to my informal survey.

And while cities around the globe are worrying about climate-change-induced sea rise, Mexico City can go them one better. Built upon ancient lakebed drained by the Spanish conquistadors, it is sinking at the rate of an inch a year.

As Arellano described the region’s complicated governance, with four boroughs inside Mexico City, 16 boroughs and a mayor in the Federal District, 41 more municipalities in greater Mexico City, 18 more in the larger urban valley — which is, itself, divided among a federal district and two states — I was attempting to make sure I understood this complexity. “Is there any one …?”

” … In charge?” He laughed ruefully. “No.”

They all compete for economic development. The industrial areas in the state of Hidalgo send their air pollution into Mexico City. But with its sewage disposal going to Hidalgo, the city gets its pollutant revenge.

Unlike Mexico City, France is a place many American planners eye with envy for its compact centers, efficient public transit and strict urban growth boundaries. Yet two Frenchmen, one a planner from the northern region and the other an Athenian architect now living in Paris, complained about greenfield development, the lack of cohesive regional governance “and the usual NIMBY attitudes,” as architect Panos Mantziaras put it.

Although French planning is much stricter and more nationalized than in the U.S., nevertheless, the Paris metro region has 500-some governments. France has 36,000 mayors, more than any other European country. But starting with the next election, a new national law has created a direct elected body for the urbanized area of French cities, said Lille-based planner Jean-Marie Ernecq.

Naturally, for such a regional body to be created, it had to be imposed from above.

Calcutta’s problems probably dwarf those of most other urban areas. “Calcutta is a large exploding metropolos tending to megalopolis,” noted Biplab Sengupta, a professor of planning and architecture in Kharagpur, India. He listed slums, traffic congestion and inadequate physical and social infrastructure.

Yet plenty of other cities grapple with those same problems — so many that a planner can get discouraged. As Mantziaras put it, “You create all kinds of tools to foretell the future — and you never can.”

Georges Prevelakis, a Greek urban planner and professor of geopolitics at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, described the idealistic goals of the Modernist movement, launched in the 1933 Charter of Athens. It was, he said, an idealism married to a lot of arrogance: “It has been an enormous disappointment. We failed. … Who speaks of trying to contain the growth in cities in Africa?”

Athens’ version of explosive population growth in the mid-20th century created many industrial areas, including land along the ancient Sacred Way, which ran between the city of Eleusis, now a suburban city called Elefsina, to the Acropolis in central Athens. Hellenic Open University Professor Lila Leontidou noted one result — that as runners traced the storied route from Marathon to the Acropolis during the 2004 Olympic Marathon, television viewers around the world saw mile upon mile of undistinguished suburban sprawl until the runners entered the center city.

Like Mexico City and Calcutta, or even Los Angeles or Philadelphia, Athens has urban issues that range far beyond its official municipal boundaries.

Mantziaras spoke with visible affection about growing up in Athens, about yearly birthday parties atop Filopappos hill. “I can close my eyes, and in my mind describe the skyline of the mountains,” he said.

But Athens is in crisis. And in today’s world, to regenerate an urban area one must deal with a city at the supra-urban scale, he said, remembering always that the future of the sprawling industrial and suburban areas is inextricably linked to the historic, tourist-filled center city.

What cities need, said Ernecq, is restored political debate. “We need to have a vision and real political leadership and civic participation.”

That, I’d add, is an important recipe, no matter where in the world you are.

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom. Disclosure: Her travel expenses to Athens were paid by the Johns Hopkins University International Urban Fellows Program.

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A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.

It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.”

But as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys sang decades before, “Time changes everything.”

“It faded away in Cornelius first,” says David Walters, an urban design professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has worked as a consultant for all three towns starting in the mid-1990s.

“The torch didn’t get well passed,” says Bill Coxe, transportation planner in Huntersville, a one-time mill-town and railroad hamlet that has grown from less than 3,000 people in 1988 to an estimated 39,000 in 2006. In both Huntersville and the next-door town of Cornelius, early enthusiasm for concentrating development into higher density nodes and for pushing more growth into the towns’ tiny, historic downtowns has faltered, victim of elections and the departures of some key planners, mayors and town managers. It hasn’t helped that a long-wished-for commuter rail line remains in funding limbo.

Today, Huntersville town commissioners are thinking of using a city-owned former cotton mill site–purchased years ago with an eye to a mixed-use development clustered at a planned commuter rail stop–to build a new police station. After all, the reasoning goes, it would save money to use land the town already owns. And anyway, conservatives on the town board had successfully scuttled a deal with a willing local developer. That happened back in the pre-recession days when developers could still get financing.

By 2010, only Davidson–an affluent college town of about 9,000, home to Davidson College–was hewing religiously to its strategy: channel most growth into already developed areas, protect the village feel of its historic downtown by requiring new development to fit in with the old and try to protect open land in its fast-disappearing rural surroundings.

In Huntersville, by contrast, “The cadre who believed in it moved on,” Coxe says. “Now you just have a bunch of suburbanites. And they just don’t get it.”

How, he wonders, do you embed into a town’s culture the precepts of smart planning, of building walkable town centers and channeling the growth into the areas where it makes sense to grow? After so much work by so many townspeople and elected leaders, how do you maintain that level of interest, engagement and understanding of the underlying principles? After all, most Americans still equate “density” with poverty.

With so many newcomers, and the generally transient nature of much of America, how many Huntersville and Cornelius residents were even aware of all those hours townspeople devoted 15 years ago? Walters worked with Cornelius, population about 13,000, on an area plan in 2003 and with Huntersville on a 2005 downtown plan. Public participation, he says, was “pretty disappointing.” And, he says, “More worryingly, there was not a whole lot of interest from public officials.”

In addition to the turnover and the influx of newcomers unaware of the past work, I suspect a piece of what has happened relates to starker political partisanship and more liberal-versus-conservative tensions in the past decade. Much about traditional neighborhood design might be considered conservative–such as its aim to hold down municipal services costs and its association with small-town values. But once “smart growth” came to be associated with environmentalism, it became a target for many conservatives suspicious of anything favored by liberals.

Yet the northernmost town of the three, Davidson, has held to its course. Walters credits many things, including its long-time mayor, Randy Kincaid, who only left office two years ago. “He got it,” Walters says. “He really didn’t need any convincing.” The town board, also, has seen little turnover and is generally well-educated about the complexities of growth and planning. And while the town’s top planners have changed, they’ve all been, in Walters’ words, “activist planners.”

And, as if happens, Davidson is a place enamored of itself. “Davidson’s own dynamics, its sense of specialness,” has, over the years, helped it work through difficulties and keep its eye on its goals, Walters says.

Coxe, the Huntersville planner, told me recently that he considers it a personal failure that Huntersville hasn’t held to its much-praised vision of a decade ago. I think he’s too hard on himself. Like a large number of Americans, many of Huntersville’s new townspeople have never lived anywhere but suburbia. That’s the way of life they know and love.

Walters, who has worked as a consultant on planning projects around the country, thinks the inability to stick to community plans is likely a continual problem, especially rapidly growing suburban areas such as Huntersville. He’s right. People move away. They forget. They elect new politicians. Time changes everything.

Even if 15 years ago hundreds of people devoted hundreds of hours to learn a better way to grow, Walters reminds us, you need “constant vigilance, constant education, constant programming of public events to keep the issues alive.”

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