Neal Peirce / Apr 22 2010
For Release Sunday, April 25, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
NEW YORK — What are the latest innovations — especially high tech “apps” — to make today’s cities succeed?
A host are being applied or waiting in the wings. They include new forms of electronic measurement to track and channel traffic, monitor potential crime sites, check on water quality, gauge the energy use in “smart grids,” and much more.
Will the new “apps” change the way cities look in a decade or two? Not on the surface, Wired Magazine senior editor Nicholas Thompson suggested at the eminent Regional Plan Association’s yearly assembly here last week, attended by 700 civic and business leaders from the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metro area.
But the technologies have the potential, Thompson and others said, to improve dramatically the convenience and safety of cities, plus cutting their costs.
Some already have good track records — for example electronic monitoring for location, time and frequency of criminal incidents. Pioneered in New York City, often combined with community policing, the geographic positioning is already undergirding improved law enforcement in cities nationwide.
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Neal Peirce / Apr 08 2010
For Release Sunday, April 11, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Could it be that African and Indian slum dwellers are more civically conscious than millions of Americans?
There’s an amazing “self-enumeration” effort under way continents away from us — and more about that in a moment.
But first: What’s happening with Americans and their decennial Census? Why did close to half of us ignore the Census Bureau’s first query?
We ought to be enthusiastic supporters. We live in one of the richest nations on earth. We enjoy many liberties, while benefitting from defenses against enemy attack and provision of public safety in our communities. Schools, roadways, environmental protection, Social Security — the list of services is almost endless.
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Neal Peirce / Apr 01 2010
For Release Sunday, April 4, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
RIO DE JANEIRO — The world is urbanizing in an irreversible flood — 50 percent of mankind lives in cities and their metro regions today; 70 percent are projected to be city dwellers by 2050. The shift raises critical issues of food and energy security, water supply, pandemics — but also dazzling new human opportunities.
Big news? You’d think so.
Late last month more than 13,000 people from 150 countries met in this fabled Brazilian city to debate the top issues at the World Urban Forum sponsored by the United Nations-Habitat.
On hand were mayors and national officials, non-profit organizations, major corporations, grassroots organizers, urban experts, and scores of reporters. The Obama administration sent a record-sized delegation of 53, including Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials. Five hundred Americans came on their own initiative.
But did U.S. wire services, or big-time newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post, cover the sessions? Or even mention the sessions were convening?
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Neal Peirce / Mar 19 2010
For Release Sunday, March 21, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
RIO DE JANEIRO — Rio, the city that stunned the world by capturing the 2016 Olympic Games, will witness a different kind of show this week: How the world’s metropolises sell the case that they’ve become key to the planet’s 21st century sustainability.
The event is the United Nations’ fifth biennial World Urban Forum, with well over 10,000 attendees expected. National governments are taking more interest: the Obama administration alone is sending a delegation of 51, including high State Department officials and Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan.
The cities’ big pitch: They’re now home to more than half the world’s population, headed to 70 percent by 2030. Cities consume 70 percent of global energy output, contribute 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But across much of the globe, they’re so swamped by rural in-migration that 1 billion people today – perhaps 2 billion by 2030 — live in urban slums, many without safe shelter, clean water, sanitation or productive work.
Cities are beehives of human activity; they generate the wealth of nations. But, UN-Habitat repeatedly warns, unless they can be made environmentally sustainable, unless they can provide basic services for their growing billions of inhabitants, prospects for the human race in this century are not bright.
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Neal Peirce / Mar 13 2010
For Release Sunday, March 14, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Should the Census count inmates as residents of the prisons where they’re held — often hundreds of miles from home? Or should they be tallied as citizens of the cities or counties they came from?
An agreement just reached between the U.S. Census Bureau and Rep. William Clay Jr. (Mo.), the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees census issues, may signal an historic shift in how the bureau reports prisoners to state and local governments. The accord creates at least a chance for prisoners’ overwhelmingly urban home areas to get a better break on legislative representation.
Counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated didn’t matter a lot when America had modest numbers of inmates, usually held in institutions near their homes.
But all that’s changed in the last three decades as America’s prisoner counts have soared from about 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million today. The combination of tough “law-and-order” politics and development of a vast “prison industrial complex” has led to confinement of predominantly city-based convicts in hundreds of new prisons in small town areas.
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Neal Peirce / Mar 07 2010
For Release Sunday, March 07, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Why in the world should Congress be considering a “Green Taxis Act”?
It’s because New York — plus Seattle, Boston, San Francisco and several other cities — want to switch their taxi fleets over to all-hybrid vehicles. But they’ve run into a big legal snag, and Congress may have to come to their rescue.
Switching cabs to hybrids promises some potentially stunning gains.
Take carbon emissions. In New York City, taxis alone account for 1 percent of total carbon emissions; switching them to hybrids would be the equivalent of taking 35,000 cars off the road.
Second, there’s gas consumption. A standard taxicab such as V-8 powered Ford Crown Victoria gets about 14 miles to a gallon of gas. But some hybrids, running on a combination of gasoline and electricity, get as much as 36. The hybrid advantage is especially high among taxis because they so often find themselves idling or creeping along in traffic, generating pollutants all the time. Hybrids just don’t need internal combustion energy in that situation.
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Neal Peirce / Feb 28 2010
For Release Sunday, February 28, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Nicknaming a federal grant-in-aid program TIGER may seem an anomaly: federal disbursements, normally loaded with rules, regulations and complexity, rarely get called bold or ferocious.
But the government’s historic knee-jerk preference for roads gets a nip–maybe a deep bite–in the Transportation Department’s just-announced $1.5 billion in grants to states and cities under the “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” program–or TIGER.
As Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explained to me last week: “TIGER is our opportunity to say to folks that we know you’re trying to do innovative and creative transportation things that never really fit our official formulas or program silos. This program is your opportunity to show you’re the innovators around the country.” Read More »
Neal Peirce / Feb 20 2010
For Release Sunday, February 21, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — The tea party crowd has it dead wrong. We don’t need smaller government, we need smarter government that can look ahead, saving us crises and billions of dollars in the process.
A prime example: this winter’s record-breaking snow storms that left the Nation’s Capital region, due to insufficient snow-clearing equipment, immobilized days on end, at humongous cost to citizens, governments and private businesses.
Appalled at the inefficiency, Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein came up with an intriguing idea: Why not require everyone in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia metro region to sign up for “snow insurance”?
Sure, it would cost something. Homeowners might have to pay $25 a year, businesses an average of $2,500. With the cash, local governments would guarantee no disruption of work or school after snowfall up to one foot, perhaps 36 hours maximum for a bigger storm. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Feb 13 2010
For Release Sunday, February 14, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — For America’s cities and regions, this seems the worst of times. But take a look at their partnership with the federal government. It’s a rapid turn for the better.
Check virtually any local budget and the dark side slams you in the face. Tax receipts are taking a deep dive while cities’ needs, from sheltering the homeless to employees’ health coverage to storm recovery costs, are on the upswing. With slow recovery in jobs and property values, mayors and county officials will have a torturously tough job well into this decade.
But check the Obama fiscal 2011 budget, together with companion moves the White House is making to coordinate federal assistance to cities and metro regions. There’s a silver lining to these “worst” times.
One example: the budget asks Congress to approve $1 billion for the new National Housing Trust Fund–a key way for communities to fill the yawning shortage of affordable housing for their lowest income residents. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Feb 07 2010
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.
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