Let’s take a trip back to 1985, perhaps the peak of anti-urbanism in this nation’s history. Suburbanization was in full force across the landscape. As Dolores Hayden has noted, “by 1980 one out of seven American workers earned a living building, selling, repairing, insuring, driving or servicing vehicles and highways.” Meanwhile, our cities were dealing with the painful legacy of failed urban renewal projects, trying to figure out what to do with acres and acres of bulldozed sites. The Reagan Administration was cutting funding from Community Development Block Grants, mass transit, and other urban programs. And Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, South Carolina wrote a letter to Jaquelin Robertson, Dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, to propose that they collaborate on a forum to educate mayors about architecture, design, and planning.

Mayor Riley predicted a great revival of American cities, but asked “What kind of cities are being rebuilt?” He proposed that by creating “a program aimed at increasing the mayors sophistication and interest in urban design, we could have a substantial impact on the quality and development of American cities.”

One year later, they had teamed up with Adele Chatfield-Taylor at the National Endowment for the Arts and the first Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) was held in Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The idea was at the same time both simple and ambitious. Just as Jefferson was both a politician and a designer, contemporary mayors have enormous influence over the physical design and shape of their cities. But they often lack training in how to use the powerful tools at their disposal. So why don’t we help them better understand how to use this authority?

“I was anxious about what we were doing,” Mayor Riley recalled at a gala celebration in Chicago last week to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Mayors Institute. “But half-way throught the afternoon of the first session, the Mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania said ‘stop — I need to call my office because I just realized that we’re doing something wrong and please don’t do anything until I come back.’ He ran out and found a phone in Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda. That’s when I knew that we had created something of enormous value, that changed our mayors and changed our country.”

Twenty five years later, this idea has powered 50 national conferences and many more regional institutes. Over 600 designers and more than 850 mayors have participated in these forums, and it’s clear that those folks in Charlottesville were onto something very powerful indeed.

The Institutes follow a common agenda. Instead of asking public officials to show off their successes, the mayors (there are five to eight at each session) bring a problem. They present a case study to a team of planners, urban designers, landscape architects, preservationists and fellow mayors about something they are struggling with back home. How to revitalize a downtown shopping district. Creating attractive gateways to a community. Connecting green spaces to build a park system. Locating a convention center or a sports arena. Preserving an historic neighborhood. Establishing design guidelines. Parking. Housing. Retail. The list goes on. Every city is dealing with these issues, and can learn from the experience of other communities.

Around a large table, the mayors and resource team members discuss the projects and how they would approach them. While the mayors get excellent advice on their specific case studies from the resource team, the real goal of the Institute has always been to educate the mayors, to make them better consumers and stronger advocates for their communities.

At the gala celebration last week, the legacy of the Mayors Institute on City Design was in full force. In the ornate Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Hilton (a room to make Louis XIV envious), Mayors Nutter of Philadelphia, Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, and Daley of Chicago and many others talked about the importance of the MICD vision for them in their communities. NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman described projects that came out of the institute sessions. Ron Bogle from the American Architectural Foundation, which organizes the forums, discussed the achievements of MICD directors. On the second day, federal officials heard from mayors and designers about the resources and partnerships that they need to build sustainable communities in the 21st century. Marilyn Taylor, Dean of Penn Design, delivered a particularly strong message about the kinds of investments and partnerships that communities are looking for from their federal government.

Perhaps the strongest legacy of the Institute is how conventional its message has become over the past 25 years. Mayors understand the attractiveness of mixed use communities and 24/7 neighborhoods. They understand the benefits of master planning, historic preservation, arts districts, design guidelines, new urbanism, smart growth, sustainability and many more buzzwords. As a regional planner, I found myself wishing that we had made even a fraction of this progress on the need for integrated infrastructure systems and capital investments, but hopefully that’s yet to come.

As the sessions wound down in Chicago, it was thrilling to take a step back and think about what Mayor Riley’s epistle has achieved over the past 25 years, and its place in planning history. I’d argue that it should be taught in our public schools, just as Daniel Burnham’s plan for Chicago was part of the curriculum in public schools for many decades. After all, not since Jane Jacobs wrote a book about her experiences in Greenwich Village has a document had such a profound – and beneficial – impact on American cities.

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As we have witnessed from recent debates in our nation’s capital, high speed rail and multi-year surface transportation programs are hard to plan, finance and build. They require long-term commitments from federal, state and local partners, and moreover, they oblige elected leaders to look beyond short-term political calculations.

Even the best projects can fall victim to these threats — witness recent developments in the New York/New Jersey region. A budget-cutting, shake-up-the-establishment politician, New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie, has discovered that he has no money for filling potholes, and suddenly a crucial strategic investment for the state’s long term economic growth seems less important than a promise not to raise gas taxes.

The most important industry in the Garden State is probably defined as “commuting to New York City.” About a quarter of a million New Jerseyans commute every day across the Hudson River by car, bus, commuter rail or subway. They bring home a disproportionate share of income, pay large income and property taxes, and create more jobs back home.

NJ Transit’s ridership has grown at extraordinary rates over the past 30 years — from 8 million passengers in 1980 to almost 45 million in 2009. This exponential increase in accessibility drove growth in pharmaceutical companies, financial industries and business services, all of which depend on New Jersey’s joined-at-the-hip connections to New York City. And as anyone who has endured the cattle call of loading a 5 p.m. train at New York Penn Station or stood the entire ride from Newark to New Brunswick can tell you, there isn’t much free capacity in the existing system to keep adding those commuters and jobs unless there are more trains.

Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) would build two new rail tracks under the Hudson River, doubling the capacity of NJ Transit to move commuters into and out of Manhattan and its 2 million jobs. It alleviates the worst bottleneck on the entire Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor. It will double the number of New Jersey residents within a 50-minute commute to Manhattan, from about 750,000 to 1.5 million, where jobs pay, on average, 60 percent more. It will increase the Gross Regional Product by $660 million a year, split evenly on both sides of the Hudson River. And the Regional Plan Association’s research estimates that building ARC will increase the value of New Jersey residences close to train stations by more than $18 billion over 8 years and eventually generate $375 million in additional property tax revenues — every year.

Only one-third of the funding for the project — or $2.7 billion — is coming from the State of New Jersey. In addition the project has committed funds of $3 billion from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and $3 billion from the federal government — the largest commitment of federal funds for a transit project ever.

Three weeks ago, Gov. Christie abruptly halted work on ARC on the $8.7 billion commuter rail tunnel. Why would he jeopardize such a project with such enormous benefits to the State and the funding to go with it?

One answer may be that the governor is doing everything he can to make sure this doesn’t become another ill-fated “Big Dig” — the Boston artery tunnel whose tab ballooned from $2.8 billion in 1985 to $14.6 billion by 2006. However, early bids for the project have been coming in below budget, so there doesn’t seem to be much to this suggestion. The less optimistic viewpoint is that the delay is a first step to killing or indefinitely delaying the project and switching the state’s funds to its general transportation budget, which is a mess.

Gov. Christie is joined by half a dozen states with governors and legislatures who over 10 years spent more than they collected. New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund receives about $900 million a year in gas taxes and other sources, but spends about $1.4 billion each year on capital projects. The gap was filled by borrowing — a familiar story.

Unfortunately, the bill is now due. Starting next summer, every dollar collected in gas tax revenues for the next 30 years will go to paying off bonds that have already been spent. Unless hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenues or significant cost reductions can be identified, the state’s capital spending on other transportation projects (street and bridge repairs, highway upgrades, other transit investments, etc.) will drop dramatically.

The error with this thinking is that while ARC may be a big expensive project, it is also an excellent one. In the short term, building the new tunnel will provide new construction jobs. In the mid-term, companies and workers will continue locating in the Garden State, home construction will pick up, and the value of real estate will rise. And in the long term, New Jersey will be more connected to New York City and the expanding global economy. And yet, rumors from the corridors of the Statehouse suggest that ARC is probably dead, a victim of budget woes and an inability to prioritize long-term investments in a short-term political environment.

Which brings us back to wondering — if perhaps the best-planned transit investment in the nation can be dropped so quickly and painlessly, how are we going to get any of these other transit investments done? If they take a decade or more to plan, finance and construct, but can be undone in a couple of weeks, how do we move ahead on any of the long-term plans our nation needs to make to become more competitive and sustainable? Civic groups and transit advocates are fighting to save this project, but the response from Trenton has been silence — the political equivalent of a long yawn. Let’s hope that New Jersey finds a way to keep ARC on track, and show the country how to move forward, not back.

Tom Wright is Executive Director of the Regional Plan Association.

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How does a metropolitan region project – and then plan – for its future? How was it done in the 20th century? And what’s new for the 21st?

I have a simple answer. For 20th, the word was infrastructure. For the 21st, it needs to be innovation.

That’s why the Regional Plan Association, where I work, decided to focus its 20th Annual Regional Assembly this month on new technologies that are radically more efficient, and promise significant cost-savings for cash-starved regional systems.

Our historic concentration, including three landmark regional plans – in 1929, 1969 and 1996 – focused on hard infrastructure such as transit lines, electricity, water supply, and especially early in the century, on accommodating automobiles. (Our 1929 document, for example, proposed 2,500 miles of limited access highways and included a plan for Radburn, N.J., entitled “New Town for the Motor Age.”) Later we took a different tack, urging as early as 1969 reserving several Manhattan streets for pedestrians and transit, and in 1996 a four-borough Second Avenue Subway.

But this month, for our audience of 800 regional business and civic leaders assembled at the Waldorf-Astoria, we struck a different note – presaging, I’d venture to guess, RPA’s next regional plan . Namely, that it will be a Smart Region plan, focused strongly on technology and innovation. Because, as my colleague Jeff Zupan likes to say, our job is to promote ideas “whose time has not yet come.” And to get really serious, as the nation must, about doing more with fewer dollars.

An example: we provided an audience for Zipcar – not because it’s an easy way to rent a car off the street, but because we know the capital cost of providing structured parking is killing great mixed-use, transit-accessible development projects that would satisfy market demand and add to property tax rolls from Newark to Bridgeport. ZipCar says that every parking space for one of its cars eliminates the need for about 14 other conventional parking spaces. That means developers could reduce their auto-related capital costs by 93 percent- a boon for TOD.

Congestion pricing is a clear winner for cities, as London, Stockholm and Singapore have demonstrated (and we still hope to do in New York). But beyond using the laws of supply and demand to manage city streets, technology provides us with many options for addressing traffic congestion. The taxi fleets of Stockholm, New York and others cities are now equipped with GPS monitors. In addition to exposing systematic overcharging by a few rotten cabbies, these mobile monitors provide instant feedback on traffic flows and capacity. Programmers at IBM are going beyond real-time analysis to create models that will predict traffic congestion before it happens. Soon stop lights will be connected to central databases that can calibrate the signals to ease traffic before it builds up.

The smart grid is another potentially transformative innovation, creating a two-way electrical supply system that monitors the flows and demands on energy to prioritize uses and needs and reduce overall power demand (and, by extension, carbon emissions). And electric vehicles are essentially batteries on wheels, charging up during the night (when demand is lowest) and providing mobile sources of supply that can be drawn down during peak periods. Suddenly, metropolitan areas become the country’s most efficient and interconnected energy users, gaining incredible competitive advantages. Power supply company NRG is in the process of making Houston the nation’s first city to have full electric vehicle recharging capability. Yes, Houston!

And we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the capabilities of GIS. As data sets become more robust, they will also become smarter – learning to connect with other systems and evolve.

Just as these technologies are transformative, they are also picking up speed. Information moves quickly through crowds, and we’re seeing transit authorities and public agencies start to open up their data with wonderful results. Boston’s MBTA began making real-time data feeds available for five bus lines last November. Within an hour, a programmer had created an application on Google which showed the real-time location of buses on those lines. In two days there was a new web page which tracked the movement of the buses. In a week, a desktop application provided countdown information for a rider’s specific stop. In a month, the Centre Street Station in Jamaica Plan had an LED sign that counted down to the next bus’ arrival. In five weeks, all this data was integrated on apps for the iPhone and Android. In seven weeks the data could be delivered to any phone. Finally, two months after the data was made available, a texting service would send any mobile phone real-time data on the arrival of the next bus at any station.

Who knows precisely where these new technologies and capabilities will lead us? But that’s where planning comes in — to try to sort through the priorities and possibilities, and then identify where these exciting new developments can and should take us our cities and regions in the future. There will always be new capital projects we need to focus on – high speed rail for the Northeast Corridor, for example, or seamless transit connections to New York’s airports. But here’s a bet that the next comprehensive regional plans – for New York and every other major metro – will be focusing much less on new highways and subways, and much more on innovation, technology, apps and creativity. It’s going to be a wild ride!