William Stafford / Mar 07 2010
For Release Sunday March 07, 2010
Citiwire.net
Do you know the best survival strategies when an earthquake hits? Would you know how to prepare for a tornado, lean into hurricane-force winds, escape from a smoke-filled room? If fire hit your home, would you know how to use that fire extinguisher you bought years ago?
The earthquake in Haiti, followed in close order by major seismic eruptions in Chile, Okinawa and Taiwan, should be a wake up call for a re-examination of readiness across the globe. We Americans should learn to be a little less obsessed with terrorism, much more about preparedness. The reality is that an earthquake or monster storm or wildfire epidemic could spell disaster for many more of us.
There’s a lot cities can do about this. And I got my first clue sitting on a plane to Fukuoka, Japan, as part of my work organizing the annual international city study missions of the Trade Alliance and Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. The city, I discovered in my reading
materials, listed a disaster training center as a tourist attraction.
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William Stafford / Dec 18 2009
For Release Friday, December 18, 2009
Citiwire.net
Once upon a time in a lost world, urban regions worried about their neighbors and occasionally other cities around the nation. In today’s interconnected web of a global economy, where talent, capital and ideas are on the move like professional soccer players, an urban region like the greater Seattle area doesn’t just look to Portland, Ore., or even San Francisco. Instead, we must cast a global eye.
In 2008, the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) and Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle developed the first‑ever International Regions Benchmarking Consortium. It’s a network of sophisticated city‑centered metropolitan regions that find it mutually beneficial to compare and learn from each other through economic and social data statistics and in‑depth research into specific issues of common interest. They range from Fukuoka in Asia to Helsinki in Europe to Melbourne “down under.” Others include Barcelona, Dublin, Munich, Stockholm, Vancouver and Daejeon, South Korea. Seattle of course is included, and Microsoft and Boeing each provided substantial funding to launch the effort. Read More »
William Stafford / Jun 11 2009
For Release Thursday, June 11, 2009
Citiwire.net
For 17 years I’ve been privileged to organize Seattle region delegations of dozens of business and civic leaders on study missions to citistates around the world.
Such heavyweight global regions as Shanghai, Munich, Dublin, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Melbourne, London, Singapore, and most recently Abu Dhabi and Dubai, have all been targets of our missions. The effort, still unique among U.S. regions, has been led and coordinated by my organization, the Trade Development of Great Seattle, an affiliate of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
What each visit has underscored for us is how central cities’ hopes, fortunes, and place in the world are tied to those of the entire metro regions around them.
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William Stafford / Apr 30 2009
For Release Sunday, May 3, 2009
Citiwire.net
America’s relations with the Islamic world, and the Arabian area specifically, are one of the most important in our nation’s future. While foreign policy is the responsibility of national governments, relationship building actually falls to people and urban regions who find themselves at the forefront of building these relations. The Greater Seattle region has begun building a friendship bridge to the Middle East.
We–the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle and the Greater Seattle Chamber–have been mounting yearly International Study Missions of civic and business leaders of our citistate for many years. Recently we organized an annual International Study Mission program to Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Our goal, as always: to study an urban region overseas to learn about how it competes in a global economy. The trips are a “traveling university,” with the student body encompassing the civic leadership of the Greater Seattle region.
The visit to the UAE was suggested by Boeing, with a goal of enhancing our leaders’ understanding of that part of the world and strengthening relations with it. We wanted to study the UAE’s successes and challenges, as well as to learn more about each other. Our delegation found the people of these two emirates to be warm and friendly and as interested in us as we were in them. Read More »