Hydrofracking’s vast grid of pipelines is having an enormous impact on the rural Northeastern landscape — the topic of my prior two columns in this Citiwire series. But what’s the impact on local economies, jobs and real estate?

The experience of slow, bumper-to-bumper traffic entering the historic Bradford County (Pa.) seat of Towanda, could discourage any resident or visitor. One local businessman reported that his daily commute escalated from 20 to 45 minutes. From a window table at a Main Street café in Towanda, one observes the non-stop freight train quantity of huge, rumbling trucks. One wonders what the vibrations must be doing to structures along all routes, from 100-year-old Main Street buildings to older roadside churches.

One shopkeeper reported the loss of most local customers unwilling to face downtown traffic. She gained onetime customers from the families visiting gas workers.

Experienced engineers, technicians, geologists, surveyors and drill rig operators come from elsewhere. Training programs exist in upstate New York but it will be years before locals in either Pennsylvania or New York will be qualified. Passing the drug test for applicants is often a problem. The high local employment — Bradford has only a 6 percent unemployment rate — is mostly the ancillary businesses created by the gas companies, such as restaurants, hotels, supply companies and some truckers.

The effect on real estate is changing every locale. The tourism economy many of these localities depend on is threatened. Few available rooms are left and one new hotel being built in Towanda already has most of its rooms reserved by gas companies. Tourists support local arts companies and programs, along with all kinds of festivals. Hunters, fishermen, kyackers, hikers and others are asking unanswerable questions or already going elsewhere.

Homes are now hard to sell, if not valueless, and farms are valued based on whether a well is on site or nearby. Banks are crying foul over their mortgagees who have signed leases without seeking permission, in effect changing the use of the mortgaged land. Those banks resist new mortgages for property with gas leases.

“Residential mortgages prohibit borrowers from committing waste, damage or destruction or causing substantial change to the mortgaged property or allowing a third party to do so,” Elizabeth N. Radow wrote in the New York State Bar Association Journal last Nov/Dec. Radow’s alarming article raises questions about owner’s potential liability and uninsurable property damage not raised elsewhere.

Susquehanna and Bradford are popular retirement and summer locations for New Yorkers and Philadelphians, not unlike many second-home communities in New York as well. Local property owners are divided over drilling but real estate brokers say the second-home market has effectively ended. No one will buy because of uncertainty — either drill sites are already nearby or might be created.

No one has begun to measure increased local health and safety costs and strained emergency services due to vehicular accidents. There are eight policemen in all of Susquehanna County. Volunteer fire departments are overwhelmed by the 911 calls. They are easily awakened at 2 a.m. for gas truck accidents. Local hospital services are over-stretched. Sometimes the vibrations and rumbling is so loud from wells sites not even close by that windows rattle and sleep is disturbed. Truck spills are not uncommon. Accidents do happen and no amount of stiff regulation will eliminate irresponsible rogue operators.

What has for generations attracted people to the area has been the character of the rural farm country that is now being industrialized. If you have historic sites that are difficult to visit and historic landscapes now being scarred, many Pennsylvanians wonder what will they have left. The support of visitors and second homeowners is critical for farmers’ markets, Main Street stores and varied local economic activity.

The potential harmful consequences are so enormous and so uncertain, one must ask — is this new method of mining energy truly worth the price that’s being paid for it?

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, 2010, Nation Books.

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There’s much more to be said about hydrofracking, the topic of my Citiwire column last week which generated quite a bit of comment.

Consider, for example, the pipelines.

Hydrofracking involves injecting clean water, sand and an undisclosed combination of chemicals into the shale to free the gas from vast lateral reserves that are then brought to the surface. Each well site — known as as a pad — contains multiple wells on three to four acres of compacted gravel. The sites are spaced maybe 40 acres apart and connected by pipelines crisscrossing the land.

In recent years, local fights occurred in many farm areas when windmills started to fill the landscape, kill birds and emit noise heard at great distances. People worried about the impact on the land of the pipeline grid required to distribute the generated energy. In the case of gas, the grid connection is a more complex piping system, indeed one so vast that it is difficult at this point to fully comprehend how many pipelines and multiple compressors will be required as wells proliferate, or how many farms, wetlands, woodlands and mountain tops they will cross. Gas makes windmills look benign in the impact on the land.

“To connect to the larger, interstate pipelines” companies are moving forward “on what is expected to be thousands of miles of smaller pipelines,” Marc Levy of the Associated Press wrote in August. And that doesn’t include a possible network of water pipelines called for to avoid the current endless truck trips required to deliver water.

Pipelines require wide cleared swaths through forests, mountain tops, farm fields and wetlands. The sediment runoff into streams and rivers understandably concerns environmentalists, noting that rising riverbeds from increased sediment accumulation increases flood opportunities. After Hurricane Irene, northeastern Pennsylvania, where I visited, was heavily flooded.

Levy also reported that the EPA raised environmental concerns about a new interstate pipeline project, the MARC-I, which is proposed by a Kansas City company to be constructed in northern Pennsylvania’s rural Endless Mountains region. The EPA noted that the line, which would travel into New York, would pose the threat of pollution to 111 sensitive streams and water bodies and split 39 miles of undeveloped forest and farm land in an area that supports a robust ecosystem, high quality of life and recreation. Nevertheless, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found “no significant impact” and approved the project, thus giving the company the power of eminent domain to confiscate private property for the pipeline.

Gas needs to be compressed at multiple points along a route to flow through a pipeline. Compressor stations are required at close intervals. Compressors clean the gas of impurities before it is piped into peoples’ homes down the line. The noise from these compressors can be deafening.

Mountain and hilltops seem to be the preferred sites for drill pads and holding areas. They are out of sight, for one thing, and avoid the run-off into creeks and streams that has been a problem. No one sees them until the burning off of the methane (mostly at night), although some companies claim to be recapturing the methane that should be required. If methane were to be recaptured, a separate pipeline would be needed — or yet more truck trips would be required.

Once windmills are created, that’s it. They are there, complete. The popular belief is that once the well is functioning, all the rigs and other equipment goes away. But gas wells often need refracking as the volume of captured gas diminishes from a well. Then of course, the drill rigs return with all that comes with them.

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, 2010, Nation Books.

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In 1969, Walter Cronkite, in one of his nightly newscasts, called Chattanooga “the dirtiest city in America.” The pollution was so thick that drivers needed headlights to see through the fog, men took two white shirts to work for morning and afternoon, and respiratory deaths were 20 percent higher than national average. Today, Chattanooga is one of the cleanest cities; its success on a number of fronts has raised concern of being too successful.

The city is indeed blessed with the spectacular Tennessee River snaking through it, a setting surrounded by small mountains and woodlands filled with recreational attractions. The 1970 Clean Air Act forced the issue of pollution and by 1972 clean air standards were met. In the meantime, the city was working on big plans for change.

“We were the smart ones,” Mayor Ron Littlefield, a professional planner, told a meeting with the Citistates Group last week. “The city produced a detailed plan, colorful documents and maps, gathered lots of figures and then delivered them to the people. We figured they would recognize our genius and run with it.”

Well, it didn’t happen that way. The plans fell flat, met unanticipated resistance and went nowhere. With a complete reversal of strategy, Littlefield explains, “We discovered that if we brought all the factions to the table first and engaged them in drawing up the plans, they were more likely to support the implementation. It doesn’t stop criticism but it does build the support you need to get things done.”

With the help of the Partners for Livable Communities, in 1983, a cross-section of civic leaders toured European and American cities, returning home with a new set of regeneration ideas. Then, in 1984, with funding from the local Lyndhurst Foundation, the citizen-based Chattanooga Venture process was established to initiate a community-wide visioning process from which a series of goals and projects would emerge. It took 52 meetings in 26 weeks attended by 3,000 people — but a plan did emerge.

A longstanding aquarium idea grew from a “little sideshow on the river” into a huge, privately funded $45 million defining project and was quite controversial. “The fish tank on the river,” the critics called it. Prevailing views identify the aquarium as the catalyst for dozens of good things adding up to downtown renewal.

The process revealed ideas planners hadn’t thought of and could be done quickly. There was a strong call for a Family Violence and Rape Crisis Center, a “real surprise,” Littlefield reports. “Quality of life is about more than the pretty things. We didn’t know we had a battered women problem.”

Another surprise was a strong push to save the lavish 1921 Tivoli Theater, once known as “the jewel of the South” and centrally located on Broad Street, downtown’s spine. It closed in 1961. The city purchased it, slapped on a coat of paint and reopened it in 1963. But the visioning process revealed a strong desire for a full restoration of its elaborate interior notable murals and golden cherub glory. After a $7.5 million restoration, the Tivoli reopened in 1988 and like in many of its counterparts in American downtowns again serves as a centerpiece.

Many distinctive revitalizing projects followed. A free electric bus running the full length of Broad Street carries a million passengers a year. This turned into a veritable economic development project: a new company was formed in Chattanooga, Advanced Vehicle System (AVC), to manufacture the buses and is now one of three such companies in the country.

The 100-year Walnut Street Bridge over the Tennessee River, scheduled for demolition, was restored as a pedestrian and biking passage, connecting downtown to the North Shore neighborhood so effectively that the North Shore experienced an organic rebirth. A waterfront highway was replaced with Riverpark, replete with a variety of recreational uses.

The appealing projects are many — an impressive Hunter Museum of American art and an adjacent arts district, scattered loft conversions, a restored inner city school serving as a very successful school for arts and sciences, and more. But most interesting perhaps is that Chattanooga is still very much an industrial city with many large manufacturing companies, most recently joined by Volkswagen. This “family wages” industrial base, Littlefield notes, remains the heart of the city’s economy.

As good as it all sounds, Chattanooga’s downtown is missing the connective granular city that so many American cities lost during the height of bulldozer urban renewal. An overabundance of parking lots and garages, curb cut drive-in eateries and unfortunate replacement buildings interrupt the flow of what could be a positive pedestrian experience. Residential conversions are scattered — and so far, scarce. One million square feet of empty office space remains a challenge. The small local businesses that give a place character lack visibility. Shop windows offer nothing to stop and look at. The vibrancy of a bustling urban place remains to evolve.
Still, it’s hard to believe the Chattanoogians’ “can do” spirit won’t in time uncover new ideas to make the city center — and, with luck, the entire Chattanooga region — a place of distinction.

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,2010, Nation Books.

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Is natural gas the clean energy source it has been successfully marketed to be? My judgment? No. It may burn more cleanly than other fossil fuels. But the process to create the wells and then to transport the gas — even before and after the actual hydrofracking process — is so destructive of the natural and built environment that it is a wonder anyone can call it clean.

Just visit  Pennsylvania, relatively new to the gas exploration industry that really started ramping up operations two years ago. In this one state, 3,000 wells have been drilled. Thousands more are planned. And already, enormous change has occurred.

Pennsylvania is not the only state to experience intense gas exploration. But it is a popular target because of its location on top of the Marcellus Shale rock formation that also fans out under New York, West Virginia and Ohio. A map of existing and proposed drill sites makes Pennsylvania look like the victim of chicken pox. Add to that the requisite pipelines either in construction or yet to be and it is difficult to imagine any community large or small escaping the impact.

A recent visit to Bradford and Susquehanna Counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, currently a prime drilling target, revealed very troubling impacts that have received little attention so far. On scenic farm roads that never before bordered anything but farms — not even a gas station — industrial sites are sprouting left and right, representing the different segments of the gas production process — compressors, storage tanks, staging sites, maintenance operations and more.

Consider for example the situation in and near the towns of Wyalusing and Montrose. Both are small, historic towns, not quite fitting the description of ‘sleepy’ but, then again, not home to intense activity either. The library in Montrose is packed daily with gas company researchers poring over land deeds. The small hotel in Wyalusing is mostly filled with gas workers or deal makers. The coffee shop conversation on this short, storybook Main Street is filled with complaints about endless midnight truck traffic and news of residents trying to sell or move.

The road between these towns is a bucolic, windy, two-lane farm road. About midway is a staging area for trucks each carrying 50,000 lbs of sand. I observed roughly 30 trucks waiting to deliver to a nearby drill site under construction. The truckers report that each load had been trucked 80 miles from Wellesville, N.Y. One driver noted, that this typical site — a drill pad with six well holes — takes 480 million pounds of sand! At 50,000 pounds per truck driven 80 miles one-way — you do the math. Then calculate diesel fuel burned, exhaust released, road wear caused for that 80 mile trip for one pad of six wells. How could this be defined as clean energy? That doesn’t even begin to touch the controversy of the impact on global warming of the leaked methane during the drilling process.

The enormous consumption of fresh water for both site creation and the drilling process is alarming environmentalists. Construction of a single gas well requires upward of one million gallons of water. That is for just a single gas well. In that same well, the fracking procedure requires upward of five million gallons of water.

The Susquehanna River Basin Commission overseas the industry’s water usage, limiting consumption according to availability and suspending withdrawals when necessary. Some 40 withdrawals were suspended last summer due to low water levels, Andrew Maykuth reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The SRBC,” he reported, estimates “that the industry will need about 30 million gallons a day.” That is a demand equivalent to that of a nuclear reactor.

At this point, no one can honestly say how many wells will cover Pennsylvania or New York. When asked what the impacts are on the area, one local resident laughed. “It is still new for us,” he said. “We’re still learning.”

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,2010, Nation Books.

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Americans are now beginning to realize that their world is not the same, that fundamental change is underway. Incomes have dropped for ten years; the unemployment rate, while slightly lower right now, is persistently high. Looking to the future, Americans know there will no quick return to normalcy. Support for bipartisan leadership is actually a cry for a new direction that will provide long term real changes and not more incremental quick fixes and policy spins that do not work.

Why this change in fortunes and what can we do about it? We are caught in the wave of a fundamental transition greater than any period in recent memory, a transition that will redefine how we think and act going forward. The promise of a “flat world” of cheaper products so we can consume more and find interesting places that we can visit has resulted in a migration of jobs from the US to abroad and, according to the World Bank, the largest movement of peoples (country to city) in recorded history.

The world is not as flat as we envisioned. Instead the gateways to this global world, the places where international airports, ports, finance, marketing and distribution centers converge, are the attractors of growth. New logistic supply megaregions, involving multiple states and portions of large states such as Texas and California, have been identified by the public policy group, America 2050. More disturbing, America 2050 noted, the rest of the country is losing population and economic growth to the rapidly growing states and regions, creating huge inequities in the U.S. Abroad, particularly in the developing world, these mega-global gateway regions are logistic production centers. People outside these global megaregions are falling behind.

The information revolution is now coupled with the logistic revolution, with its massive container ships, double–stacked trains and barcoded distribution driven distribution centers, to redefine how the world market works. A semi-truck sized container costs $600 to transport from China to Los Angeles, making our competitors equivalent to our neighbor. Interestingly, moving the same or equivalent amount of goods from Los Angeles to Houston costs $1,400 due to the inefficiencies, primarily in the urban regions, of our land system. The trade policies of the world’s countries and these new logistical innovations are creating a new competitive reality that we never envisioned. The international sector growth from 8 percent to almost 40 percent in the last 20 years means that the U.S.A. is no longer an island where we can do what we want without implications.

The total cost — of doing business, public and private lifecycle costs over time — counts significantly. When we take public and private actions, they will affect our international competitive position. Competitors like China do not make a distinction between public and private expenditures; they make investments that are needed to run their society so they can produce and export with an eye to export more. Collective choice goods, such as transportation systems and education, are all part of the costs that go into producing and selling and they all contribute to growth in the economy.

Unfortunately, U.S. decision-making does not look at cost this way. What is more important, we do not consider long-term costs. If we do not have up-to-date logistics systems in place to move our goods in these logistics megaregions, and if we do not have higher speed rail in place to move workers (particularly skilled workers) over the longer distances involved, we disadvantage ourselves. Meanwhile our competitors have or are developing this infrastructure.

Another cost is how we put ourselves together to deal with these collective choice issues. Infrastructure, energy, education, environment, health require all sectors to work together differently and will require fiscal resources that our debt-laden governments at all levels cannot provide if they are looking seriously at lifecycle costs. If we do not address these issues, which are the foundations for competitiveness, we fall further behind.

Bringing people and sectors together happens when collective interests are furthered by working together and the results of this cooperation can be realized. This has happened historically in this country at the grassroots level in communities. Because of the complexity that has evolved through globalization, this form of collaboration will need to evolve beyond the community to the region and even to the megaregion. Critics will say that it won’t happen. But we are now beginning to see that leaders are developing strategies to bring the sectors together to address their collective choice issues.

In the Northeast Megaregion from Boston to Washington, DC, the Regional Plan Association, a business led organization, is mobilizing support for the development of a high speed rail system in the Northeast Corridor to move skilled labor from one metro region to another and to facilitate business transactions in the megaregion. The strategy captures labor and business mobility and land use benefits to finance the system. Federal financial instruments and state cooperation will accelerate the evolution of the system, but the leadership is coming from within.

In the Southern California Megaregion, governmental leadership from the Southern California Association of Governments developed a new logistics corridor to move goods from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach through the region, removing blockages and lawsuits that were threatening the development of the ports. The key to the strategy was the business and public agreement on a container fee that was based on the benefits the project developed and was implemented by a new institution–the Alameda Corridor Authority. A federal loan accelerated the development of the project but the leadership came from within.

In the Northwest megaregion, the recession of the 90′s led the political leadership to capitalize on the region’s major locational advantage of being a global trading center to form the Greater Seattle Trade Alliance as an alliance of business, government and educational interests. The alliance developed strategies that led to the development of the FAST Corridor (Freight Action Strategy for Seattle-Tacoma) which will facilitate the movement of containers out of the ports. Additionally the Alliance created a public and private marketing strategy for the region that accelerates its growth. Again federal assistance is important to the regional strategy but the leadership is local.

Examples abound throughout the country of new regional educational, health, environmental and infrastructure partnerships to address these collective choice issues, aiming to find new lower cost solutions and develop new resources. Leaders throughout the country understand that we need to roll up our sleeves and, with new rules of the game for our organizations, work differently to address the issues we face in a way that deals realistically with our cost and our competitiveness issue.

Mark Pisano served for many years as Executive of the Southern California Association of Governments, with headquarters in Los Angeles. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Bedrosian Center for Governance at the University of Southern California.

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2011 saw Oregon once again daring to be the first bird off the wire on an audacious policy agenda. Governor John Kitzhaber, having been governor from 1995 to 2003, won the office again in 2010. What he told seasoned politicos was that he wasn’t running just to be governor again — “been there, done that.” But if elected again, he would put all his chips down on doing something bold, with the power to endure.

Kitzhaber’s bold maneuver: a proposal to overhaul the entire system of education — from toddlers to twenty-somethings, now called Oregon Learns.

In the 2011 session of the legislature he won a down payment on the promise — a liberalization of the chartered school law, a better welcome for on-line schools, and an official board. It’s called the Oregon Education Investment Board, intended from its enactment forward control how money is appropriated to get better education results.

Sounds tame enough. But the governor’s agenda is actually aimed at radical change in the system. For the first time (anywhere, not just in Oregon), the system of education would find its financial pivot point on results. The entire budgeting process would be re-engineered around outcomes rather than inputs.

Old measures such as ‘seat time’ in K-12 and the credits-collecting pattern in higher education would yield to real-world measures of proficiency — what knowledge and skills young people actually develop. Students who can move more rapidly would get a green light to speed up. Students needing more time could pace themselves without today’s stigmatic penalties. Today there are bright lines between pre-K, K-12 and college. Under the governor’s proposal, the experience for students would begin to be seamless.

The state would work to redefine what success means for college-going. That it’s not just going for a conventional baccalaureate degree, but aiming for whatever fits a student’s aptitude and passion, that also lines up with what the economy is rewarding in the jobs market. Community colleges, the system’s most adaptive institutions, would move from the edges of relevance to the center of attention.

Greg Hamann, president of Linn-Benton Community College, says he’d welcome a system oriented to measurable results. He likens the present system to a time-and-materials contract for building a house. “If you get paid by how many materials you use, you’re going to order a lot of 2×4 pieces of lumber,” he said. Worse yet, he added, “if you can deliver the results more efficiently, as providers, we get less reward. That’s the system we have today.”

This shift is revolutionary in a nation now caught up in “college ready” frenzy, without defining what that means.

Further, the governor would recognize, like no other state has, the primacy of the role of teachers, and an overdue welcoming of innovation — opening the system to people willing to try new and different means of achieving education goals.

Gov. Kitzhaber calls this the 40/40/20 program. Translated, this means by 2025, 40 percent of Oregonians will have one or more college degrees, another 40 percent at least a certificate or associates degree from a community college, and the remaining 20 at least graduating from high school. Each target is a stretch. But each is also a realistic target.

This sort of creative audacity is almost a trademark of Oregon politics. This past fall I put the question directly to Barbara Roberts, who was governor of Oregon just prior to Kitzhaber’s first term: “Is there something in this state’s ‘DNA’ that enables it to be first at so many daring policy initiatives?” “Absolutely,” she shot back. “This is our tradition, and most people have forgotten all the things we did first.”

Then she reminded me of the long list of Oregonian Firsts. First to enact a bottle-refund. First to guarantee access to the beaches of the ocean. First on small urban blocks. First on the right to vote for women (all the way back to 1912). First on seat belts. First on veterans’ home loans. First on challenging the Medicaid system to set priorities for care. First on voting by mail. First on a land use policy that protected both surrounding farmlands and the integrity of urban communities. She talked so fast that I probably missed several other ‘firsts.’

Gov. Kitzhaber clearly wants to keep this tradition alive. In a speech to a gathering of higher education officials in early November in Corvallis, he referred to the 40/40/20 program as the state’s ‘north star.’ The operating mode, he said, would be “tight on expectations, loose on methods.”

In early winter, with its brooding dark days and the daily dose of ominous world news, Oregon’s bright optimism about possibilities should challenge other states to undertake their own bold maneuvers.

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The Kingdom of Thailand practices governance with some unusual twists, some of which offer intriguing models for regional governance in America.

During my recent visit, Thailand was struggling with massive flooding. I monitored the interactions among national, provincial and local governments during the disaster. And I spent time with flood refugees in Pattaya, a city renown for sun and sex south of Bangkok.

Thailand is unique among its neighbors as having never been a European colony. It was ruled by an absolute monarchy until the 1930s and still has a strong royal presence in a constitutional monarchy. The national government structure has a prime minister, National Assembly with a House and Senate, and a complex judiciary — in all a blend of western laws and cultural practices that go back to the Khmer roots of the kingdom.

The Thai people have suffered through 16 constitutions, usually triggered by governance crises or military coups. Most of the constitutions make only small changes in the basic government structure. But each redistributes political and economic clout among the traditional powers — old families, the military, and the royal family — often with little consideration of citizen desires. Interestingly, the current king has played a role in resolving some governance crises, facilitating peaceful leadership changes between political parties and avoiding the threat of military coups, and yet more constitutions.

As one of the “Asian tigers”, Thailand enjoyed rapid growth through the second half of the last century. However, it suffered its own crisis of overdevelopment in the 1990s. As a result, some economic enterprises owned by the traditional powers were purchased or displaced by international firms, whose logos are now ubiquitous across the nation. Newer roads have been built to connect rural farmlands to urban centers.

Bangkok is the largest city in the kingdom; the region is home to over 12 million, almost 20 percent of the national population. It is served by numerous expressways, underground and elevated transit lines, and considerable boat traffic on the Chao Phraya River that flows through the center of the city.

The Chao Phraya River also channels monsoon waters from the northern rice fields, through the city, to the Gulf of Thailand. When flooding occurs, it can shut down factories for weeks and relocate families for months. Yet the positive, hospitable spirit that drives the Thai people prevails. Loy Kratong — which, ironically, is the festival of the spirit of the waters — was still celebrated with all-night revelry, in the midst of the flooding.

The metropolis of greater Bangkok, one of 76 provinces countrywide, is governed by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), a creature of the national government. It has an elected chief executive, the governor of Bangkok, and an elected 57 member Bangkok Metropolitan Council. It is authorized to prepare regional plans and deliver road, transit, waste management, housing, security, and environmental services. But it often shares these and other authorities with the national and local governments.

These sharing arrangements were severely strained by the flooding, resulting in running conflicts between the national government’s flood control organization, the Flood Relief Operations Center (FROC), and the BMA. The prime minister and governor of Bangkok, two of only three directly elected executives in Thailand, carried on a daily war of words and threatened actions in the press. To add to the volatility, neighborhood districts (of which there are 50 in the Bangkok region) were often felt left out of decisions to control flooding, and periodically engaged in guerilla activities, such as illegally opening flood gates.

What can we learn about regional governance from Thailand? The national government has empowered regional governance in the Bangkok region, through the BMA, and at times provided funding, to plan and implement major transportation and other regional projects. As a result of the current flooding, the BMA is also a key player in designing and providing the improved flood control systems required to protect Bangkok against future flooding. While its actions might not match the boldness or rapid implementation of Chinese provinces, many of the infrastructure projects are impressive. And protecting the region against future flooding would be monumental.

Even though public comment and criticism of government appears to be a national pastime, public involvement in decision-making still appears to be dominated by the traditional powers. However, major public demonstrations influenced the drafting of the most recent constitution, resulting in provisions supporting public participation. In addition, the governors of Bangkok and the Bangkok Metropolitan Council are directly-elected. Only time will tell if actions like these will foster greater civic engagement at regional and other levels of governance.

The intriguing “wild card” is the role of the King in resolving governance crises. This is partially related to the respect that the people have for the current King, the threat of royal family intervention does influence the behavior of political parties. For better or worse, that threat has probably faded, due to the advancing age of the current King and mixed reviews of the crown Prince. Lacking a king, could regions in the states empower individuals or groups of individuals to help bring warring local factions together to take bold regional actions? Maybe a committee composed of regional senior statespeople. When I lived in the Pittsburgh region, for example, Fred Rogers and various Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins could play that role.

These are only impressions of a short-term traveler overseas (and a battered regionalist at home) — but hopefully food for thought as we think about regional potentials in America.

Bill Dodge is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Regional Councils, author of Regional Excellence, and is writing a new book on regional charters. He can be reached at WilliamRDodge@aol.com.

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MOSCOW – American movies usually depict this city as a dark, drab and dangerous place.  In most of the plots there are big burley neckless mafia as central characters in these thrillers.

But the real Moscow isn’t any more like the old gangster movie depictions than New York or Chicago. In fact, Moscow is an easy city to fall in love with. The Czars may have been brutal but they had pretty good architectural taste. On this old framework Moscow is actively and very smartly trying to become one of the world’s mega-global cities.

Early in December, on the edge of Russian winter, Moscow put on a spectacular Global City Forum featuring a stunning panel of international experts from all over the world, especially from China. Whatever differences Russia and China have nationally, there are no barriers among the big cities of China and Russia.  Both nations are embracing the notion that city-regions are the drivers of the new economy.

Indeed, as China urbanizes to industrialize, Moscow is urbanizing because of the de-industrialization of the Soviet factory towns that dotted central Russia.  The early post-Soviet era attempts to resurrect steel and fabrication industries are over. This transition from an old managed economy to a new innovation entrepreneurial economy is, of course, far from easy.  Unlike China and Japan, Russia has no history of small factories to draw on. It does have a very rich culture of craftsman and artisans who can make almost anything from wood and glass. But these fine arts are in competition with cheap knock offs from the developing world. The acceptance of low quality substitutes for handmade luxury items baffles many Russians.

But there’s no choice: Russia must meet the challenges of the modern world.  So, Sergey Sobyanin, the new mayor of Moscow, and his team are setting a course to change Moscow from the sleepy Soviet managed city to one that will compete with the rest of the world.  This explains the invitation to Chinese cities is to play key roles in the transformation of Moscow.  As the Russians acknowledge, almost no cities in the world are growing faster and smarter than Shanghai and Beijing.

Mayor Sobyanin is taking some very bold to make Moscow a city of brains instead of factories. Moreover, the mayor, with central government permission, is expanding the boundaries of the city to make a region about the size of Greater London or the New York region.  His rationale for this expansion is to control unwanted and un-needed peripheral land uses – for example single family suburban housing that will gobble up more land and extend auto based infrastructure.  Instead, the inner ring of the city, with its unused and under-used rail land and surplus heavy industry-oriented infrastructure, is seen as ripe for redevelopment into the kind of more knowledge intensive industrial activities that have emerged in Chicago’s core over the last decade.

Sobyanin and his team want to get much of the non-essential government work out of the core of the city into new surrounding nodes, in much the way Washington, D.C., has been able to do.  Taming the automobile, in a city where the car is the symbol of wealth and mobility, with streets carrying as many as eight lanes, is the most challenging agenda for the mayor. These are daunting tasks.

But the most difficult challenge for Muscovites is the struggle over the destiny of their fledgling post-Soviet democracy. The national elections during the first week of December led to strong demonstrations in the centre of the city.  More than 60,000 people of all ages and classes called for a re-run of a very tainted electoral process, flawed – according to international observers – by apparently large scale ballot stuffing and voter fraud.  Many locals witnessed these electoral abuses and reported them in the press, on television and via social media. It’s clear that before a great city is re-planned, some semblance of democratic electoral processes will need to be installed.

But Moscow has good bones. The rivers and the Kremlin give the city a natural flow.  The imported Parisian architecture is a good building block for urban renewal.  Failed modernist architecture of the ‘50s-70’s is crumbling on its own.  Moscow is calling for an international competition in late 2012 to set out the direction for change. A new physical plan for the city is essential.

But the real test for Moscow will be whether it can generate distinguished civic associations like SPUR (San Francisco Urban Renewal) or the Regional Plan Association (New York) to guide, protect and energize the city so that it can be what Peter the Great set out to make it—one of the great cities of the world.

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Edward J. Blakely is honorary professor of urban policy at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia is an internationally known leader and scholar of urban policy.  For more background on Moscow as a global city, see Blakley’s website: Blakelycitytalk.com.

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What can you learn in two days and two nights at a palatial estate in the Hudson Valley with a room full of smart, experienced regionalists? I’m sure glad I’m in a position to answer.

In late October I participated in a symposium on states and regions organized by the Citistates Group. The event was generously hosted by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the William Penn Foundation. Citistates founders Neal Peirce, Curtis Johnson and Farley Peters pulled together this “meeting of the regional minds” to address one central challenge: metropolitan regions are the geography of the economy but not the geography of government.

Along with a couple of chamber leaders, I was joined by representatives from MPOs, COGs, universities, foundations, think tanks, and several former big city mayors. To articulate the professional accomplishments and accolades of this distinguished group of veteran practitioners and thinkers would easily run two hours or more. And it did. Thirty minutes into the introductions my suspicions were confirmed; I was the low man on the totem pole in both credentials and class. I just hoped a few of the collected IQ points might rub off on me.

From Wednesday evening through midday Friday we discussed and debated. What is the best structure to organize regional stakeholders? Can state governments help, or do they need to just get out of the way? Can you expect regional cooperation without a galvanizing crisis? Does the “ism” in regionalism turn people off? Can the Cardinals really come back with 2 outs and 2 strikes in the bottom of the ninth?

Scattered amid the discussion were some fantastic success stories from leaders in the field: Atlanta’s regional regulatory and infrastructure action to quickly solve an acute water crisis, Seattle’s alignment of two major ports and dozens of distinct municipalities to speak with a unified voice on international trade and investment recruitment. Plus Southern California’s multimodal logistics solution to moving goods in and out of the L.A. and Long Beach ports.

At the end of the day I left with renewed confidence in some core convictions about regional cooperation:

• Business leadership is essential to regional action. Business groups are the only entities with political leverage across the multiple jurisdictions that comprise a region.
• The outcome of regional action is far more important than the structure or governance of regional organization. As the Atlanta Chamber’s Sam Williams said, “Results and outcomes equal power and influence.”
• Someone has to provide neutral turf to get suspicious stakeholders together. Whether COG, MPO or chamber, the regional convener role is vital.

The symposium also clarified some new concepts for me:

• Economic competitiveness can be the great unifier for regions. The downturn has compounded our challenges but it has also provided a rallying point for individuals with different political affiliations and groups with different agendas. We will disagree about a lot, but I think we can all agree that jobs, trade and investment are key priorities.
• We’re all the same, but we’re not. There is plenty of head-nodding and “me too” expressions when someone describes the challenges facing her region, but the context is always unique. Orlando is not Cleveland is not San Diego, but they can learn a lot from each other’s experience. That’s why I think detailed stories of success and failure are as important (if not more important) than conceptual models.
• Business can’t do it alone; it needs a strong public sector partner. I’m not talking about public/private partnerships, I mean a visionary elected or appointed public sector leader willing to cross political divides and work with non-traditional allies for the common good. Almost every success story cited mentioned dynamic individual players from the public and private sectors.

I’m not sure I picked up any IQ points from all the big brains in the room, but I did leave the Citistates symposium with a renewed conviction in the important role chambers of commerce must play as regional leaders and conveners.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, its staff or trustees.

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As I listened to the dialogue at the Citistates Group’s Pocantico retreat in late October, I was impressed by the way the conversation about regional thinking and acting had shifted from structure to form, that is to say, from governmental fiat to organic growth. Here was a new paradigm!

Given the discouraging state of affairs at the federal and state levels of government, the creation of by the state legislatures of creative interjurisdictional mechanisms, or revised federal mandates, beyond what is already in place (MPOs and COGs, for example) is a pipe dream.

What then can stimulate real progress in affirming the reality, and recognizing the necessity, of regional cooperation? It’s the a focus on creating clusters of economic development opportunity. Clusters can grow organically, and do not need official action by government to happen. Harvard’s Michael Porter has famously described clusters as “geographically proximate groups of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities.”

Clusters we are familiar with, such as life sciences in Boston, tourism in Orlando, aerospace around Wichita, the Golden Triangle in Raleigh-Durham, NC, and Silicon Valley, all illustrate Porter’s point.

Economic development today must be a collaborative process, with companies, research and academic institutions working together to find out what is unique in their area and to create new companies, new start ups, new spinoffs. Government can be a facilitator, but not the driver, in this new model — simply because it involves the private and non-profit sectors more than the public sector, in its policies and incentives.

Consider the following two examples:

During the time I served as Mayor of Indianapolis, we had a Corporate Community Council (CCC) consisting of local CEOs plus the governor, the presidents of Indiana University and Purdue, and the mayor. But early in this century, corporate leaders realized that the entire Central Indiana area — Bloomington, Terre Haute, Lafayette, Muncie, Kokomo, Columbus and so on — was too dependent on large manufacturing companies whose high wages “masked underlying challenges in workforce and economic diversity.” Consequently, the business leaders came together and arranged for the old CCC to morph into the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership (CICP), including not only business leaders, but also leaders of higher education.

CICP commissioned Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, to study regional successes in establishing clusters. Out of that initiative, begun in 2001, emerged the CICP’s blueprint for economic progress. It focused on the key clusters of advanced manufacturing, the life sciences, distribution logistics, and information technology, with a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship and economic diversity. CICP’s president and CEO, Mark Miles, has defined its mission as: “educating, retraining and retaining the workforce; ensuring connectivity among and between organizations, sectors, clusters, and regions (both in the United States and globally); harnessing the region’s intellectual capital to create firms and jobs; encouraging an entrepreneurial climate for the growth and expansion of the clusters.”

To date, the most successful cluster fostered by CICP has been the BioCrossroads Life Sciences Initiative, founded with assistance from Eli Lilly & Co., Indiana University, Purdue University, the Indiana Health Industry Forum, and local government. $80 million was raised in venture capital, and over $2 billion in corporate and institutional investment has been attracted, all of which has led to new companies, new asset-based economic strategies, new life sciences research, and hundreds of new jobs.

A second example of how a cluster can be formed independently of government regulations and policies has developed around Geneva, Ohio in Ashtabula County. It is currently being driven by a group of students at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., in a class called “City Lab” under the leadership of Associate Provost and Dean Robert L. Manuel.

The students were asked to develop a plan for the region’s “sustainable economic future.” In their study, they discerned several building blocks.

First and foremost was the SPIRE Institute in Geneva (a multi-sport, 750,000 sq. ft. facility that “exists to unlock the full potential of the human spirit through athletics, academics and service.” It was already in place in Geneva and debt free, thanks to the generosity of Ron and Tracy Clutter. Included in its mission statement is a section about helping people adapt to various mobility problems.

The second building block was the regional business plan of “Advance Northeast Ohio.” It emphasized the region’s strengths: precision manufacturing, material science, and chemical/mechanical engineering. The students noted that Ashtabula county is “the cradle of the reinforced fiberglass composite industry,” materials that could play a “major role in para-equipment and exo-skeletal research and development.”

The third building block was the proximity of 29 institutions of higher learning known for their achievements in scientific innovation and research—state universities, the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve, etc.

From this stockpile of assets, the students have come up with a unique idea; to wit, create an “adaptive community” in which those who have mobility issues caused by illness or injury can receive the equipment and training necessary to move toward “an active future.” The students note that currently, there is no economic cluster anywhere to serve the Adaptive Community, and believe that secondary benefits such as conferences, seminars, trade shows, and product launches could accrue in a cluster relevant to the needs of Special Olympians, Wounded Warriors, weekend warriors, and Paraolympians.

The cluster is not in place yet, but the students at Georgetown are driving this, and intend to persist with the idea, confident that the cluster will grow over time.

These two instances suggest a new model for organic regional growth independent of government structures, a smart way to go, don’t you think?

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