“Rustbelt” is out. “Legacy” is in.

For years we’ve needed a new word for the arc of cities and regions, stretching from the Northeast to the Great Lakes and so deeply damaged by decades of vanishing factories, abandoned properties and alarming population loss.

Now, a new report and book, “Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities,” gives us a way out. Looking deeply into the plights of our Youngstowns and Toledos, Detroits and Flints, it’s the report of the 110th session of the American Assembly, the non-partisan political forum founded 62 years ago by Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was president of Columbia University.

The Assembly, held last spring in Detroit, actually had a spirited debate about applying the “legacy” word to the hard-hit cities. Some suggested “legacy” meant something from the past that’s outdated, such as “legacy software,” outmoded cost structures, or fragmented governance.

But Henry Cisneros, the Assembly co-chair and former former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, painted a highly positive view of these cities’ legacy at a late January Brookings Institution forum on release of the session’s report. Many of these historic industrial cities, he noted, gave the North the arms and men it needed to win the Civil War. The factories of Akron, Flint, Buffalo and Rochester were critical to America triumphing in World War II. Detroit was long synonymous with American industrial strength.

And even today, Cisneros argued, “we can’t afford to lose the potential of these legacy cities.” They’re great “human capital multipliers” with their prestigious universities, medical services and foundations. They’re staging locations for new immigrant talent, laboratories for a more compact and efficient built environment, places where America’s equity agenda can be advanced. They hold billions of dollars of “sunk” (established, in place) infrastructure.

The timeliness is compelling. A new American consensus is demanding we make more in America, import less, create jobs here. We may be on the verge of more targeted direct government subsidies of strategic start-up industries, to match the inducements China and other countries offer.

That could well translate into comeback potential for the legacy cities with their rich industrial history. “We have the land. We can quickly put a half million square feet under roof, developing a new industry,” said Hunter Morrison, director of the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium. “Our communities know how to make things. It’s part of our DNA.”

But there’s a major hurdle: Creating a level playing field in our metro regions, so that legacy cities can rise to new opportunities. The key obstacle here is often a state government’s. Legally, cities are creatures of the states. But as Lavea Brachman, executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center notes in the new Legacy Cities report:

“State laws, regulations and policies establish the rules for what cities can and cannot do and set the stage for how and where development occurs.” And all too often, they’ve “stacked the deck against central cities” by “perpetuating fragmented local governance, encouraging cities to compete with cities for business and economic development” — in effect “incentivizing greenfield development over the reuse of urban sites.”

The Legacy Cities report suggests a turnaround: to give center cities, including areas around their economic anchors of universities and medical complexes, strong preference in state funding for transportation, sewer and water facilities. To make local city-suburb government mergers much easier. And to encourage regional revolving loan funds for infrastructure and development projects.

The federal government, it’s argued, can help with incentives. Washington’s Sustainable Communities program, Morrison noted, helped 12 counties in northeast Ohio, along with their business leaders, county commissioners, mayors and metropolitan planning organizations, avoid the normal “turf” battles and formulate a regional business strategy.

Plus, he reported, young people are asking — why aren’t we using up-to-date information technology to pinpoint concentrations of jobs, of poverty, across entire regions, and then build corrective strategies around them?

A whole new approach to give legacy cities a better shot is proposed by Daniel Kildee, former Genesee County (Flint) treasurer and president of the Center for Community Progress. Seventy percent of Michigan’s population, he notes, lives on 8 percent of the state’s land — including places with concentrations of infrastructure but eroded tax base. So why not adapt state policy to target subsidies for transportation and economic development to the 8 percent territory, rather than spreading state investments, peanut butter-style, across the map?

Can such ideas start turning the tables for legacy cities? The American Assembly report makes it clear: the time is now to start trying, very hard.

And with conviction it’s possible. Pittsburgh, steel and smoke behemoth of past times, beset by heavy population losses, has nonetheless rebuilt its economy and now prospers through higher education, high technology and medical advance. Rochester, N.Y., notwithstanding Kodak’s bankruptcy, is doing the same.

In today’s hard-hit Detroit, there’s one growing demographic: young hipsters, well-educated professionals 25 to 40.

Maybe the turnaround to new legacies is not as impossible as we think.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

The words are harsh: Clean-air regulations are under “demagogic assaults.” House Republicans are dangerously “advocating abandonment of toxic regulations” that have demonstrably protected Americans’ health. They’re “ignoring climate change.” In fact, “for some of the most prominent leaders of the Republican party, science has left the building.”

The speaker, William K. Reilly, has gilt-edged Republican credentials. He was a senior staff member of President Richard Nixon’s White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. For four years, he served as President George H.W. Bush’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Indeed, Reilly credits the first President Bush’s “monumental contribution to the environment” for his support of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. And when critics assault EPA regulations as “job killers,” Reilly argues EPA rules have had dramatic public health benefits even while the U.S. economy has grown by 200 percent since Nixon signed the original Clean Air Act in 1970.

What I’ve always found fascinating about Bill Reilly, whom I’ve known since the ’70s, is not just the political candor he brings to big issues. Nor just his array of top public service posts including heading the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, directing the Global Water Challenge, and co-chairing the recent National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

What I’ve found striking is his equal interest in creating better places — communities, neighborhoods, in which we live. It’s a connection the mainstream environmental community ignored for many of its early years, focused overwhelmingly on issues such as saving the wilderness.

But not Reilly. He was an urbanist before it ever became fashionable — indeed starting in his college days, he explained in a recent lecture at Washington’s the National Building Museum on receiving the prestigious the Vincent Scully Prize for “exemplary” leadership in urban design.

He’d learned from distinguished conservationists, said Reilly, that it’s possible to breathe life and beauty even into the dullest landscape or cityscapes. And from Holly Whyte, author of “The Organization Man,” that density is the secret, not the bane of urban life — that “pedestrians choose the most heavily crowded and trafficked intersections to stop, chat, exchange reciprocal gestures.”

James Rouse, famed developer of festival marketplaces, took Reilly for a tour of his first big hit, Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. As they passed the low-revenue fruit, vegetable and flower market that had taken up the entire ground floor of the building, Rouse remarked that big developers were mocking him for ignoring “the bottom line.” But Rouse explained what critics missed: “the market is the magnet, it’s what draws the crowds.”

William K. Reilly

As president of the Conservation Fund, then merged with the World Wildlife Fund, Reilly focused in the ’70s both on protection of “exquisite, unspoiled, wild and beautiful places” around the world and creating friendlier, more inviting and inclusive neighborhoods in U.S. cities.

He also chaired the board of Robert McNulty’s Partners for Livable Communities, creating such programs as The Economics of Amenity to convince cities and corporations, even at a time of serious urban flight, that there were greenbacks — and civic gold — in investing in such “frills” as people-oriented parks and plazas, theaters and museums, historic preservation, waterfront revival and sports events.

Check America’s rejuvenated cities, 2012, and it’s clear that work was prophetic. And so is Reilly’s warning of the devastation that today’s steadily advancing climate change may visit on our communities if Congress and the country continue their “sleepwalk” and denial on the issue. He cites cataclysmic multi-billion dollar impacts that may result from rising sea levels, soaring summertime temperatures, insect infestations and the washing away of thousands of miles of critical levees.

“Climate change,” says Reilly, “is to America what the German buildup in the 1930s was to the British — the threat that grows more menacing even as we determinedly pretend it is not there.”

Though while Congress sleeps, Reilly says, industry and cities are starting some of the essential responses. He cites Chicago’s comprehensive Climate Action Plan as an example.

Recalling the City Beautiful movement which flourished in the 1890s and early 1900s, Reilly argues we need a new movement — “the City Sustainable” — for communities that are green, smart and fair. The top priority: to “armor our cities” against climate change’s worst impacts by such practical steps as reduced water use, greater energy efficiency, better insulation, green roofs, reflective pavements, and more tree cover. Along with “a more congenial environment for pedestrians, bicyclists, for public transportation.”

It’s all possible; it’s already being tried in cities, Reilly insists. And, he adds, “It’s very much place-based, in the best sense,” and might help “save us from the ideological gridlock in Washington.”

Will Washington — and especially its combative Republicans — listen? Not very soon, I’d guess. And that’s the quandary, as the climate clock keeps ticking.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

“You’ll be woken in the morning by a convicted murderer.”

It was some years ago (1982), and the governor of Mississippi — William F. Winter — was talking. He’d graciously invited me to spend the night at the Governor’s Mansion. As he predicted, the next morning I was indeed politely awakened by a convict serving as a trustie at the mansion.

So earlier this month, when outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour stirred up a hornet’s nest with his pardon or clemency for over 200 offenders, I wondered if mansion trusties were among the bunch. And indeed, five — including four convicted murderers — were included. I checked with my friend former Gov. Winter (now 88), and he confirmed it was long-standing Mississippi custom — not just to assign several well-behaved and stabilized criminals from the state penitentiary to the mansion, but to suspend their sentences at the end of each governor’s term.

Barbour said he’d had so much confidence in the mansion trusties that he’d let his grandchildren play with them. Winter told me there’d even been one occasion, when other staff was off duty and he was obliged to be out of town, that he’d felt free to leave his wife, feeling ill, to the care of a single murderer trustie.

The Mississippi custom raises an intriguing question: What ever happened to the idea of rehabilitation in American justice as a whole? Historically, notes Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, it was common for governors to issue a significant number of pardons and commutations — typically just before Christmas, in a spirit of mercy and forgiveness.

But since the 1970s and the “get tough on crime” crusade, we’ve focused almost exclusively on punishment and retribution. We’ve increasingly spurned the idea of possible parole or pardon as an incentive for prisoners’ self-improvement — notwithstanding convincing research showing that even perpetrators of the most serious crimes often mature and become a radically reduced threat to public safety.

In fact, there’s been a virtual explosion of sentences for life imprisonment without parole — up to roughly 140,000 nationally, a doubling as a percentage of all prisoners since 1992. Most of the sentences are for murder, but many also for burglary, robbery, carjacking and the like.

Included are offenders we have reason to fear and want to keep off the streets for several years. But forever? Do we really want to leave all of them with zero hope of ever going free, so that there’s no incentive for reform and good behavior?

Then there’s the cost issue. Increasingly, with life sentences, we’re seeing 50- and 60-year old convicts behind bars. Statistically, they pose scant threat to public safety. But as they age and their health deteriorates, the cost to the public of holding them runs as high as three times that of incarcerating younger convicts.

Is gritting our teeth and being vengeful worth $75,000 a year to hold a mature man who’s already spent many years behind bars? Couldn’t we toss away mandatory sentences and trust parole boards to make sensible case-by-case judgments?

And to speed our rethinking, couldn’t our state governors — and the president — show some initiative through their power of pardon and commutations?

President Obama — surprisingly — is failing miserably on this score. He’s issued just 22 pardons and one commutation, barely exercising his important executive power to correct injustices and excessive sentences. African-Americans, heavily overrepresented in prisons (in comparison to crimes they actually commit), have special reason to be disappointed.

In 2010, for example, Congress reduced penalties for crack cocaine possession (most frequent among blacks) to 18 times the comparative penalty for powder cocaine (more popular among whites). Before, the crack penalty had been 100 times higher. But the change wasn’t made retroactive.

“With a stroke of the pen,” Mauer notes, the president could reduce existing crack sentences to conform to the new standards. Such a move, he said, would represent “justice and fairness” and could even include checks to exclude any convict corrections officials identify as “a terror in prison.”

Governors, Mauer suggests, could also respond to growing public belief that our “war” on drugs is excessive by reducing sentences by some set percentages — from five to three years, for example. Released earlier, prisoners can more easily rebuild their ties to their family and community. The reduced sentences can also deliver substantial economies for hard-pressed state budgets.

The good news is that the politics of reduced sentencing has become less partisan. Some conservative politicians are joining reformers on the left to question our massive incarceration numbers and look for ways to let up on harsh and long sentences while saving public funds.

In that sense, Gov. Barbour has done the nation a favor by reminding us that the broad powers of our elected officials can be used not just to punish wrongdoers, but to help redeem those ready for a new life.

Editor’s Note: In a guest column for the Washington Post, Barbour Jan. 19 elaborated on his decision to pardon or grant revocable, indefinite suspensions to five inmates who worked at the governor’s mansion. Excerpts from that column:

“Historically, most of the inmates sent to the mansion, known in Mississippi as trusties, have been murderers, convicted of crimes of passion. Experts agree that these inmates are the least likely to commit another crime and the most likely to serve out their sentences well. My experience has been that this view is correct. About a third of the inmates sent to the mansion were returned to prison because of rules violations or infractions, but most worked there successfully during my terms. All but one of these mansion trusties had been convicted of murder.”

“The criteria the Corrections Department uses to select the prisoners who work at the mansion narrows the pool to those convicted of terrible crimes, almost always crimes of passion.”

“These crimes must be punished, but these offenders are not hard-core, cold-blooded criminals. In fact, to work at the mansion, an inmate must be classified as minimum-security by the Department of Corrections.”

“I always intended to follow the tradition of gubernatorial clemency for the mansion inmates. When I did so at the end of my first term, I was criticized for pardoning murderers. I never made any secret of the fact that I would again pardon those who successfully completed work during my second term.”

“The mansion inmates I fully released are not threats to society. They have paid the price for their crimes, having served an average of 20 years’ imprisonment.”

“In Mississippi, the constitutional power of pardon is based on our Christian belief in repentance, forgiveness and redemption — a second chance for those who are rehabilitated and who redeem themselves. Other great religions have similar tenets; so does the U.S. Constitution.”

“Mississippi spends about $350 million a year on our corrections system, much of it aimed at rehabilitating those who went wrong. Regrettably there are bad actors who will never be rehabilitated, but many who go to prison can be helped. Our state recidivism rate is just above 30 percent, far below the national average.”

“For some who are rehabilitated and redeem themselves, the governor is the only person who can give them a second chance. I am very comfortable giving such people that opportunity.”

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON — Newspapers, the airwaves and the blogosphere are already delivering 24-7 news and speculation focused on the 2012 presidential campaign.

But in the end, will we get the president the most Americans favor?

Don’t count on it. The hoary electoral college system lets states cast their electoral votes any way their legislatures determine. A minor electoral switch in one state can reverse the entire national election. There’s always a temptation to meddle.

Take Pennsylvania. For five elections running, Democratic candidates have triumphed there in “winner take all” style, capturing all of the state’s 20 electoral votes. Great for Democrats.

But the 2010 election gave Republicans control in Harrisburg. Gov. Tom Corbett endorsed a bill to split Pennsylvania’s electoral votes by congressional district. The motive was transparent: to cut — roughly in half — the number of Pennsylvania electoral votes that President Obama could hope to win in the Keystone State.

That effort now seems shelved, but it reflects a bipartisan habit: When we can pull it off, we try to rejigger the election system to favor our side. A Supreme Court majority even did it in its infamous Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, stopping a recount that might have awarded the presidency to Al Gore (who actually led by more than 500,000 popular votes nationwide).

The Big Cure would seem obvious: institute a direct vote of the people, and scrap the electoral college, a jerry-rigged, last-minute concoction of the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

For 68 years — since 1944, when the Gallup Poll first posed the question — overwhelming majorities of Americans have favored direct popular election of the president. But getting a constitutional amendment approved is so cumbersome that all attention has now turned to an ingenious, alternative approach.

It’s called the National Popular Vote initiative and its method is ingenious: Use a compact among the states to deliver all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes of citizens nationwide. The compact will go into effect when — but only when — states with votes constituting a majority of the electoral college (270 of the total of 538) formally approve it. The legality is clear: the Constitution gives state legislatures total power over casting electoral votes, plus the right to make interstate compacts.

So far the compact proposal has been approved by nine states which hold, cumulatively, 49 percent of the required 270 electoral votes. Included are Maryland, Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont, the District of Columbia — and California, in a big-time win for the movement this year.

There’s been a distinct Democratic cast to the group of states approving. Many Republican operatives, recalling the 2000 election, apparently feel the system somehow favors the Democrats. Plus, a significant number of GOP state legislators have been heavily wooed by the ultra-conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It opposes the National Popular Vote, charging the measure would “render minority groups voiceless and empower densely populated and ideologically homogenous regions as well as radical fringe groups.”

It’s a somewhat preposterous argument when one considers how “voiceless” many minority groups — from progressives in the Deep South to conservatives in the Northeast — may feel today. They know they’re so outnumbered in their states their votes will rarely if ever make a difference in choice of a president. And if everyone votes equally, how could direct popular vote for president really benefit “radical fringe groups?”

In fact, several states have reported significant Republican support for the National Popular Vote. Republicans voted 21-11 in favor, for example, when the New York Senate last June approved the proposed interstate compact. Republican supporters of a direct presidential vote have included, over the years, such stalwarts as Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and Fred Thompson of Tennessee.

The reality is that a Republican could win the popular vote and lose the presidency just as easily as a Democrat. Each close election perpetuates a kind of insane electoral roulette which the National Popular Vote (
www.nationalpopularvote.com) would resolve.

Plus, a direct vote would end the Flyover Phenomenon. Candidates see little point in visiting, or paying much attention to the two-thirds of states rated “safe” for one party or the other (for example Republican Texas, Democratic California). Following Labor Day in 2008, more than 98 percent of presidential campaign spending, plus all the candidates’ campaign visits, went to just 15 battlefield states (among them Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina) that represent barely a third of the U.S. population.

This means that special interest causes, like ethanol in Iowa or Cuban-Americans in Florida, get inordinate attention. And we virtually invite voter apathy, non-participation, in most of our states.

The favoritism would disappear in the first presidential election under the National Popular Vote. Its proposition is simple: Each American’s vote ought to be inviolate — and have equal impact.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

What can high technology do to help cities confront their thorniest problems — from police strategies to water systems, traffic control to waste disposal?

A group of high technology firms, led by IBM and Cisco, are plunging into the city management business. In varied forms, they offer super-efficient new-generation computerized information and control systems.

If the systems prove out — and first signs are positive — the companies stand to garner billions of dollars in business. But savings for cities, measured by dollars, by livability, by human lives protected, may be far greater.

IBM already reports over 2,000 “Smarter Cities” programs in cities worldwide. A lead example is Memphis. The city faced the dilemma of shrinking budgets even while crime — especially violent crime — was rising. Though 2,000 officers were responding to some 1 million calls a year, there was scant time to “connect dots” of incidents and develop strategies.

IBM’s solution (working with the University of Memphis’ Department of Criminology) was to apply “predictive analytics” software to compile volumes of crime records by type, time of day, victim/offender characteristics and more.

Now Memphis has a new “Real Time Crime Center” that’s able to pinpoint and relate crime incidents in seconds, to predict hot spots and redeploy police officers with high efficiency. Robberies, burglaries and forcible rapes have fallen to their lowest rate in a quarter century. Several million dollars in savings are being reported. And IBM has sharpened crime tracking and control software it can offer to cities elsewhere.

IBM’s urban initiatives, explains Gerard Mooney, now the company’s general manager for Global Smarter Cities, began six years ago as the computer giant looked to future business opportunities. Thousands of IBM employees took part in a 72-hour “Innovation Jam” to pinpoint promising target areas. Topping their list: smarter utilities, water systems, public safety and transportation.

And where were most of those issues focused? Yes, it was cities — the fast-growing, economic engines of our time. Yet cities are often burdened with bureaucracies drowning in data. So Sam Palmisano, then IBM’s CEO, put up a $100 million fund to sponsor teams to investigate and build the firm’s urban business. “First-of-a-kind” projects began to emerge — in smart grids, smart roadway traffic control systems, innovations in public safety, health care and advanced water management.

IBM’s most exciting current project is in Rio de Janeiro. That Brazilian city is plagued by flash floods and serious landslides along the steep mountains that frame the famed center city and beachfront. A severe storm in April 2010 caused 212 deaths and made 15,000 people homeless.

Now IBM has provided Rio with computing power for a city operations center designed to help meteorologists, police and over 30 other city departments both predict the danger of, and respond rapidly to emergencies. The high-resolution weather system, called “Deep Thunder,” combines standard tracking of incoming storms with a path-breaking process — Mooney describes it as “deep computing” — that’s also able to predict an oncoming storm’s likely intensity.

Command Center for Emergency Response in Rio de Janeiro

That intelligence can then be correlated with sensor systems on hillsides that determine soil stability and landslide danger. Timely alerts should make it possible to warn residents in advance of storms, to close down streets, mobilize ambulances, and turn off electric power to prevent electrocutions.

Workers from the many departments in Rio’s city operations center wear NASA-style uniforms to underscore their collegiality — a symbol of what the new integrated, high-tech systems can do to bust the silos that perennially plague smooth service delivery in cities worldwide. The Rio system’s also connected to the mayor’s home so that even in deep night hours he can be in high speed communications that make it seem he’s in the room.

As the global cities market opens, there’s as much sign of collaboration as competition among the interested corporations. IBM and Cisco, for example, are collaborating not just on the Rio breakthroughs but several billion dollars of technology and services worldwide yearly.

IBM’s specialty is analysis of vast amounts of data, integrating multiple software systems to enable “smart” city management. Cisco, by contrast, has clear software interests but focuses more on supplying cities with the actual instrumentation — the technology building blocks for increasingly “wired,” sensor-rich cities. In one form or another, such multinational firms as Siemens, ARUP, AECOM and Philips aim to develop their own niches — and already work on occasion with IBM and Cisco on this new technology frontier. All recognize the steps taken so far are in the infant stages of what integrated solutions development may eventually be.

For mayors and councils, all this comes on with dizzying speed. Their first challenge is to strategize smartly with the techno-wizard firms (and remember they have lots of underutilized wired and wireless networks already in their cities). But they have an even greater challenge: not to miss out on the dramatic benefits — fiscal, administrative and human — that this new technology promises.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

NEW YORK — The world’s cities are impatiently demanding that they be heard earlier, and heeded seriously, in the decisions of nations — and at the United Nations.

A top case: preparations for “Rio+20,” the UN’s global conference on sustainability that’s scheduled for next June in Rio de Janeiro. It will mark the 20th anniversary of the historic 1992 Rio conference, attended by 17,000 delegates and observers including 108 heads of state. They forged the world’s first joint environmental accord, which included the start of global climate consultations.

Greater global sustainability starts with “bottom-up approaches,” so Rio+20 should — in contrast to the 1992 conference — hear local governments’ voice and report on their role. That’s the case being made by UCLG — United Cities and Local Governments, the umbrella organization of world cities.

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg presses the point even more forcefully. Speaking at an event at UN headquarters Dec. 15, Bloomberg championed a major role for cities at Rio+20, specifically including the naming of mayors to national delegations.

Even as national and global efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have faltered, Bloomberg said, cities across continents have moved aggressively to the “forefront of climate change action.” And that matters hugely, he suggested, since burning of carbon fuels by cities isn’t just the source of an overwhelming 70 percent of global greenhouse emissions but in reality “clogs our city streets, pollutes our air, harms the health and shortens the lives of the people we serve.”

The mayor, who also chairs the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, cited New York’s pacesetting “PlanNYC” — the “greenprint” for his city’s future. But he pointed as well to significant carbon reduction efforts in such cities as Lagos, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Berlin and Seoul.

Yet to achieve full sustainability, Bloomberg argued, cities need far more power, resources, expertise and encouragement from national governments.

Ford Foundation president Luis Ubinas, at the same UN forum, insisted there’s an even broader agenda: “The growth of cities presents collective opportunity to reduce poverty, to achieve social justice.” First, Ubinas said, through dense, efficient development — “because density boosts creativity, entrepreneurial energy, and creates jobs.” Second diversity that welcomes all peoples, of different races or sexual orientation. And then expanding peoples’ right to secure tenure of the land on which their houses stand — all “city keys to a sustainable planet.”

Focused heavily on the environment, Rio+20 will likely not embrace quite such a very broad agenda. But the UN-Habitat organization is urging that it consider asking national governments to embrace urban strategies, to focus on slowing the rapid growth of slums (threatening to rise from today’s 600 million to 1 billion souls), and to urge cities to work toward creation of metropolitan-wide growth plans.

This second 21st century decade could, though, produce another event consciously aimed at a planet-wide conversation — namely a dialogue linking not just cities and their leaders, but also to welcome citizens of the world’s cities as direct participants.

The new event, in 2016, will be called “Habitat III” — officially a successor to earlier UN-sponsored conferences on human settlements held in Vancouver in 1976 and Istanbul in 1996. Habitat I led to creation of the UN Habitat organization — the Nairobi-based United Nations Center on Human Settlements. Habitat II, following up on the Rio Earth Summit, focused on adequate shelter and sustainable cities.

And Habitat III? It was lucky to get UN General Assembly approval because times are tight, including for UN and lead member state budgets. But sponsors can point to fast-changing conditions: the rapid rise of information technology, financial crises for governments worldwide, and a startling increase in natural and man-made disasters.

At a UN forum in October, I heard what at first seemed a wild m&eacutelange of ideas about cities that could be communicated, exchanged, debated worldwide to prepare for, and follow up, on Habitat III. The technology that was cited — from moderated Internet discussions to Facebook/Twitter to as-yet-uninvented platforms for discussion — clearly breaks with anything possible at the earlier Habitat conferences. In fact, it makes the idea of a first-ever global peoples’ urban dialogue, with ideas invented anywhere traveling across continents in seconds, an actual possibility.

Then I heard proposed topics — an amazing mix. How Habitat III discussions could focus early on neighborhood, bottom-up processes. The role of women in challenged neighborhoods. Opportunities for youth. Start-up business opportunities. Tracking clean water and healthy air strategies. Successfully integrating immigrants. Coalescing trans-national metropolitan regions. Or a global place-making campaign for neighborhoods and accessible transit and peoples’ right to the streets of their cities.

And wait — more: corporations like IBM, CISCO, Siemens and others as significant new business presences on one hand, invaluable city connectors on the other. Perhaps a global “Sustainability Jam.”

Easy to do? Surely not: there’ll be immense language and cultural barriers plus demand for a skilled global set of translators and moderators.

But if cities are mankind’s new shared home, what better way might there be to plan for — and then follow up — on a Habitat III process? To make a leap appropriate for these times, embracing globally connected grassroots dialogues, solutions and celebration? Indeed, why not?

———-

Editor’s Note on Durban Charter: The restiveness of cities while national governments dither on forging a clear global climate accord was illustrated in Durban in December, when 100 mayors and elected officials from around the world — representing 950 local governments — issued a bold “Durban Adaptation Charter” for localities.  One key point: the cities agree to mainstream adaptation to climate change as a key factor in all local development planning.  The breadth of points in the agreement come close to reflecting the scope of local actions that a truly meaningful meaningful global accord would require.  Commenting on the new charter, Margareta Wahlstrom, Special Represent of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Reduction, noted: “Local governments are blazing a trail for nation states to follow. Just as they did in Cancun during the COP 16 talks, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability are leading the way with practical measures to tackle climate change.”

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

A heartening sign of Christmas, 2011: holiday festival markets are emerging and flourishing in and near central city squares across America, smartly following the model of the great Christmas markets of Germany and other European lands.

The biggest and possibly most spectacular may be Union Square in New York, where over 100 merchants have been on hand this season offering delights ranging from hand-blown glass housewares to hand-tooled leather belts to “German delights … sweet and savory treats, cider and cappucinno to keep you warm.” A strong runner-up: New York’s Bryant Park, with dozens of stands.

But when I queried David Downey of the International Downtown Assn. about other cities, he e-mailed his member list and in hours was flooding my in-box with examples spread across the continent.

Rochester, Minn., for example, has “Market Strasse — our attempt to be an authentic German winter market.” Downtown Lancaster, Pa., created space for 20 local “creatives” to show their products. Kirkwood, Mo., turned its farmers’ market into a “Christmas Market & Gingerbread Shoppe.” The Roanoke, Va., “Dickens of Christmas” event has featured handmade crafts, soaps, and photography.

In Ohio, the Downtown Akron Partnership’s eight-year old Holiday Market, “begun in honor of German Christkindl Markets,” this year actually had two vendors hailing “from our Sister City of Chemnitz, Germany.” Missoula, Mont. — where I’ve repeatedly admired one of America’s finest all-seasons farmers’ and crafts markets — reported that the “Missoula Made Fair was so busy last Sunday you could barely get through the crowd!”

Parallel stories flooded in from Boston, Chicago, Baltimore and Dallas as well as Green Bay, Wis., Delray Beach, Fla., Albany, N.Y., Grand Rapids, Mich., Fort Collins, Colo., Charleston, S.C., Raleigh, N.C., even from Charlottetown, on Prince Edward Island in Canada.

There’s also some great news in Washington, D.C. (where normal life continues, notwithstanding the constant political calumny). A resplendant Downtown Holiday Market, which sprang up in a parking lot a few seasons ago, has graduated to a prime location directly beside the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.

Nancy Wasserman, handcrafter of glass jewelry, displays her work at the D.C. Holiday Market

And it symbolizes an historic comeback. The market is located on the very stretch of Washington’s Seventh Street Northwest where I recall witnessing the tower of smoke rise from rioting and fires of the April 1968 weekend following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Decades of abandonment followed, but now the area — dubbed the new “Penn Quarter” — is alive with new shops, restaurants, a state-of-the-art sports arena and two Metro subway stops.

The D.C. Holiday Market was launched by Washington’s Business Improvement District, founded in 1977. BIDs — there are now about 1,200 across the U.S. — typically assesses all property owners and then provide special security, extra street cleaning, marketing and planning. The idea’s to match what malls offer — and more. Washington’s is one of the most successful, having in 14 years helped spark $14 billion worth of office, retail and residential growth. And with a special focus, as Richard Bradley, the BID’s founder and executive director puts it, on enriching street life, “populating the public space with art, commerce and sociability.”

Streets for people — not just “throughput” of motor vehicles — is the key concept. In earlier years, it took a Washington cafe owner up to two years to get a permit to place seats on the sidewalk outside his premise. “Today we’re up to 1,237 cafes with 3,800 seats– a true indicator of livability,” Bradley claims.

Wintertime livability is another challenge. America’s holiday markets may never equal Europe’s winter markets — cities like Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Strasbourg, where people flock by the tens of thousands, from late morning into the icy evenings, enjoying city blocks set aside for artisans’ stands, puppet shows, candies and gingerbread houses, miniature steam train rides, hot spiced gluhwein and much more.

But we’re learning. I checked with Michael Berman, whose D.C.-based Diverse Markets Management firm works extensively managing outdoor public exhibitor markets including the Downtown Holiday Market for Washington’s BID. Berman circulates word of the opportunity to display to over 1,000 exhibitors — independent painters, sculptors, fiber art, leather, glass, ceramic, jewelry, printmaking and speciality food specialists. Exhibitors of foreign crafts are also invited.

Then Berman assembles juries — art professionals “with a keen eye” — to decide which exhibitors have the class and originality to be invited. Each day there’s a slightly different mix, selected for optimum balance. And a big part of the enjoyment, walking from stall to stall, is to meet, talk with the designer/exhibitors. Suddenly one’s in dialogue with real humans about their creative work, and can buy from them directly — a rare luxury in the age of mass merchandizing.

Thinking jealously of Europe, Berman adds “Just one thing’s missing for us in winter — alcohol.” Licensing for outdoor shows is a challenge, he notes — but adds: “Just wait — Some year we will have a grog tent.”

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

“Dance with one that brought you” is the title of a well-known song. But the Urban Dictionary offers a deeper meaning: “the principle that someone should pay proper fealty to those who have gone out of their way to look after them.”

Barack Obama should pay attention. In 2008, young voters were enthused and turned out for him by the millions.

But now? The campus/youth enthusiasm factor has declined sharply. The deficiency seriously imperils Obama’s reelection effort.

There’s one issue, though, that might reignite youthful enthusiasm. That issue is marijuana — partly its medical use, but especially Americans’ right to recreational use free of potential arrest and possible prison time.

Today’s grim reality is that police continue to arrest youth for marijuana possession by the hundreds of thousands. But each arrest is a red flag of danger, threatening life prospects for a young man or woman suddenly saddled with a permanent “drug arrest” record that’s easily located by employers, landlords, schools, credit agencies and banks.

Small wonder then that 62 percent of young Americans (ages 18 to 29) now favor legalizing marijuana, as the Gallup Poll reported this October.

And it’s not just youth these days. Gallup this year found 50 percent nationwide support for legalizing marijuana use — the most ever, up from a measly 12 percent in 1969 to 30 percent in 2000 and 40 percent in 2009.

A ballot measure to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana received 46.5 percent of the vote in California last year. Parallel measures are likely to be on the 2012 ballots in Colorado and Washington. Odd political bedfellows — Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) — recently introduced a legalization bill and now have 20 cosponsors. Paul even gets applause advocating legalization in Republican presidential debates.

But what about President Obama? In 2004 he endorsed marijuana decriminalization. He was candid about his early pot use and in 2006 told a group of magazine editors: “When I was a kid, I inhaled, frequently.” By his run for president in 2008, he was slipping away from decriminalization but at least talked of a “public health” approach, emphasizing drug treatment instead of prison, giving drug reform advocates hope for a new day in national policy.

But Obama as president has been a clear disappointment to reform forces. In White House-initiated electronic town halls, the respondents — who are heavily weighted to original Obama supporters — have repeatedly put marijuana at the top of their issue lists. But the White House has either laughed off or provided dismissive retorts.

Obama’s Drug Policy Office claims the drug war is over, replaced by a focus on shrinking demand, “innovative, compassionate and evidence-based drug policies”. But Obama has not once singled out marijuana — a substance arguably far less harmful to the human body than alcohol — for special consideration. Nor has he spoken to the harm to youth caused by 800,000 yearly arrests. Or moved to stem the billions of dollars a year still being spent on marijuana-related arrests.

He reappointed, in fact, a Drug Enforcement Administration head, Michele Leonhart, who has refused repeated requests to remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use.” The refusal has multiple ill effects — including making it much harder to test the initial indications that marijuana offers powerful relief for our ex-warriors suffering severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is clearly not the “change” Obama’s enthusiastic supporters of 2008 expected. And it’s deeply ironic. Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance notes that if local police departments had been enforcing marijuana laws as harshly in the early 1980s as many do today, “there’s a good chance a young Columbia student named Barack Obama could have been picked up — and not be in the White House today.”

Nadelmann suggests that both the White House Drug Office and the Justice Department enforcement divisions have been “coopted” by holdover appointees deeply invested in anti-marijuana rhetoric and “let’s just bust them” drug enforcement.

Facing the 2012 election, Obama’s not likely to advocate, suddenly, marijuana decriminalization. But he could announce it’s time for a serious national dialogue on the issue, to be a hallmark of his second term. He could express his dismay that 800,000 people, mostly young (and heavily black and Hispanic), are being arrested each year for marijuana possession — even as 50 percent of Americans favor legalization. He could focus on the massive costs of enforcement, the deep social costs of imprisonment. Let all America, youth included, join in the debate, he could urge.

A new openness to marijuana reform could help to reignite, on campuses and among high numbers of young people, the hope for “change” that really means something. Perhaps even prospects for the president’s own reelection.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON — Is the Justice Department poised for a counterattack on the sweeping wave of photo identification and related voter restriction laws that newly-Republican-controlled state legislatures have been grinding out this year?

Opponents of the laws are hoping so, awaiting a major speech on voting rights that Attorney General Eric Holder delivers in Austin on Dec. 13.

The stage was set Dec. 1 by Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, addressing a American Constitution Society forum. Florida, South Carolina and Texas, Perez said, would “bear a burden of showing” that their new photo I.D. laws “are not intentionally discriminatory and have a retrogressive effect” in assuring a broad right of all Americans to vote.

Perez noted that judicial decisions spanning a century have identified the right to vote as “preservative of all rights.” He called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and companion statutes “the crown jewels” of American participatory democracy, “a sacred trust” to be protected.

So now is the time for broad action, if Holder chooses to take it. Reports of actual fraud in today’s U.S. elections are extraordinarily rare. Nevertheless, legislatures across the country have passed an array of restrictive statutes that may disenfranchise as many as 5 million Americans, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.

The new curbs arguably represent the most serious efforts to exclude Americans from voting since the Jim Crow wave of anti-black voter suppression laws that Southern states enforced from the 1870s until the 1960s.

The new photo ID requirements for voting lead the list. Six states suddenly passed them this year — Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. The total would be 11 if Democratic governors in Montana, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Missouri had not vetoed similar laws passed by Republican-dominated legislatures.

Middle class citizens normally consider the photo ID laws reasonable (and polls show they enjoy broad support). But what the rest of us forget is that life at the economic edge, or in youthful years, presents challenges. A 2006 survey by the American Research Corp. showed that 25 percent of African-Americans, 18 percent of senior citizens, and 18 percent of 18-to-24 year-olds don’t have photo IDs. In Wisconsin, a separate survey showed 78 percent of young blacks (aged 18-24) lack a driver’s license.

The Brennan Center cites the case of Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year old African-American woman in Tennessee who was denied a free ID card and told she couldn’t vote at her polling place, as she had for elections over 75 years, because the names on her birth certificate didn’t match the married names on her registration cards.

Students also face barriers: the South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee laws explicitly disallow student ID’s as acceptable identification. Wisconsin effectively does the same. But Tennessee and Texas do allow concealed handgun permits to vote.

Many of the voter ID measures, critics note, are based on model bills circulated to legislators by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a heavily conservative non-profit organization funded by such corporations as Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Pfizer and Koch Industries.

Critics charge that the motive is appallingly obvious: to restrict voting by minorities and youth more likely to vast votes for liberal candidates and causes.

And the ID laws are just part of the picture. “Proof of citizenship” laws (requiring, for example, a birth certificate or naturalization papers) have been passed by Alabama, Kansas and Arizona. At least 7 percent of Americans lack this proof, the Brennan Center estimates.

Then there are new Texas and Florida laws to curb registration drives that typically add thousands of African-Americans and Hispanics to voter rolls. The Florida law carries such extreme penalties for any process error that the League of Women voters has withdrawn its entire registration program there.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Maine voted to end same-day voter registration — a key tool to increase participation. (Maine voters promptly overturned the law.) Yet there’s still another new barrier: five states shortened early voting times, including eliminating the Sunday before election day, known as a key date to mobilize black voters.

All these pile on top of pre-existing state laws disallowing felons, even with sentences completed, from voting. In Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia the ban is for life. Nationwide, 13 percent of black men have lost the right to vote — seven times the national average. The bans are clearly vengeful if not racist: society’s real interest is to bring felons back into the responsibilities of full citizenship.

The Justice Department lacks authority to curb all the nation’s voter suppression laws. But even a selection of new suits would telegraph a vital message: that free and unencumbered voting is sacred, and that after 222 years of nationhood we’re finally ready to defend the rights of all our citizens.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

“Sustainability.” It’s 14 letters, six syllables. Small wonder many people blanch when they read or hear the word. Some may ask — “Is it something about the environment?”

For clarity and to stress the timeliness of their work, the managers of the Obama administration’s “Sustainable Communities” program are switching strategies. Competitive planning grants for cities and regions are still the top goals. But instead of talking first about more efficient land use, transit or town planning, the new focus is now on raw economics.

Check the 52 cent figure, they say. Research shows that for every dollar the average American family has to spend, 52 cents is taken up right away for housing and transportation. That means everything else gets squeezed, sometimes dangerously. And not the least, such essentials as food and clothing.

So what’s a promising cure? It’s clearly to push the 52 cents figure down by helping workers and families gain easier, more affordable access to jobs and schools. And that does dictate that communities pivot away from yesterday’s sprawl patterns, embracing instead such smart development strategies as housing closer to real work centers, homes closer to schools, and transit services to help households spend less on car travel.

Plus, it means a need to supply more compact, efficiently located housing units as American family sizes keep shrinking and the population ages.

Clearly, more and more local communities “get” the saliency of this approach. Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, cites the outpouring of interest in HUD’s must recent Sustainable Communities nationwide competition, announced Nov. 21. There were eight times as many applicants as awardees, $500 million in funding requests but only $96 million to distribute among all winners.

Significantly, Donovan noted, this awards process is evoking growing interest among chambers of commerce and economic development corporations that are glad to become “core partners” in the local applicant coalitions.

The grants — 27 for individual communities, 29 for regions — are spread from from Boston to Denver to Seattle, from the deeply depressed city of Opa-locka, Fla., to heavily rural Fremont County, Idaho. All provide federal stimulus money to challenge local areas to create high quality, interconnected housing, transportation and workforce development plans which show clear potential economic payoffs.

Each project has to incorporate clear fact-based assessments; all are followed closely in implementation by the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, headed by Shelley Poticha. “We’re unusual for the federal government,” notes Poticha, “by investing in proactive strategies to shape the future and not just the historic pattern of federally-supported capital projects.”

The HUD effort doesn’t stand alone: it’s one section of the Obama administration’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities (www.sustainablecommunities.gov). It’s an initiative that works to coordinate smart growth, sustainable and economically promising initiatives and policies across historically rigid departmental lines. Encouraged and endorsed by the White House Domestic Policy Council, the three official players are HUD, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Key personnel from the three agencies meet not just occasionally but every week to mesh their policies and approaches. They’re regularly joined by the Agriculture Department, which isn’t officially part of the partnership yet with $20 billion a year in rural development is a significant player. Transportation adds heft, especially through its series of highly competitive “TIGER” grants for local transportation projects that are designed both for sustainability and high economic impact.

Ideally, all these efforts would be praised and advanced by Congress as harbingers of a smart and engaged federal government, one that dictates less and listens more to communities’ needs, encourages local ingenuity, and that helps to position the nation for a stronger joined economy and livable communities to come.

Sadly, it’s not happening. While Congress is willing to keep TIGER rolling with $500 million for the next fiscal year (enough to fund about 10 percent of its applications), the HUD Sustainable Communities program is in deep trouble.

Evidence: House Republicans originally prepared legislative language that actually would forbid a dollar of government expenditure if the related federal departments were to talk, plan, research, or manage grants cooperatively. And in relation to what activities? The language left no doubt on it intent: specified cited was “interagency coordination on livable communities or sustainable development.”

Geoffrey Anderson, president of Smart Growth America, commented: “What business would ever tell its units not to talk to each other?”

Later, cooler heads prevailed and that language was dropped by the House committee. But still, the final House-Senate conference report, while it did endorse the concept of interdepartmental coordination to integrate housing and transportation, failed to fund HUD’s Sustainable Communities program awards for the next year. Poticha’s office will be able to administer the grants already made, but not to issue new ones.

There’s just slim hope that funding will be restored in future years. Which would be sad — the demise of one of the most imaginative federal system innovations in many decades.

But then again, sometimes there’s an idea just too good to stay dead long.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.