CREATIVE CITY NEWSLETTER: NOVEMBER 2001

ISSUE 4: GROWTH

ISSUE IN FOCUS: Smart Growth
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Bohemian Index
CREATIVE CORNER: Slow Cities
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Marquette County, MI
September 11: Creative City Participants Respond
Research and Public Policy Outline
Creative City Participants' Updated Agendas


RESEARCH AND PUBLIC POLICY OUTLINE

Greetings from Partners! Though we had to postpone our activities in Louisville, we are still forging ahead with our Creative City agenda.  One of the key priorities of the fall meeting was to share with you our first cut at the Creative City research and public policy report outline.  We still plan to have the report published in 2004, and therefore must move right along with the process.  Had we been able to meet in October/November, we would have presented the outline and solicited your feedback in person.  While we cannot formally present or obtain discuss the outline face to face, I hope we can accomplish the goal through written communication.

I have sent each of you a copy (via mail and email) of the outline for your critique.  I am also presenting you with an online version below.  We would like each of you to spend some time going over the outline and the supplemental information.  After consideration, I would like to discuss your reaction with you.  Does the outline cover the areas of the project that you expected? Is there anything we’ve left out? Where do you see your city/community fitting into the research agenda? Can your community be a laboratory for one or more of the areas? Can your city offer academic, institutional, and/or other resources to the research involved in the publication? How would you like to be involved in the final publication?

After you have had an opportunity to review the draft, I hope you will use the Creative City discussion board (accessed through the newsletter with the same user name and password) to provide me with feedback and share with each other.  Following our discussions, we will then be ready to move to the next step in the process – establishing niche research areas for us to document.  We want to focus on the creative approaches you have each taken to dealing with the themes in the outline, and we need your feedback to achieve that goal.  As a result of our discussions, you will each receive the "next generation" of the research and public policy document that will further outline these niche areas and each community’s role in the creation of the final report.

The Creative City Research and Public Policy Agenda
Draft - October 2001

I.    Economics of Amenity and the New Economy

Throughout our years of work in communities across the country and internationally, Partners for Livable Communities has chosen to focus on the importance of an amenities based approach to improving the quality of life.  In 1980, Partners made a landmark contribution to the field of amenities-based planning with an urban economic development initiative entitled "Economics of Amenity."  The program was led by a number of distinguished economists who connected the decline of the manufacturing economy, and the subsequent rise of the service sector, with an increased significance in the perceived quality of life of a community.  Working with a thirty-seven-city consortium over five years, Partners explored the elements that made up quality of life and assessed how these elements could serve as an investment strategy for training and creating jobs.  The result changed the way businesses made location decisions, and gave a boost to communities to invest in an amenity infrastructure that included libraries, parks, streetscapes, and museums.

The 2000’s present a new set of challenges to cities struggling with the tough planning decisions that come with a revolution in the nation’s economy.  Though amenities still represent the crucial social and economic elements of a livable community, the New Economy raises the stakes for creative city planning.  A livable city not only provides an exciting and inviting home for mobile, choosy tech firms and professionals, but also promotes social equity through access to culture and education, safety through design, and pride through effective community development and amenity marketing.

II.   The Creative City Project

The Creative City project represents Partners’ newest effort to reexamine, using a select number of "creative cities", what it explored 20 years ago – the relationship of quality of life and amenities to community sustainability and smart development, and the use of creative solutions to diversify single-industry economies – with an emphasis on identifying and nurturing those practices that best suit the challenges and opportunities of the New Economy. It is now important to explore those creative ideas that embrace and strengthen high-tech jobs, e-commerce, and link local economies to the globally competitive region; cities with access to the best and the brightest can put those resources to work locally, serving the needs of those that have not had the dull bootstrap opportunities of advancing into the mainstream.  Partners seeks solutions that will improve the marketability of cities, helping cities become more livable by seizing their competitive cultural advantages.  With cities increasingly vying for access to the mobile workforce of the new economy, talent attracted through livability will allow development across seemingly disparate sectors of the economy, and will allow cooperation and common success to reach all citizens – cementing a community of mutually dedicated talent.

Establishing a policy agenda that effectively delivers on so many economic and cultural expectations is a tall order, but quite necessary.  As part of Partners for Livable Communities Creative City initiative, we are committed to developing this agenda, undertaking the research and documentation of its components, and producing a high quality report that communicates how our participating cities found and applied creative solutions to planning in the New Economy.

A.    The Use of Amenities
Using amenities as our toolbox, we have found that there are five overarching themes that carry the Creative City agenda.  The themes are: People, Place, Finance, Leadership, and Jobs.  Under each thematic area, our participating cities are finding creative approaches to using their amenities meet problems and opportunities in this new era of planning and community building.  An essential component of our Creative City work is to publish the report described above.  The following outline provides an initial scope of work for the report, using the five overarching themes as the basis for the Creative City research and public policy agenda.

i.  PEOPLE:
Communities are people – families and single people; children at risk and teenage parents; young people with nowhere to go and elderly people with nowhere to turn; people with jobs and people without jobs; people with decent places to live and people with nowhere to live.  Each of these issues can add up to problems for many communities and sometimes peoples’ needs, dreams, and fears can add to the problems facing communities.  When people can overcome their fears, focus on their dreams, and meet their own needs, they can take charge of their own communities and their own futures.  There are many examples in American communities that show how this can be done – many examples upon which a community can build.

• Low-income neighborhood conservation is creating options for     reinvestment and livability.
• Education programs are empowering community schools.
• The concept of livability is embracing issues of public health.
• Local organizations are helping children and families.
• Local welfare reform strategies are breaking the cycle of dependency.
• Museums, libraries, cultural centers, zoos, parks and other local institutions are creating new programs to serve families and communities.
• Local groups are building bridges of cooperation – not walls of obstruction – in multicultural cities.
• Communities are being redesigned so that people can grow old in place.
• Communities are taking back their streets so that residents can feel safer and more secure.

Social equity requires creating opportunity institutions – those that extend equity and access to the disenfranchised populations or at-risk individuals.  The demographic revolutions of the upcoming years will give minority groups, immigrants, and the elderly a new strength through their greater numbers; this change in the cultural landscape of American cities will require the necessary economic and social opportunity, as well as the requisite tolerance and integration, that will allow this jump in population to translate into a proportionate bloom in economic prospects, cultural renaissance, and human development.
The Creative City research and public policy agenda explores solutions, such as the following, under the theme of "People":

• Culture Builds Community
• Aging in Place
• New Programs for Old Institutions
• Multiculturalism as an Asset
• Cultural Resources for Youth At Risk
• Neighborhood Empowerment – Take Back the Streets
• Planning for Healthy Cities
• Access to Physical and Mental Fitness

ii.  PLACE:

Place, whether the focus is on a rural or suburban community, a central city, or on a region, is a defining element of the Creative City agenda.  Each participating city/community is a defined place, but the process of definition is not always easy.  There are many issues and problems related to place and place-based development.  The design of a city, the constituency of a region, the accessibility of a rural or suburban community, and other elements of "place" can add up to both challenges and opportunities in planning for the New Economy.  There are, again, many examples of how communities can face these issues.

Partners for Livable Communities will examine, through its research and public policy agenda, a number of ways that its participating Creative Cities are addressing the issues related to our theme of "Place".  As they use their amenities toolbox, we will explore participants’ solutions like the following:

• Tourism and Hospitality
• Celebration and Animation
• Cultural and Heritage Districts
• Place-based Marketing Strategies
• "Green City" initiatives
• Downtown Development – Revitalizing Downtowns, Saving Open Spaces
• Smart Growth Strategies
• Transportation Agendas
• Housing for All
• Nature, Parks, and Open Spaces
• Regional Cooperation and Regional Competition

iii.  FINANCE

The responsibility of finance for civic programs – ranging from infrastructure projects to educational programs – largely falls upon local government.  It does not seem to matter if it is a time of prosperity or a time of belt-tightening—there never is enough money to go around. 
Complex partnerships between the business and government sectors are common in development.  Partners helps communities maximize return on the various tax and other revenue sources used to forge these partnerships.  One special area of interest is in helping private developers and municipal governments decide how to share the benefits and costs of infrastructure improvements.  Following are some of the creative financing tactics that will help a community raise money for these improvements.

• Public/Private Partnerships for Economic Development-what should and should not be given away.
• Tax increment financing
• Corporate priorities-Is local community or the global market the first priority?
• Foundation resources for the city-community foundations as players

Partners will continue to explore the theme of "Finance" through the Creative City research and public policy agenda.  As with the other overarching themes, our report will demonstrate the many solutions Creative City participants have found to addressing issues related to finance, including the following:

• Community Re-investment – using banks and community development corporations
• Downtown Financing Strategies – city bonding and lending powers
• Metropolitan "asset" financing
• Tax Increment Financing
• Business Improvement Districts, Arts and Entertainment Districts – Civic Empowerment Taxes
• Public-Private Partnerships
• Federal Government/Federal Assistance
• Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities
• Growth and Growth Taxes
• Privatization and Advertising – Corporations and Foundations

iv.  LEADERSHIP:

In the 21st Century, the purely conventional modes of governing communities – the top-down, centralized method – simply will not address all the needs of communities.  From citizen action groups to decentralized planning methods, and from major private sector motivation on community investment to community-oriented policing groups, the role of leadership has taken on a different meaning.
Community empowerment and renewal are long-term propositions in the new economy, and they require leadership over a long period of time.  Partners’ experience has led the organization to some important conclusions regarding leadership in successful community renewal.  Whatever the situation, whatever the place, whatever the time, communities in which leadership is issue based, institutionalized, and continuously renewed are positioned to conceptualize and carry out empowerment programs successfully.

Creative City participants are constantly exploring the theme of "leadership", and our report reflects some of the solutions that they have found through research and public policy agendas.  Some examples of these issue-based leadership solutions demonstrated in the Creative City report:

• Civic Capacity Building
• Active Visioning and Goal Setting
• Regional and Non-Governmental Stakeholders
• Working With the Media
• Faith-Based Leadership
• Cooperation Between City/County/State

v.  JOBS:

Individual self-reliance is essential to community self-reliance.  In a period of technical change, international competition, and increasing conglomeration of industries, communities that want to become more stable and self-reliant must find new ways to create and retain jobs.
Investments in the quality of life and employment diversity are paying dividends for communities across the country.  Many communities are taking advantage of the relationship between the promotion of amenities and local economic growth to add to the quality of life for those who live and work in the community and generate revenue for the community through expanded tourism and business markets.

• Job creation and retention strategies are responding to new technologies, changes in defense spending, international business opportunities, and social needs such as affordable housing.
• Neighborhood enterprises are keeping income in the neighborhood and building links with downtown.
• With corporate support for job training and work-welfare programs, communities are building tomorrow’s labor force.
• Investments in amenities – animating the city, keeping an eye on public aesthetics, cultural planning and development, and creating strong city and community images – are paying off in quality of life and economic opportunity.
• New concepts for economic development are going beyond convention centers and sports stadiums.

Under the overarching theme of "jobs", our participants have found many creative solutions to related issues using an amenities-based strategy.  Our research and public policy agenda explores a number of these solutions:

• Focusing on the Economics of Amenities – Quality of Life Pays
• Attracting High Technology Firms to the Area
• Strong Manufacturing Bases
• School to Work Programs
• Job Training/Apprentice/Retraining Programs
• Tourism and Hospitality
• The City at Night – Attracting Commercial Activity
• Using Humanities and Cultural Districts
• Attracting Tenants by Celebrating the City
• Image and Marketing Strategies
• Greening of the City
• Neighborhood Enterprise