The Rise of the Rest of Us – How Middle-Weight Cities Can Rebuild America
America is crumbling and it needs to be rebuilt. In their book “The New Localism”, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak make the case that it will be the middle-weight cities that will lead the way in rebuilding our country, and I agree completely.
I entitled this blog “The Rise of the Rest of Us,” because so much of our national news and federal government’s attention is on the heavy-weight cities, like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, with Seattle trying to fight above its weight. These cities are entrenched in a zero-sum extreme partisan struggle over societal challenges, where the only possible hope is to mitigate consequences rather than solve the problems.
Ever growing big city budgets are consistently outpaced by the increasing cost of various societal needs and, as described by Katz and Nowak, these big cities all lack certain attributes and types of capital necessary to adequately address these needs and create a place where all people can earn, learn and belong. I have bucketted the various types of capital needed, in order of priority, as Community Capital, Social Capital and Economic Capital. Big cities are simply too big and too disjointed to possess or effectively exercise the needed capital.
In contrast, middle-weight cities populated by the rest of us, cities like Sioux Falls, SD, Spokane, WA and Tucson, AZ and many others, have all three types of capital in abundance. The size of these cities has allowed them to remain agile and connected, and they are well suited to organize and unleash all three types of capital for the betterment of our society. Let’s focus on Community Capital.
Katz and Novak write that: “…the dynamism of the US Economy comes from the wide swath of middle-weight cities across the Nation. This broader base of metropolitan economies creates more flexibility and diversification for the US economy as a whole. It can be one of America’s greatest advantages but only if we invest accordingly. Enhancing the value of those middle-weight cities will be decisive for the American economy in the future.” Enhancing the value of these cities starts by moving away from the top-down policy arguments from the state and federal level, and instead moving toward and embracing the ideal of local reinvention.
Community Capital is required for local reinvention because it depends on a higher level of social cohesion. Community Capital means there is a strong base of people who have a moral consensus on the value of community and strive to include everyone in the opportunity to earn and learn and feel welcomed to enjoy and contribute to the aesthetics and resources of the city. In other words, there is a very strong stewardship of the city’s resources to build a vibrant civil life for all. Without a strong sense of common values and a commitment to building community, all the social empathy and money in the world will not solve problems or move humanity forward.
Community Capital is essential to problem solving because it strives to be inclusive, and thereby generates an abundant amount of new problem solvers who are aligned on the value and social cohesion of their community and want to maximize their contributions to the betterment of their community.
Community Capital remains strong in middle weight cities, and it empowers the citizenry to use the kind of innovative problem solving that Katz and Nowak believe is much more productive than the uniformity of policy making, because “it adapts the risk-taking attitude of individual entrepreneurs and investors to the collective sphere. It is experimental and tolerant of failure.” It is in the local realm where the immediacy of the spirit to innovate, try, fail and try something else continues to move humanity forward.
Katz and Nowak state that another advantage these cities have is how they are “multidisciplinary in focus and collaborative in practice, enabling cities to leverage the expertise and experience of disparate sectors and diverse sets of people.” This can only occur where an abundance of Community Capital is present and continuously cultivated.
Further, Katz and Nowak note how New Localism is “intensely focused on maximizing value for long term prosperity rather than short term private profit or political gain. Cities are not inclusively governments but represent broader networks of institutions and individuals – homeowners, universities, hospitals, philanthropies, private businesses, utilities- which are committed to and depend on the betterment of their place.” In other words, all participants are all in it for the “we” and the “us”. That is Community Capital!
Community Capital enables each middle-weight city to thrive on its own, but appreciating the real power of Community Capital comes from what Katz and Nowak describe as the new horizontal, rather than vertical, mechanism for societies to solve hard problems. They write that “Cities may be on their own, given the abdication of responsibility by national governments and states, but they are not alone. Other cities are continuously inventing solutions that are ripe for replication and adaptation.” The problem solving and innovation is going to spread from middle- weight city to middle-weight city, thereby spreading the best of who we are, and the best of what we can be, across the nation.
Citizens in middle-weight cities all across America face many of the same societal challenges and needs of the big cities. But these citizens, strengthened by the bonds of Community Capital, are free to make decisions and innovations that build, protect and beautify our communities, drive local and national economies, educate children and change lives. The answers, solutions, inventions, innovations, and cures are walking around among us every day, and it is in the rise of the rest of us that those efforts can be tried, applied, shared and learned. And if they fail, they will inspire us to try again.
