Metropolitanism Finds an Audience

Two member schools reported for this issue that their programs have been involved in efforts to increase local leaders’ awareness of metropolitanism.  MIT and UWM both report below on programs they have sponsored to explore opportunities for greater metropolitan cooperation and coordination.

MIT colloquium addresses Metropolitanism

As planners seek ways to combat sprawl and promote reinvestment in inner cities, metropolitanism has become a hot topic.  The fall 2000 colloquium of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning tackled the topic of “Metropolitanism in Practice,” examining the politics and policies that have succeeded in getting cities and suburbs to work together to address area-wide concerns.  Thirteen speakers from metro areas around the United States, along with discussants from the Boston area, joined audiences of 30 to 40 in lively discussions over workable solutions to today’s urban dilemmas. 

The speakers—including elected officials, planners from the public and private sectors, community organizers, academics, and even one funder of metropolitan initiative—addressed topics ranging from land use, to tax-base sharing, to affordable housing.  The colloquium emphasized political feasibility, leading to crackling debates such as that between Greg Galuzzo of Chicago’s Gamaliel Foundation, which emphasizes power politics and confrontation grounded in grassroots organizing, and John Parr of the Center for Regional and Neighborhood Action in Denver, which promotes slow consensus-building.  (Their conclusion: each strategy needs the other as well.)  Catherine Ross, Director of the newly created Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, pointed out that despite her agency’s sweeping statutory powers, success depends critically on building political legitimacy.  Bob Stacey, who played a variety of roles in institutionalizing metropolitan land use planning in Portland, Oregon, recounted the successes of the Portland model, but also noted its fragility, as exemplified by the passage—just a few days before Stacey’s talk—of a statewide ballot anti-“takings” initiative which may invalidate the area’s planning process.

Speaker after speaker highlighted the fault lines of race, class, and geography that make metropolitan cooperation difficult, and bemoaned the lack of federal support for area-wide collaboration.  Nonetheless, the tone of the colloquium was optimistic, looking back at what has been accomplished in recent decades and looking forward to new possibilities.  Speakers appealed to visions of a better society, but built their plans on pragmatic politics.  “When people see how these issues are affecting them in their pocketbook,” Mayor William Johnson of Rochester commented, “that’s when they get very civic-minded.”

  UWM Hosts Meeting of Metro Area Mayors

Mayors, village presidents, and municipal administrators from southeastern Wisconsin met at UWM on February 7 to review their accomplishments in making local government more efficient through cooperation with their neighbors and to explore the need and potential for even greater cooperation in the future.  The meeting was convened by the UWM School of Architecture and Urban Planning, as part of the Metro Milwaukee Initiative, a three-year project funded by the Herzfeld Foundation.  Faculty from the Department of Urban Planning facilitated the discussions.  The event was sponsored by Wisconsin Gas Company and the Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation.

The municipal executives, representing the larger communities in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington Counties, saw the meeting as an opportunity to jointly identify ways to maintain and enhance economic growth and a high quality of life in communities throughout the area.  As one mayor stated, “We all recognize that more and more we need to work together to get southeastern Wisconsin recognized as the great place it is.” Another mayor commented, “There are things happening outside our borders that are good for us, and if we don’t look outside, we are not serving the interests of our constituents.”  All agreed that, although communities in the metro area are cooperating more than ever, even more cooperation would be beneficial.

However, mayors and village presidents also observed that the residents of their communities often do not recognize the benefits to be gained through cooperation because they fear loss of autonomy and community identity. It seems, one mayor commented, that residents really don’t care who provides a service, as long as the service is good.  But, at the same time, residents worry that cooperative efforts will mean decreases in service quality, even though experience shows that services actually improve through cooperation.  Consequently, municipal executives find that they must expend considerable political capital to get cooperative projects through their city councils 

At the end of the day, the municipal executives had identified a number of ways that they could work together and with UWM on important issues of economic development, watershed planning, land use, and regional assets.  Several municipal executives indicated that they were looking forward to working with a group that UWM Chancellor Nancy Zimpher is pulling together to work on economic development in southeast Wisconsin. 

A report by Sammis White, UWM Professor of Urban Planning, was distributed at the meeting, documenting the substantial efforts of local communities to save tax dollars through cooperative efforts.  White interviewed municipal executives (mayors and village presidents) and community development directors of the 15 largest cities in the four-county metro area to learn more about cooperative efforts among municipalities.  He found “a good deal of intergovernmental cooperation is currently occurring” and “more cooperation is occurring than any time in the recent past.”

Communities in the study had pursued a long list of successful cooperative efforts. Recent successes include the creation of Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission (MADACC), a consortium of the 19 municipalities of Milwaukee County, and a cooperative recycling effort.  Other cooperative efforts found in White’s research include multi-community sewer and water systems, cooperative purchasing of equipment to obtain a better price per unit, shared police and fire services or support facilities for those services, such as a fire tower or a firing range.