| This column is appearing a week later than it would have normally appeared because I've been on vacation. My oldest son got married in Thailand, and I, along with about three dozen other friends and family members, traveled halfway around the world for the grand occasion. It was very good to be there, and, as always, it's good to be home again.
Travel almost always affords us some new perspective on our own home communities or regions, and this trip was no exception. Among other things, I came back with a new appreciation for some of the challenges and opportunities facing the Rocky Mountain West as we think about how this region can best position itself for sustained success in the context of the global economy.
Southeast Asia turns out to be a good place
to think regionally within a global context. Up
through the 1960s, all of Southeast Asia remained very
poor, and in every way decidedly third-world.
Then a few countries and city-states began to take an
explicitly "Asian" approach to economic development,
deliberately attempting to leverage their natural advantages
to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We
first heard of the East Asian "tigers" -- Hong Kong,
Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea -- and these were
soon joined by a second generation of "tigers" -- Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, and, pre-eminent in this
group, Thailand.
While the experience has varied from country to country, all of them have pursued policies suited to their own place in the world, taking advantage of natural features like harbors and waterways, raw materials, and cheap labor, but also pursuing aggressive social policies like widespread education, land reform, and high savings rates. Progress has certainly not been uniform, nor has it come without sometimes high human and ecological costs. The point here is not to romanticize this particular effort at subcontinental global positioning, but to look for any lessons it might hold for our own subcontinental region.
In fact, the clearest lesson I thought I
had learned from my journey came from what seems to
me to be a growing failure on the part of one of these
"tigers." Thailand continues to make progress
by most measures of economic prosperity, but as I drove
and walked through (and flew above) the blanket of smog
that constantly envelops Bangkok, it seemed increasingly
clear that Bangkok had to be jeopardizing its role as
a world-class city by allowing its airshed to be so
badly polluted. If indeed global businesses are
increasingly footloose -- able to locate wherever they
choose -- and if indeed quality of life is becoming
an increasingly important location criterion, then Bangkok
(and therefore Thailand) is not as well positioned for
success as its most progressive leaders would surely
choose.
So what does any of this say about the Rocky Mountain West? First of all, no region in the world is better positioned than we are to understand and profit from the increasingly important role of livability as a key contributor to sustained prosperity. For a decade and a half, this region has been the fastest growing in the nation, not only in terms of population, but also in economic terms such as income growth. Unlike the economic growth of the Asian "tigers," very little of the recent economic growth in the Rockies has resulted from deliberate social or economic policy. Instead, it has occurred largely because, as historical forces have freed individuals and enterprises to locate wherever they choose, our very appealing and very open landscapes have made the Rockies a leading destination.
The steady growth in both population and
economic activity in the Rockies reveals unmistakably
where this region's global competitive advantage lies.
But as a growing number of Westerners are coming to
realize, we cannot secure that advantage without becoming
increasingly deliberate (and smart) about those public
policies that either enhance or undermine that advantage.
And nothing will make a bigger difference to the long-term
prospects of this region than the way we manage our
cities.
If the open landscapes of the West are going to continue to attract people to the region, then cities become crucial simply because that growing population has to be concentrated if the landscapes are to remain open. We might think that, with all the public land in the West, this would be a marginal issue, but a quick look at the growth of land trusts and the passage of city-sponsored open space bonds proves otherwise.
As the West's economy has changed over the
past few decades, its center of gravity has clearly
migrated from resource extraction to city-centered economies.
In fact, cities, with their capacity to concentrate
people and economic activity, have become the real drivers
of prosperity across the region. Their capacity
to play that role depends on their ability to maintain
their global competitive advantage -- which again is
their livability. Livability is a multi-layered
and complex phenomenon, and it clearly cannot be protected
or enhanced without very deliberate policies.
The good news is that many of our western cities are pursuing those policies with ever-greater determination and ingenuity. Open space bonds, like those passed by Boise a few years ago, are a good example. Light rail systems, like Denver's, or the new one in Salt Lake City, will become increasingly important to the region's growing cities. Downtown revitalization, and particularly the encouragement of downtown living, can begin to realign expectations about what constitutes good urban living, so that steadily fewer people think of the good life in terms of single-family detached homes, let alone exurban ranchettes.
As western cities mature, so must their relationship with the surrounding countryside, and here again we see encouraging signs of movement in the right direction. More and more of our cities are developing active farmers' markets, which are just one more city amenity, but in this case the urban amenity also provides an economic boost to the surrounding farms and ranches.
Livability is incompatible with widespread poverty, but that incompatibility is easily masked or ignored. The rest of the region should keep a close eye on Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's bold initiative to reduce or eliminate homelessness in his city. It's the right thing to do in human terms, of course, but I suspect that Hickenlooper, a successful entrepreneur before he became mayor, also understands that Denver will become that much more attractive as an economic hub if it can succeed in addressing this debilitating economic disparity.
Most of the initiatives for improving our cities must necessarily come from the cities themselves. In the process, cities in the region should be diligent about learning from one another's successes and failures. A few years ago, the Center for the Rocky Mountain West joined with the University of Calgary to sponsor a series of Cities of the Rockies conferences, to which we invited elected city leaders, planners, and civic leaders. It was clear that, while all of these groups were always seeking to learn whatever they could from other cities wherever they might be located, they were especially eager to learn from other Rocky Mountain cities, simply because we share so many challenges and opportunities.
That kind of learning is important for the
individual cities in the region, but it is also important
for the region as a whole. The further we move
into the age of the global economy, the more important
it becomes to recognize and leverage competitive advantages
at various scales. The subcontinental scale will
only become more important as the century progresses,
and in the Rockies, our regional success in the global
economy will depend increasingly on how well we manage
our cities.
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