Philadelphia Citichat October 8 1999

CITICHAT 33/99 - OCTOBER 8 1999

Philadelphia

Between last week's and this week's Citichat I attended the 45th Annual Conference of the International Downtown Association (IDA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The theme for this year's conference was "Developing, Managing and Promoting the 24 Hour Downtown".There was a wide choice of workshops, round table discussions and plenary keynote speakers, over sixty sessions in all from Saturday through to Tuesday afternoon.

The local IDA member, in this case the Philadelphia Center City District (ie one of the local Business/City Improvement Districts), together with the IDA, came up with some outstanding keynote speakers. Two that I found of great interest and relevance were Theodore Hershberg from the Center for Greater Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania who spoke on "The Role of Cities in Regional and International Competition" and Andreas Duany of the professional urban practice Duany Plater-Zyberk of Miami Florida who spoke on "Levelling the Playing Field between Cities and Suburbs". More about his input next week.

I love speakers who are clearly passionate about what they speak on even if I don't always agree with what they are saying. This wasn't the case with Hershberg, for, whilst incredibly passionate about his subject matter, he also made a great deal of common sense. ;Some of the challenges and opportunities that he felt that CITIES must square up to:

*Ensuring that communities have a strong, diverse economic base

*Maintaining greenspace

*Integrating sectors of development (retail/housing/sports/cultural,etc)

*Providing accessible transport

*Improving quality of life

*Being concerned about runaway growth and managing it, and

*Fostering private/public partnerships.

He felt that these issues could not effectively be addressed on a purely city level for the unit of competition today is REGIONAL. This required Downtown leaders to;

*Get involved in local metropolitan planning and to

*Support sensible regional growth policies

He pointed out that in the USA regionalism has to struggle to overcome four dichotomies between city and suburb.1. Race: American inner city communities are almost all black, suburbs almost all white. 2 Class: American cities cater for lower income levels; suburbs for middle and upper income groups. 3. Politics; American city communities are largely Democrat, suburbs largely Republican. 4. Parochialism is widespread.

He pleaded forcibly for scarce investment capacities to be used wisely and for urban sprawl to be contained. Toronto has recently taken a stand that no moneys from urban sources may be used to fund urban sprawl. Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis/St Paul are way ahead with the establishment of urban growth management and the creation of urban growth boundaries and are seeing the benefits whilst other cities merely talk about the issue..

For cities to survive, the cost of goods and services must be lowered, the cost of capital must be lessened by controlling sprawl, the central cores of cities must be stabilised and human resources must be developed to the full. The major source of comparative advantage is to develop human resources. If cities and regions do not have well educated people "you can kiss your cities goodbye". We need to anchor our children to strong economic growth in the future for new technologies will favour the educated.

Pointing out that a concentration of poverty in inner cities must become more and more expensive to service, he stressed that the real stakeholders of inner cities are in fact the suburbanites for it is the suburbanites who ultimately will be most affected by inner city decline. It is the suburbanites who should be taking the initiative and setting down their requirements for inner city revitalisation instead of walking away from the problem or living as if there weren't one.