World Cities Summit Issue, Jun 2008

Transformative Investments:
Remaking American Cities for a New Century
Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner

Transformative Investments often involve an empirically-grounded vision at the building block level: While a vision is not a necessary pre-requisite for realising transformative investments, cities that proceed without one have a higher probability of making the wrong physical bets, siting them in the wrong places, or ultimately creating a physical landscape that fails to cumulatively add up to “ cityness”. It is easy to find such examples around the country, such as isolated mega-projects (a new stadium or convention centre) or waterfront revitalisation efforts that constructed the wrong projects, having misunderstood the market and the diversifying demographic.

Telescoping the possibilities and developing a bold vision must be done through an empirically-grounded process. A visioning exercise should therefore include: an economic and market diagnostic of the building block; a physical diagnostic; an evaluation of existing projects; and the development of a vision to transform the landscape. From here, disparate actors (public, private, civic, not-for-profit) will have the best instruments to assess whether a physical project could meet specific market, demographic and physical needs—increasing its chances of becoming truly transformative.

Transformative Investments require integrative thinking and action: Transformative investments are often an act in “connecting the dots” between the urban experiences (e.g., transportation, housing, economic activity, education and recreation), which are inextricably linked in reality but separated in action. This requires a significant change in how cities are both planned and managed.

On the public side, it means that transportation agencies must re-channel scarce infrastructure investments to leverage other city building goals beyond facilitating traffic. It means that agencies driving a social agenda, such as schools and libraries, have to re-imagine their existing and new facilities to integrate strong design and move away from isolated projects.

In the private sector, it means understanding the broader vision of the city and carefully siting and designing investments to increase successful city-building and not just project-building. It means increasing their own standards by using exemplary design and construction materials. It means finding financially beneficial approaches to mixed income housing projects and mixed use projects instead of just single uses.
In all cases, it requires holistic thinking that cuts across the silos and stovepipes of specialised professions and fragmented bureaucracies.

BUILDING GREAT CITIES
For the first time in decades, American cities have a chance to experience a measurable revival. While broader macro forces have handed cities this chance, city builders are also learning from past mistakes. After investing billions of dollars into city revitalisation efforts, the principles underpinning particularly successful and catalytic projects—transformative investments—are beginning to be clarified. The most important lesson for cities, however, is to embrace “cityness”, to maximise what makes them physically and socially unique and distinctive. Only in this way will American cities reach their true greatness.

Bruce Katz is a Vice President at the Brookings Institution and founding Director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. He regularly advises national, state, regional and municipal leaders on policy reforms that advance the competitiveness of metropolitan areas. He focuses on reforms that promote the revitalisation of central cities and older suburbs, and enhance the ability of these places to attract, retain and grow the middle class. In 2006, he received the prestigious Heinz Award in Public Policy for his contributions to urban and metropolitan America.

Julie Wagner is the Trans Atlantic Fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Formerly the Deputy Planning Director for Washington DC, she is an expert on long- and short-range land use planning. Her research areas include how federal policies of various EU member states are advancing the prosperity of metropolitan regions; how US federal and state policies are encouraging quality physical reinvestments in urban areas; the resolution of urban development projects through land use mediation; and how to design and implement public involvement programmes for controversial urban projects.

The authors want to thank and acknowledge Andy Altman for his intellectual insights on developing this topic.

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