This fall, Donjek principal Jon Commers is again offering a colloquium in the Urban Studies department at the University of Minnesota, focused on the interaction of public and private sectors in cities. He created and has taught a similar course since 2014.

Cities are many things: Buildings, streets and transit routes, infrastructure to collect and distribute water, energy, and communication. More fundamentally, cities are networks of human relationships, drawn together by reduced costs of connection. Typically having developed over many years, cities have a unique history both of physical design and social dynamics, which influence their health and future prospects.

Public and private organizations have different roles to play in the city, different motivations, and perspectives about the other that don’t consistently match. At the same time, government agencies and private firms are truly interdependent in the city environment: Neither can accomplish their objectives without engaging the other. Interdependence of the public and private sectors can be traced historically, and this dynamic produces political tensions that can support or undermine urban areas.

Public-private partnerships are an essential urban redevelopment tool applied in U.S. cities to accomplish a wide range of development and social objectives. This course will explore the history, current condition, and future of how private- and public-sector organizations identify, structure and implement partnerships that shape community development and real estate development in cities.

Through reading, discussion and other media, this course will use the advantages of the University’s urban setting to explore the many types of partnerships that have evolved to support the economic, social and cultural health of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Students will also consider what kinds of partnerships will make a difference in an increasingly urban future. Key themes of the course will include:

• The City is a Platform for Interaction
• Roots: Recent and Distant History of Public/Private Interaction
• Contemporary Tools for Partnership
• Politics of Public/Private Interaction and Interdependence: “You Didn’t Build That”
• Future Marketplace and Partnerships
• Applications of Public-Private Partnerships
• Using Data to Evaluate How People Use Places

Human progress has always been the fruit of small and iterative innovations, undertaken by individuals acting on what Johnson terms “slow hunches” that accrue from experience. When these individual tinkerers are connected via decentralized networks offering numerous ways for them to interact, the cross-fertilization and productivity of these innovations is magnified.

As a result, Johnson presents his confidence that members of these flat, decentralized networks of peers, using an increasingly broad and powerful set of platforms to work together, will advance human progress in the future. They are, in his term of art, peer progressives. Interaction using these platforms is evolving the way we go about invention, trade, social life, music making, even revolution.

Johnson’s frame of reference is primarily the internet, but his heralding of the power of peer progressive values could not viably take place without both the model of the city, and the contributions of urban networks to nearly every example he cites. Consider this handful of insights from Future Perfect as they relate to urban dynamics:

Faster, Higher, Stronger
“The density and open exchange of a peer network drive up the information productivity of the overall system, because new ideas circulate quickly through the network and can be built upon or expanded at little cost. You can do more with less.” Reducing the transaction cost of developing new ideas, and stretching them into multiple commercial forms, are why Jericho was formed and the essence of why modern cities exist. In Triumph of the City, economist Ed Glaeser expresses the same sentiment in his language: “The increasingly global marketplace means that the returns to innovation have increased. Since urban density speeds the flow of new ideas, an increase in the value of innovation naturally strengthens those cities that specialize in innovation.” Information productivity will vary among cities, but cities will increasingly lead the way. They are the global leaders.

Crowdfunding as Urban Springboard
“Kickstarter, for instance, took an existing problem that markets had traditionally fumbled – how do we find and support interesting new creative forms – and radically increased both the density and diversity of participants. It gave thousands of creative people direct access to the wallets of millions of potential patrons.” Cities provide a rich backdrop for ideas to be conceived and developed as they spread through professional, personal and civic networks forming there. In art and commerce, cities provide a forum for creators to combine and recombine. Crowdfunding sites have taken the assembly of productive, critical masses around specific interests that occurs in cities, and multiplied it using technology.

City Mashup
In one of Johnson’s prior works, Where Good Ideas Come From, the author presented valuable historical context, drawing on examples including the process Johannes Gutenberg used to derive the printing press. In his account, Johnson establishes the connection between the wine presses used in Gutenberg’s native Rhineland in the 15th century, and the design of the printing press, which by economizing published print, unleashed an era of democratization and reform. In Future Perfect, he draws the same thread through to today’s open source world. “When text is free to flow and recombine,” he argues, “new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases.” Just as the city is where individuals come to mix and match with others, it is also where their ideas are shaped and shifted and made into new forms. Call it concept arbitrage.

Buckminster Fuller said “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In Future Perfect, Stephen Johnson has delivered a succinct argument that the peer progressive model is at this moment rendering the prior model obsolete. And the peer progressive model’s home field is the city.

The author’s premise argues that the comparative value of proximity to core cities – their economic and cultural assets, diverse building stock, and ease of transit access – is rising. As that shift in value unfolds, says Ehrenhalt, many U.S. metro areas will invert, assuming a pattern where core city neighborhoods typically are among the most desired, while suburban areas offer values accessible to more residents.

Ehrenhalt writes a compelling narrative, observing dynamics that can be observed in cities across the country. In interviews he’s described the shift as “an entire metropolitan area rearranging itself…a true inversion of demographic groups.” Still, at times the premise does not allow full exploration of variation within regions. He stresses the importance of transit in reshaping regions, for example, but does not organize his argument to reflect how effective transit service can itself reshape the city/suburb relationship. If in one area of a metro, transit can move people from city to suburb (and vice versa) more effectively than in other areas, how might they invert differently? Job growth on a transit corridor, for example, may affect residents living elsewhere along that corridor, more than it does other residents living nearer by, even if it’s occurring within the same municipal boundary.

That caveat aside, it’s clear that fiscal scarcity, changing pricing caused by climate change (essentially unaddressed to date), shrinking households and shifting cultural attitudes about cities are converging powerfully to reshape metro areas, and increasingly channel investment toward the center. For public agencies and firms involved in redevelopment, such as Donjek clients, this return to a pattern based on proximity will produce a whole universe of new opportunities.

The news narrative around these issues is usually simplified in an unhelpful way (see this critique of coverage of recent demographic data released for the Minneapolis Saint Paul region), presenting these trends as “core cities up, suburbs down.” None of the ingredients here are so simple: The physical geography and amenities of regions, job location criteria, and the politics that shape transportation investments are just a few examples. Instead, shifts like the Great Inversion will create opportunities and troubles which are different than the recent past, but very familiar in history. Creativity is required for good redevelopment, now more so with these dramatic demographic shifts underway.

Dating to the mid-19th century, St. Paul’s University Avenue has matched entrepreneurial people with available space, central location, ease of access, and proximity to employees and other businesses. Central location and a mix of new ideas and longstanding networks in the community continue to stimulate entrepreneurship and business development on University Avenue. Its position in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region also frames the largest public works project in the state’s history: Construction of light rail transit service that will extend from Union Depot in downtown Saint Paul, the State Capitol, down University Avenue to the Midway, to the University of Minnesota and downtown Minneapolis. Illustrated in comparable markets, LRT service is likely to elevate demand for space and increase foot traffic substantially on University Avenue. As development increases around University Avenue, opportunities arise for business owners operating there.

At the same time, increased real estate values on and near University pose a challenge to the small and emerging businesses that help give the street its character. This report summarizes an exploration of models that could create space on University Avenue for new and existing small businesses, led by the Greater Frogtown Community Development Corporation and the Rondo Community Land Trust, and made possible by funding from the McKnight Foundation. Informal survey data suggest that 10% of business owners on University own the property in which they operate. While ownership can provide long-term stability of building cost for business owners, ownership is not a uniformly high priority – or even a uniformly desirable outcome – for businesses.

The report concludes a feasibility analysis undertaken with Donjek coordination over the last year. The project set out to address three priorities:

• Explore the need for and interest in long-term stable-price business property ownership and leasing;
• Identify and evaluate models for accomplishing long-term cost stability for business operators; and
• Chart a course for accomplishing these objectives without ongoing subsidy.

Innovative models that blend ownership and leasing, public with private, may have a role to play in supporting entrepreneurs on University Avenue after light rail transit is in place. The report highlights selected strategies that allow business owners to structure more stable real estate costs, either through ownership or leasing. These strategies and a more stable cost structure for small businesses allow entrepreneurs to build reserves and working capital, invest in future projects or products, and hire more employees.

At Strong Towns, we’re part of a growing chorus, spanning across disciplines, bearing a message that communities making forward-thinking, high-return public investments will be positioned more strongly for the future. The mechanisms of growth we’ve outlined at Strong Towns are each unsustainable in the long run, as is much of the development they have enabled us to produce.

Form follows function.

While I am always reluctant to quote secondary online content, I would be remiss to skip the following Wikipedia commentary about the origins of this phrase, which architect Louis Sullivan (evidently) made famous:

Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th Century Chicago at the very moment when technology, taste and economic forces converged violently and made it necessary to drop the established styles of the past. If the shape of the building wasn’t going to be chosen out of the old pattern book something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. It was “form follows function,” as opposed to “form follows precedent.”

Sound familiar? We are together part of a dialogue about how to harness all the interrelated processes that cities accomplish, in ways that secure tandem environmental and fiscal sustainability. We don’t have a choice. Truly functional places in the future will house spaces that perform at much higher rates of return than what we currently have. They will produce energy as well and use less of it. They will perform more than one role at once. Our definition of function is shifting rapidly, hence will form.

On that much we all agree. The dialogue gets more colorful at finer grain, however. An aesthetic approach, for example, prioritizes fostering of attractive places that will draw talent (especially talented younger people), cultural vitality, private investment and job creation. An operating approach, for lack of a better term, establishes higher-amenity areas based on criteria ranging from proximity to transit, existing infrastructure, or job concentrations. More broadly, a regional approach emphasizes investment in connecting productive nodes (of employment, housing, et cetera) into a network. Urban/suburban rhetoric doesn’t fit in any of these approaches. They overlap. One size won’t fit all.

What is common among the successful cities of the future, and the neighborhoods and submarkets that bind them together, is functionality. Effective networks of people and institutions, vital job markets, courageous civic leadership are essential for transition to a new form. But each is undermined by the burdens of unproductive land use and infrastructure providing low return on investment.

The key function of modern cities is to harness the talents and skills of its people. The form that follows is a city of intentional and high-return infrastructure and design.

The transition is noticeable. Residential building permit data for Minneapolis illustrate the fundamental reversal from market emphasis on single-family unit construction (maroon) to multi-family unit construction (blue), starting in 1996. Denser living will never be for everyone, but it seems to be increasingly attractive to many.

Human networks are the premise of urban economies. By providing a physical format for exchange of ideas, development of trusting relationships, communication about reputation and quality of products and services, cities reduce the costs associated with trade (as well as training and education or cultural events, for example). As Bob Weissbourd presents in his collaborative “Dynamic Neighborhoods,” concentrations of people and investment follow the development of stable, vibrant networks.

The majority of population, intellectual assets and economic activity located in U.S. metro areas continues to grow. We have to wonder: How can cities’ physical form be encouraged to fill in, to maximize the product of this combination of ideas and relationships? Public and private actors share a compulsion to intensify what fruits emerge from urban economies.

Ed Glaeser has asserted that decisions falter when based on “the all-too-common error of confusing a city, which is really a mass of connected humanity, with its structures.” With increasing market demand for structures that increase human connectedness, Glaeser’s bifurcation loses some of its value. As the housing crash reminded us, the development pattern of core cities isn’t a mistake – it’s an eclectic but durable form that has withstood the stresses of growth and prosperity as well as economic crash. Cities, and the neighborhoods that comprise them, are strongest when most flexible. Denser land use makes more efficient use of infrastructure for transport, housing, training and education, leaving more public resources to invest in people, who are the most essential asset in any city.

In Glaeser’s words, a city is a mass of connected humanity. True. But the degree to which that humanity is connected in a city is influenced by how the city’s structures allow people to interact. The growing momentum of higher-density building will provide basis for experimentation, and for us to better understand the relationship of structures, land use, innovation and productivity.

For Donjek, it’s been a vivid and productive road in 2011. I hope you’ll indulge my short list of key developments.

In February, after an intense competition against three other teams, Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition judges awarded victory to the Donjek team, led by Kennedy Violich Architecture and the Tom Leader Studio. My role on the team focused on developing a narrative for the future of the Mississippi River as connector of North and Northeast Minneapolis, on the future of industrial uses currently on the river, and historical research of land uses dating to 1860. Read my February post, and visit what has now become the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Initiative.

Following an application and interview process, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton appointed me in March to represent Saint Paul on the Metropolitan Council. The Council operates the region’s expanding transit system (mainly bus, light rail and commuter rail) and its wastewater treatment system. The Council also provides affordable housing, guides local planning with an overarching regional framework, and funds priorities like brownfield remediation, transit oriented development, and affordable housing. Its regional scale allows the Council to undertake these core services in a cost-effective and aligned way, and I am invested in advancing its work.

In April, Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak presented the Minneapolis Saint Paul Metropolitan Business Plan to an audience of policy makers and thinkers at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. As project manager, lead researcher and writer of the plan, I was gratified by their charismatic joint presentation of a document that links together a panoply of interrelated efforts currently underway in the region. See the final business plan and executive summary, or see the mayors’ comments and other content at the Brookings web page.

In September, I completed work on an extensive reuse study of the historic Hudson Manufacturing Building in Hastings, Minnesota, along with team lead Stark Preservation and collaborators Claybaugh Preservation Architecture and Peter Musty LLC. The project represented a demonstration of how the value of land can evolve. The Mississippi River-front location was attractive for the manufacturer for one set of reasons in 1870; today, the location and historic portions of the building derive value in a very different marketplace, driven by demand for access to a rehabilitated river and its views. Read my earlier post with more detail about the reuse study.

Toward the end of the year, I presented findings of a Donjek economic impact study of a prospective linear park in downtown Minneapolis, linking the downtown employment base, light rail and bus transit, the Minneapolis Central Library, and the Mississippi River, via underutilized spaces ripe for redevelopment with both open space and structures. Stay tuned for more detail about the study and its findings; in the meantime, take a look at the 34-story Nicollet Residence development now approved to proceed at the southern boundary of this space.

It’s December 30, and time to unfold the map leading into 2012. I wish you good luck and look forward to working together.

Over the last few months, I’ve been partnering with a client to examine potential redevelopment sites along a planned rail transit corridor. As I described in this previous post, some property owners and users are in search of sites that are not only near station areas and other nearby assets, but clearly and conveniently connected.

In my home market in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region, the same impulse can be observed. Take, for example, the 34-story residential redevelopment recently approved by the Minneapolis Planning Commission, which is adjacent to a light rail transit platform at the Nicollet Mall station, next to the prospective Gateway Park, and reachable (both by pedestrian and transit mall and skyway) from all work, civic and entertainment locations in the central business district.

The Minneapolis example, however, made for easy site selection – its value is obvious. As customer preferences shift and transportation (both in mode and in cost) evolves, new opportunities will arise to identify and redevelop less evident, but very high-potential sites. Welcome to the future.

Related Articles:

• The Business Case: Connect to Your Surroundings
• Urban Economies: Going With the Flow
• Charles Landry: City Making in Minneapolis Saint Paul

Connections bring foot traffic, and foot traffic underlies prosperous places. We depend on and value connections in different ways than in the past. Census data released this year confirms falling commuting by car and rising use of transit, bike commuting, and walking. America’s two largest demographic groups – Baby Boomers and the “Millennials” – are aligned in driving this trend.

Stronger links between buildings and their surroundings have long been values of urban designers. Increasingly, because these links present a business case by reducing vacancy and increasing lease rates, commercial tenants, property managers and owners are focusing on connections to neighboring property.

Connections nearly always involve interaction with both private and public sectors. Consider these examples:

• Average space per employee has fallen from 500-700 square feet to 200 today, and is still dropping. Accommodating the needs of more employees, and maximizing spillover benefits, involves the public and private sectors, and can distinguish property owners and increase demand and values.
• In 2011, transit in the region will move over 80 million passengers, including 69% who choose transit instead of their cars. In Minneapolis, the number of bicycle commuters increased by 27% from 2007-10. Property owners and managers prepared to engage these audiences will link to a growing base of consumers arriving by bicycle and foot.

Donjek has demonstrated expertise in real estate finance, public/private sector negotiations, and planning to help owners, managers and other users of urban real estate increase the function and desirability of property. More specifically – we can work with you to:

• Serve as your “R&D” function to take advantage of ways to attract feet
• Enhance visibility, increase safety, and boost foot traffic
• Create value by taking advantage of proximity to nearby large employers or institutions
• Produce real-time analysis of TIF cash flow of any district that may contain your property
• Monitor the development process of nearby parcels in transition, for impacts on your transportation, zoning, or other assets
• Create communication about these initiatives in a way that sets you apart.

The preferences of businesses and their customers are evolving. Tenants and their customers are leading the way, and you have an opportunity to attract and retain them with innovative strategies that reflect an evolving set of demands.

Related Articles:

• Mobility Understood Best at Metro Scale
• Donjek Project: TOD Metrics/Picturing Value in Walkable Neighborhoods
• The Big Sort: A Small Summary

That’s why I take issue with an interpretation recently put forth by respected author and speaker, Richard Florida, in a pair of short posts (“America the Stuck” and “The Geography of Stuck“). He distills his interpretation into a claim that “America can be divided into two distinct classes, the stuck and the mobile.” These “classes,” in his view, are not only sorting themselves geographically, but by state: Residents of coastal states are mobile, others are not.

In my view, the Census data really don’t support this narrative. As Florida and others have documented, America’s economic and cultural landscape is increasingly metropolitan. Those metro areas with the highest proportion of residents born in another state are found primarily in states that Florida highlights as “mobile”:

These data don’t support the “two class” thesis for two reasons. First, while clearly in-migration is good for regions in forms including new ideas, cultural vitality and diverse labor pools, the specific kind of mobility Florida is calling out doesn’t appear to correlate with economic strength. The right column in the table shows each region’s rank (out of 366) in income growth from 2009-10; these aren’t the nation’s star performers. Second, as the map below illustrates (click on it for a larger image or see the source brief here), mobility continues to occur within states, from rural or micropolitan regions to larger metros and among metros. This is occurring in the states he calls mobile, and in many of the states he deems “stuck.” As it turns out, neither label accurately reflects recent trends.

There are structural shifts underway, and Florida has named some aspects of these in recent years. This most recent chapter strikes me as a departure from his record of nuanced analysis. Some American communities are clearly less mobile than others, but these dynamics haven’t developed in clean ways that follow state boundaries in an either/or fashion. They’ve developed by region, subregion, and neighborhood – and that’s where our focus belongs.

Related Articles:

• Productivity and Design Merge in the Gated City
• Urban Economies: Going with the Flow
• Minneapolis Saint Paul Metro Business Plan (and Executive Summary)

Visual rendering of a revitalized Hudson Manufacturing Building. Image: Stark Preservation Planning and Peter Musty.

I’m currently in the process of concluding work with a historic reuse team focused on next steps for the H.D. Hudson Manufacturing Building in Hastings, Minnesota. The City-owned Hudson Building is of substantial size, and offers open floor plans and high ceilings – a blank, solid canvas. The Hudson was featured as a “hot property” recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

From a finance perspective, the chief hurdle for historic reuse is reconciling long-term lease rates or purchase prices, with a rehabilitation investment that may include remediation, demolition, site costs, and a collection of items that can petrify typical investors: HVAC, roofs, stormwater management, vertical circulation, accessibility improvements. My role on the team, led by Will Stark of Stark Preservation Planning, has been to:

• Evaluate and quantify the long-term financial gap between the value of the building’s net income and its required investment
• Identify funding sources and mechanisms that private and public parties could employ to make reuse of the building feasible in a financial sense
• Inform scenarios for the City’s next steps with the building, with financial analysis. Cost, speed, and scale of reuse each impact the financial outlook for its future
• Narrate findings related to the downtown marketplace and project finance, to citizens, the City Council, and other stakeholders.

Historic structures offer uncommon attributes for the very reason that their construction occurred in a different marketplace. In the late 1800s when the Hudson Company put up the Hastings facility, materials including stone and lumber were available at lower real cost than today. The proximity of the building to the Mississippi River distinguishes the building regionally, in part because regulations have evolved to protect the river from development impacts. The reuse or demolition of the structure will, either way, continue to influence the health of downtown Hastings.

Related Articles:

• Victory in the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition!
• Layers of Stone, Layers of Finance at Historic Fort Snelling
• St. Paul’s Rice Park: Part Catalyst, Part Message

In the meantime, I'm preparing for two events where I will present as a panelist. On October 5, I will be in Washington, D.C. to participate in an intensive one-day conference on economic vitality, coordinated by the Living Cities Integration Initiative. I will be joining Tracey Nichols, Director of Economic Development, City of Cleveland; Olga Stella, Vice President of Business Development for the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation; Leslie Anderson, Executive Director of New Jersey Redevelopment; and Paul Graziano, Commissioner of Housing & Community Development for the City of Baltimore.

The following week, I look forward to walking down the street to the University of Minnesota's Saint Paul campus on October 12 for the 27th Annual Conference on Policy Analysis. The conference topic is this year focused on defining the public good and the role of government in the state; I will participate in a panel with Caren Dewar, Executive Director, Urban Land Institute-Minnesota; Ann Mulholland, Vice President with The Saint Paul Foundation; and Mark Vander Schaaf, Director of Community Planning and Development at the Metropolitan Council.

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to present in each of these forums; even more, anticipating all that my colleagues will have to say on the issues of urban economics and policy that form the core of my work.

Last: While I'm unable to attend (and post from) the Inner City Economic Summit to be held by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City in Chicago on October 3-4, I hope readers present there will share a summary for the rest of our collective benefit.

Amen.

The policy arena is stocked with arguments over which strategy or which sector provides the most efficient return for job creation (for a sample, search "jobs per dollar" on Google – although, as this commentary indicates, your results will be different than mine).

This dialogue, however, does not usually consider the spatial issues involved. How many jobs, and of what type, are created across a city or region? Employers rely on a workforce that is trained and educated, able to reach the workplace reliably, and able to transport a product – by rail, by digital means, or other mode of movement. Employers and the economies of which they are part also rely on relationships that form networks around industries, innovations, or particular skill areas. Success or failure in each of these areas is all about how our cities are designed and how intensely infrastructure is used.

It's relatively simple to evaluate job creation initiatives if direct public expenditures and jobs ("full time equivalents") are the only terms examined. As I suggested a few months ago, Steven Johnson and Ed Glaeser illustrate this would miss a substantial part of the essence of why and where jobs are created. The last few days' eruption of interest in Avent's message indicates we're headed for a more nuanced, comprehensive view of how urban design and productivity are linked. That's a very good thing.

*Postscript: Thanks to Ryan Avent for including this short post in his list of commentary pieces on the Gated City. See the others here.

Given that a primary filter of mine is that of placemaking, I wondered what this shared musical experience means for our work in urban design and redevelopment. Current Donjek projects include an initiative on urban open space, focused on building links between residents and workers to a major riverway and to the green space itself. An (implicit) goal is connecting people to each other using open space as the medium, to create a distinct experience. Another current engagement relates to exploring reuse of a historic industrial building; a substantial element of the community’s preservation interest is to use the structure to connect people today to yesterday’s residents and the heritage of the place. In each case, physical design acts as a language that allows us to relate to others.

Music and other performances can trigger a powerful connection among us. Our places can become more vital and durable if we build and preserve them with connection in mind. 

This week, I leave for travel that will include time spent with family in Holland, and I’m looking forward to exploring another tradition’s approach to city building and public finance. A few examples I’ve touched in here at the Cents of Place include:

• Understanding the value created both by access to transportation, and by a mixing of real estate asset types, remains a driver in Donjek projects. The Dutch connection is diluted in this piece, but I cited evidence from the Lowlands suggesting the premium for commercial real estate located near rail stations exceeds 10%.
• Highlighting the historical connection of urban success stories and concerted public investment, I cited the model of Amsterdam as it emerged from the Middle Ages in reviewing Joel Kotkin’s 2006 book, “The City, a Global History.”
• As a past adjunct instructor of economics, I could not be expected to forego some consideration of the fascinating period of Dutch history that centered on the mania of the tulip bulb. Similarly, I could not be expected to forego the comparison to the housing bubble, which I did in 2008.
• Given the intensive construction underway outside the Donjek office, which will lead to easy access to nearby light rail transit, I’ve been reminded of the promising product of Dutch firm, the Ooms Avenhorn Group. Using street infrastructure for more than multimodal transportation, the geothermal systems collect and store warm and cool water beneath road surfaces for climate control in nearby buildings.

This is a small, unscientific sample of ideas. There are a great many who have both a more authoritative and more comprehensive perspective on Dutch planning and development. Call me a student. With luck, I will bring home more ideas for applying the most effective Dutch practices in American central cities.

Photo: Courtesy Flickr/Tashenka

Waterways remained critical as arteries to transport commodities and other inputs for trade and commerce; they also provided the doorway through which most entered frontier towns like my place, St. Paul. Over time, comparative pricing and relationships to rivers changed – railroads, then cars and trucks, airplanes, and digital thoroughfares provided radically cheaper modes of overland movement. 

Ports facilitate accumulation of value through transfer of material from one transportation mode to another. In the past, the fact that river ports fronted riverways was only significant in that barge transportation was cost-effective. As freight rail (for long runs) and trucks (for shorter runs) compete with river navigation, many river ports have declined. Minneapolis' Upper Harbor Terminal, for example, has managed falling volumes in recent years, the region's barge traffic dominated by the St. Paul (downriver) harbor.

Today, the relationships of "prices" continue to shift. In particular, the pressure to attract and retain talent is familiar to American mayors and business operators across the country.  In addition to creating recreation amenities, urban riverfronts also create collective open space that draws the eye through the city landscape. When perceived as safe and clean, access to river frontages creates substantial property value and economic potential. In addition to moving things in and out, the role of some riverfronts has expanded to focus on use as open space magnets that  make places more distinct and attractive. 

Our river, the Mississippi, formed and shapes both Minneapolis and St. Paul in important ways. Earlier this year, a team to which I served as regional advisor won the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition, now evolved into the Minneapolis Riverfront Development Initiative. I've been engaged for several months managing a project focused on strengthening the connection of downtown Minneapolis to the Mississippi via the Gateway. Comparable efforts have been underway in St. Paul over the last twenty years, including the Great River Park master plan developed in the last year. This subject, conveniently, presents an opportunity for field work: I'm looking forward to August visits to Roman river towns Maastricht, Ghent, and London.

Open space and riverfronts cannot by themselves replace key economic functions such as port activities. Still, as larger forces transform cities, the prominence and role of rivers continue to be key in distinguishing prosperous regions.

Photo courtesy of pmarkham/Flickr.

True to form, Landy offered a compelling and global perspective on what differentiates successful cities and metropolitan areas from those in decline. Each region's approach is key: Is the dominant strategy an "urban engineering paradigm," or "creative city making"? Presented directly to us in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region, Landry asked: Is this a city of projects, or is the project the city?

Most of the audience, I believe, share Landry's underlying confidence that urbanization can and ought to bring about a greener, more productive, healthier and happier world. In that vein, he offered five threads found in great cities. In each case, I've offered editorial comments:

• Anchorage: What is a region's gravity, which attracts people and ideas? The importance of robust networks of people and activity – industry clusters – can't be understated. It's true for people involved in chemistry, and for people involved in music (and for those involved in both at the same time!). See the Metropolitan Business Plan for more.
• Possibility: What's the potential for the place? Youth development, education, and workforce development (for the young and mature) are the critical areas of possibility for a place. No urban region can thrive without investing in the young, and their potential to generate new ideas.
• Connection and Reconnection: Beyond the need for physical connections to give community members and workers access to their most significant destinations (whether work, school, civic, religious), successful regions maintain strong bonds well beyond their borders. High rates of immigration and import/export activity, and the ability to communicate a region's message in the global arena are two examples of such ties.
• Learning: To me, Landry's citation of the importance of learning extends beyond the realm of education, which (as I suggested above) is a cornerstone for effective regions. Learning needs also to include the degree to which governance is flexible and intelligent enough to incorporate emerging trends and past experience, in planning for the future.
• Inspiration: Establishing shared values and shared identity are crucial, so that a region can articulate what is its inspiration. Why are we here? What do we have to communicate to the world? What is our contribution to the cultural, economic and political life that surrounds and includes us? 

Landry's framework of these five threads offered a provoking platform to consider how regions like Minneapolis Saint Paul move forward. Unfortunately, the speaker's efforts to speak in detail about the Central Corridor LRT line (and even specific sites along it) were neither specific nor reflective of context. He also appeared unprepared to discuss how manufacturing and other industry play a role as economic engines, job providers or as gateways for workers to earn good wages.

As Ed Glaeser argues in the Triumph of the City, places are powered by people, not buildings. Landry's presentation was worthwhile as a full (if high-altitude) depiction of how "creative city making," focused on harnessing talent, can craft durable regions in the 21st century.

From here forward, the Cents of Place blog will continue to focus on the issues in which you and I share an interest: Public finance, redevelopment, land use, urban economics, policy. Posts will, however, be shorter and more frequent than has been typical over the last four years. 

For today, I am pleased to post the final Minneapolis Saint Paul Metropolitan Business Plan, its executive summary, and a companion framing piece produced by our region's partners at the Brookings Institution. These documents will, I hope, remain in development in the near future, to reflect the increasing momentum and consensus around the importance of a region-scale agenda for innovation, human capital, education and workforce, spatial efficiency, key industry clusters and governance. Like other metropolitan economies, ours depends on intential approaches to each.

Thanks for continuing to read the Cents of Place blog – I hope you will find it valuable in this new format.

We’re drawn to the challenge of remaking places that are more durable, more competitive, and more attractive for people who live there. If we systematically rethink street width, the basis of land and property tax, and the high-risk design we’ve adopted for many American communities, we’ll have more resources to invest in our real assets – people and their skills. Our interest at Strong Towns is to change physical layout as a way to restore order to our financial house, and to reduce the risk we bear to national and global trends such as climate and energy instability.

Tight budgets on the state and federal level – surely promising to get tighter still, as our previous post described – are helping focus attention on more deliberate and intense use of existing infrastructure. Whether we’re talking about the High Line, stormwater management at the Gophers football stadium, or the Complete Streets discussion, policy is increasingly structured around the search for multiuse infrastructure. In each case, literally doing more with less translates to more a productive system.

And while it may be impolitic in some quarters to say so, together we represent another key form of infrastructure: Developers and traders of ideas. Innovators in every sector are connected through “liquid networks,” says entrepreneur and author Steven Johnson, in his new book “Where Good Ideas Come From.” Approaching innovation from a historical perspective, drawing on brain research and sociological literature, Johnson makes a case that won’t surprise all the people who make up the Strong Towns forum: How we design places and use land directly impacts how innovative is the activity taking place within it.

Building design can form rich environments that encourage ferment and exchange of ideas, Johnson notes. Built in 1943 as a temporary structure, Building 20 at MIT housed faculty and student research in an open plan easily reconfigured for new projects. Over fifty years of adaptation, Building 20 produced significant research across fields including IT, linguistics and acoustics.

Inspired by models like Building 20, Microsoft in 2007 built a headquarters for its research division designed explicitly to cross pollinate employees’ ideas. Apparently also inspired by its generic moniker, Microsoft named their facility Building 99. “Building 99 – like Building 20 before it – is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw,” writes Johnson. “It is designed to leak.” Walls feature surfaces for writing and erasing. Work spaces are all modular and can be built and rebuilt as the project or day inspires. Research confirms that active horizontal, diverse social networks are multiple times more innovative than uniform, vertical ones. Leaking is valuable.

Cities do best to leak too. That’s one of the themes revisited through economic geographer Edward Glaeser’s “Triumph of the City,” released early this year. Glaeser documents the rise of single-industry marketplaces – whose collapse is now epitomized by conditions in Detroit – which, through sheer dominance, eroded the quality of information spillover among workers. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press by combining use of winemaking tools from his native Rhineland, his metallurgy background, and existing Chinese printing methods. Dialogue led to tinkering, tinkering led to more dialogue, and innovation emerged. On a modern scale, the same process takes place every day, and it’s much more likely to take place in physical environments that connect people in consistently unexpected ways – cities.

Cities themselves aren’t the source of innovation, and Glaeser warns of the error of “confusing a city, which is really a mass of connected humanity, with its structures.” Still, our structures and our physical layout can serve to intensify idea exchange, or inhibit it. A compelling public and private interest exists to support the leakiest land use and urban design we can devise.

Prospective internship projects will include work on Donjek engagements, as well as initiatives related to the nonprofit Strong Towns and the Metropolitan Council. A sample of past Donjek projects is available here, and content relating to past projects is available through the Donjek Projects category of this blog.

Interested applicants may learn more online at the Donjek website (www.donjek.com), at the company’s Cents of Place blog (www.donjek.typepad.com) and on Twitter (@commers). Please submit a one-page cover letter, resume and short writing sample by Friday, April 29 to Jon Commers, Donjek, Inc., 2500 University Avenue West, Suite E2, St. Paul, MN, 55108. Or, email: internship@donjek.com.    

This morning, the competition's supporters and sponsors (including the Walker Art Center, the University of Minnesota's College of Design, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, the Minneapolis Parks Foundation, and others) gathered on Nicollet Island to announce that our team is the winner of the competition!

The process, inside our team, unfolded like a charette, only on a broader and deeper scale than I’ve seen before. Since early November, this team pulled together volumes to inform a thorough approach to a complicated river corridor. There are many meeting points in the project area that each represent opportunities: Where North meets Northeast, river meets shores, trails meet bridge heads, industrial meets other land uses, central business district meets neighborhoods. Hydrology, bridge design, area culture and history (indigenous, pioneer and more recent), land use economics, institutions, equity of access to parks – these topics and many others received focused, research-driven attention. Led by Tom Leader, and Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich of KVA, this team produced an innovative approach to tie these issues all together in physical space.

It's a privelege to be a member of this team. I've also marveled at the compelling mix of collaborators who made this possible, from the sponsors to standout project manager Mary DeLaittre. That we will together have the opportunity to continue working, focused on a particular site to be determined on the Upper River in Minneapolis, promises to be a professional highlight.

See the final proposal here.

I have served as the project manager of Minneapolis Saint Paul's role in this work (see a previous piece about the work), and continue to find the idea of business planning to be an effective way to analyze strengths and weaknesses in those elements that differentiate those regions that thrive.

The draft plan explores how fresh, disruptive ideas are developed, passed through networks, cross-applied and used to create businesses and jobs. It considers to what degree all students – young and older – are able to access education and training opportunities, and transfer these skills to a workplace setting. It addresses the networks that comprise "clusters" among industries or among people involved in the region's high concentration of business headquarters, and how the region's systems and development pattern (transportation, housing, open space) serve or undermine competitiveness.

I hope you'll take a look at the materials. Please take time to look at these products and share your response. Specific questions about content may be directed to me at commers@donjek.com, and comments or changes may be sent to Snezhana Bessonov at Urban Land Institute – Minnesota, at snezhana.bessonov@uli.org. The documents are:

• The Minneapolis Saint Paul Metro Business Plan (discussion draft)
• The region's investment prospectus (pictured above)
• The presentation given by Mayors Coleman and Rybak to the Global Metro Summit in Chicago, Illinois on December 7.