Cities and their surrounding suburbs are the new building blocks of an economy both global and local.Forget about states, cities and counties.They are so yesterday. What`s in now is metro. No, it has nothing todo with sexual orientation or furniture design. We`re talking aboutmetropolitan areas: the cities along with their environs — includingtheir suburbs, their exurbs, even some of the surrounding rural areasthat are tied to the center by employment or commerce.For decades, urban affairs columnist and author Neal Peirce hastrumpeted the underappreciated importance of "citistates," which hedefines as "one or more historic central cities surrounded by citiesand towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zonefor trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social,economic and environmental interdependence."Now, as the general election contest gets under way, the BrookingsInstitution`s Metropolitan Policy Program has embarked on an ambitiousand clearly well-funded bid to change the way we look at the countryand its economy, with the hope of influencing the debate during thecampaign and then policy making by the new administration and Congress.The message goes like this: The top 100 metropolitan areas coveronly 12 percent of the national land mass but are home to abouttwo-thirds of its population and its jobs — and even larger shares of"innovative activity": 78 percent of its patents, 75 percent of thosewith graduate degrees, 79 percent of air cargo, 94 percent of venturecapital funding, and so on. In all, they generate three-quarters of thegross domestic product.Add in more than 200 other smaller metro areas, and we truly arelooking at a metropolitan nation. Peirce puts it in context: "Aseconomic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major worldnations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among theworld`s top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia.The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater thanTaiwan or Switzerland." And so, he says, citistates are how "our worldis now organizing itself" away from an old way of thinking {federal,state, local} to a new way: global, regional and neighborhood.The first of two reports from Brookings notes that "we are part of ahighly networked global economy in which the world`s major metropolitanareas generate an outsized share of world output. Politics, custom andlanguage continue to separate us into individual nation-states; buttrade, migration and investment link Seattle more closely to Shanghaithan to Sacramento."The problem is that Washington doesn`t get it. Federal officials seeonly one economy, or occasionally perhaps 50 state economies; thepopulation is divided into 435 congressional districts. The feds "adoptpolicies that betray no understanding of how our metropolitan dominatedeconomy works," the Brookings report argues. "And they saddlemetropolitan leaders with fragmented, diffuse programs that ignore howthorny public policy programs interrelate and spill across state andlocal borders."Investments NeededWe`re paying a price for this myopia. Productivity is slipping, thesupply of scientists and engineers has stalled, research anddevelopment funding has declined and patent activity is faltering. K-12education is underperforming; higher education for the first time on aninternational scale is slipping. Growth patterns are creating asituation where we`re gobbling up farmland, increasing commuting timeswell above population growth, and pushing more tons of greenhouse gasesinto the air.In short, Brookings concludes, we are ignoring the economic enginesthat give us the prosperity we now enjoy: our metro areas. To rectifythat, it advocates investment in education and training, particularlyfor new immigrants; in infrastructure to move people, goods and ideas;an
www.governing.com/articles/0806harkb.htm