Part 1: Innovation and “the next Silicon Valley”
It’s Cleveland Mayor’s Day and a number of viable candidates stand at. Political candidacies inevitably go hand in hand with political agendas. We’ll hear a lot about what a particular Cleveland candidate thought was good or bad. We’ll also hear predictions about the future of Cleveland. Are we going in the right direction? Regressing? Or breastfed in a lukewarm bath of the status quo?
While these recaps and projections are welcomed, there is a catch. Most politicians are not very good at providing a compelling vision of the places they represent. They also have difficulty explaining how and why a city has developed in this way, if only because they are localized and therefore unable to nest their locale in the global context. That’s a problem. Because what is global becomes local. “[G]It has been shown that lobalization increases the standard of living in developing countries. ” explained a writer for National Geographic, “but … globalization can adversely affect local or emerging economies and individual workers.” Cleveland’s story is not just Cleveland’s story, it is the story of a region in a country in a world that is constantly changing. The key is to find patterns within that change. If you just want to know what is in your power as a person or as a collection of people – a city – the change is less random and disruptive and therefore planned. Otherwise, building in the city is just a big shit of pure emotions expressed by the powerful, passed off as politics.
This is not a blow to local or other politicians. It is just an acknowledgment of the constraints of politics or of the political milieu from which the politician is supposed to operate. After all, the politician works within the time constraints of “short-termism”, in which the tactics for today repeatedly seize the strategy for tomorrow. The philosopher Roman Krznaric Remarks This default setting for the short-term stems from the electoral cycle, which he describes as “an inherent design flaw in democratic systems that creates short political time horizons”. This in turn leads to short-sighted decisions that repeatedly throw proverbial doses on the street. The following figure is for illustrative purposes. In 1979, the state of Ohio devoted 17.7% of its budget to investing in higher education. That is 10.6%. Correction expenditure increased from 2.2% to 7.1% over the same period. This is the case when the future is mortgaged to support the present while neglecting the past.
Combating short-termism requires institutionalizing a long-term vision among policy makers. What exactly does it mean when I say “vision”? It means figuring out what’s going on in this complex, crazy world and then pinning Cleveland’s place in it, if only so that the region has a compass to help it move in unison with the winds of change. Without that, cities are left behind. “Globalization Didn’t Kill Detroit” explained Jim Russell in the Pacific Standard: “Globalization Avoided Detroit.”
The following outlines a vision for Cleveland. This is part 1 of a 4-part series that includes part of a Write project called life after rust. The series is a result of past work That centered on the development of the cities in the rust belt, or the tendencies of some people to live, die and revive, as opposed to the tendencies for more people to live, die and get stuck. The culmination of this work can be found in a recently published white paper entitled “The Future of Growth”. The overall goal? To simply understand the complex of how and why the world economy is changing, and then to show how these “upstream” changes are played “downstream” on various geographic scales – be it the state, the city, the neighborhood, the household or the individual. As for the motive, there is no one outside to share what I have learned while I have the time.
Read the rest of this piece below RicheyPiiparinen.Medium.com.
Richey Piiparinen examines the life of the cities in the rust belt of the state of Cleveland. Co-founder of Rust Belt Analytica. Director “Life after Rust”. Husband, father, Clevelander.
Photo credit: Carlos Javier via Flickr under CC 2.0 license.
