sustainability « Kristin Wolff

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World Bank Innovative Cities Symposium: Three Take-aways

Via Networked Publics »

Last week, I participate in a two-day event that brought together researchers, thinkers, urban leaders, policy professionals, and social innovators to share strategies for strengthening regional economies and improving the quality of life in the world's urban regions. Graciously hosted by Keshav Varma, Head of the World Bank Institute's Urban Program, the Innovative Cities' agenda was organized around the theme of competitiveness, but covered a wide range of challenges urban leaders face: intra-regional competition, social inclusiveness, positioning on the value chain, "smart" policies, transport and infrastructure capacity, and cultivating a healthy business climate.

Unfortunately, I had to leave for a flight just prior to the last panel – the summary panel. So I will offer my own top takeaways, based on no criteria other than personal resonance. I have not been able to stop thinking about these issues since I left the symposium.

1. Jurisdictional boundaries are rarely aligned with where problems need solving, but collaborative approaches can make a real difference.

The first panel (on intra-urban competition) featured economic developers and urban planners from the Washington, DC region: Gerald Gordon (Executive Director, Fairfax County Virginia Economic Development Authority), Steve Silverman (Director, Montgomery County Maryland Department of Economic Development), and Richard Reinhard (Deputy Executive Director, Downtown DC Business Improvement District). After a brief presentation from each on their approaches to development and key priorities, moderators Stephen Fuller (Center for Regional Analysis, George Mason University) and Greg Clark

(OECD, LEEDs Program) began asking hard questions about shared strategies and significant challenges. Transportation surfaced immediately, as did the incentive structures and institutional barriers to collaboration on long-term (read: expensive and shared) priorities. Rich Reinhard (attributing the framing to his boss) offered the following insight:

"Our policy and program tools exist at three levels: federal, state local. Our problems exist at three different levels: global, regional, neighborhood."

Therein lies the problem.

At the risk of sounding like I've got a hammer and have discovered a bevy of nails, I have since come to see so many contexts in which this misalignment impedes shared action: jobs policy, site selection/location, educational cachement areas, investments in higher education or business support programs, etc. Government services (and the policies that drive them) are nearly always tied to jurisdictions in ways that inhibit scale and discourage broad, public participation through which creative solutions can emerge.

A specific example was raised in the room: a DC-commuter admitted "slugging" (essentially, organized hitch-hiking to DC from northern Virginia) and wanted to know (quite rightly) why it is illegal and what the alternatives might be.

At one level, this is a commuter-specific issue economic development professionals tend not to want to spend their time addressing (imagine the safety and liability issues...). But it is also an example of a larger pattern of citizen-led innovation (enabled by technology among other things) that could inform regional policy approaches on transport and other issues. So many citizen-led innovations emerge as neighborhood-based social practices (and occupy a legal grey zone), that it is hard to link them to policy making, let alone share them across a region. Moreover, this is the kind of innovation that can be shared any any direction – advanced economies have as much or more to learn from emerging ones as the other way around.

This speaks to new role of leaders - it's less about being the one with the solution, and more about knowing how to cultivate, test, and grow ideas that work (see reivew of Open Leadership for more on this subject) collaboratively, at different levels, and on different time horizons.

2. We need many more conversations about the enabling role of technology in helping cities thrive (citizens and residents, not just governments) so that we can inspire new models of governance and leadership.

Relina Bulchandani (Cisco Smart + Connected Communities initiative, of which this blog is a part), Gerard Mooney (IBM Global Government & Education), and Debra Lam (ARUP) made important presentations about how shared data and information platforms, systems (and sensors) integrated into the built environment can change what's possible for city leaders trying to manage extremely complex systems.

Relina's presentation emphasized how ubiquitous connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices give us the potential to reimagine many aspects of work, learning, commerce, and life. By partnering with cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam to redesign urban information architectures, Cisco is helping city leaders reinvent the way they collect data, turn it into intelligence they can act upon, and share it with citizens and residents who can apply it (and contribute to it) too.

Gerald described similar partnerships with urban environments in the context of IBM's SmarterPlanet initiative, an effort to help cities get smarter about systems that support water, health, public safety, and transport, and begin to place citizens at the center of their work.

ARUP is an employee-owned engineering and design firm helping to green the built environment. Debra's presentation focused on measurement and feedback systems in the built environment that can help influence behaviors of people and communities. She offered some terrific visualizations that made evident why data transparency and presentation matter. When her slidedeck is made available, I will link it here.

Debra was also the first speaker to champion middle managers and experienced civil servants. While most of the symposium focsed on leaders and leadership, she argued that it is middle managers that make things work – these doers should not be overlooked as key agents of large-scale metropolitan change efforts.

3. We're not just reinventing strategies and tactics, but our fundamental approach to economic competitiveness and urban development.

Bruce Katz, Director of Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program, launched the Symposium with some key observations about cities:

They will drive the next economy and create low-carbon ways to work and live.
They will grow in importance (because urban migration is increasing worldwide).
They will insist on new approaches to common, urgent challenges like long-term infrastructure planning, trade policy, and regional development.

Many other speakers used these as a foundation for their own observations about important changes within and across cities – growth, aging, poverty, access issues (energy, water, food), etc. – and described approaches to their key challenges.

But competing paradigms did emerge, provoked in particular by Bijal Bhatt (SEWA), Deputy Mayor Jerry William Silaa (Dar es Salaam), Michael Joroff (MIT), TIm Campbell (UrbanAge) and Melanie Walker (Gates Foundation):

Are we building clusters or making places? How are these agenda linked?/li>li>What role does human capital play in development?
Is competitiveness about growth or about broader indicators of health, soul, and prosperity?
Is development about sharing lessons from the US and Europe with the rest of the world, or about co-creating and sharing new models for sustainable working and living?
Do leaders make places or do citizens?
How do cities learn from each other (who doe the learning?)
How do we think about integrating the poor in development strategies? Are there things leaders need to do differently to ensure engagement?
How do we start measuring/comparing true costs of development, resource extraction?
How do we scale approaches that work (and does that mean replicate? grow? network? or something else?)
When (and how) are we going to integrate citizens and residents in not just policy review, but actual implementation – engaging citizens in placemaking as we do leaders?

We began defiing components of a "new operating system" for cities of the future.

And that's when I had to leave. I'd be grateful if another attendee could summarize the last session in the comments below. I will attach any materials I receive in the next week or so to this post.

Many thanks to Sabine Palmreuther, Jennie Datoo, Narmeen Iftikhar, Damon Luciano, Kashev Varma, and everyone else at the World Bank who helped organize the event, and the speakers and attendees who made it come alive

Jobs Policy: What’s a Government to do?

Via Networked Publics »

Today, voters in Arizona will decide whether a $.01 sales tax increase (in a state with 9.6% unemployment and wages 6% below the national average) will stave off otherwise draconian cuts in state support for higher education, K-12 schools, healthcare, and welfare.

The last two weeks offered unprecedented drama in the UK, as the general election resulted in the resignation of Gordon Brown as the head of the Labour Party on May 11, and the establishment of a coalition government lead by new Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat). The domestic agenda? Reducing the UK's £163B deficit and addressing the highest rates of joblessness in over 15 years.

And then there's Greece, flanked (in print) by the words "austerity" and "job loss" in roughly equal measure.

Jobs Issues are Central

The jobs issue is at the heart of some of the most difficult challenges cash-strapped governments face the world over (but in particular, where the tango between the finance and housing industries wrought the greatest havoc). Some of these connections are obvious: people who lose their jobs have less money to spend, reducing the government revenue they would otherwise pay in the form of income and sales tax and increasing their need for government services - unemployment insurance, training grants, food stamps, health insurance, transport, even public libraries.

There are also less obvious "costs" linked to unemployment ranging from an increase in public school enrollment as more parents have difficulty paying for private school, to widespread declines in risk-taking on the part of entrepreneurs, consumers, lenders, and even job seekers ill-matched with their current positions but fearful of leaving them. Never mind the longterm and potentially massive social costs.

Community Perspectives on Jobs

This past March, my colleagues and I at Corporation for a Skilled Workforce captured the experiences of workforce professionals at the National Association of Workforce Boards Annual Forum - they are the community faces of workforce policy in communities across the U.S. And they are very concerned about jobs.

Policy Levers for Job Creation

We also interviewed policy professionals and thought leaders representing a wide range of perspectives about the policy prescriptions they were advocating - from Dean Baker's (CEPR) ideas on job sharing to Jagadeesh Gokhale (Cato) on loosening credit and promoting self-employment to Heidi Schierholz's (EPI) case for a second stimulus. Most focused on federal-level interventions. (The entire set of 14 videos is in this playlist.)

Communities, too, are advancing solutions:

Investing in innovation and growing sustainable industries through collaborative ventures;
Economic gardening, regional resilience efforts, and other locally-focused development strategies;
Promoting upskilling among workers and those looking for work;
Reinventing placement services and supports;
Experimenting with new (and revisiting old) approaches to training and placement; and
Using technology to make information more accessible and transparent, and to connect job seekers with resources, information and assistance outside of government - leveraging community resources and social networks.

Over the next six weeks, we will be looking specifically at government policies, programs, and approaches that seek to accelerate job creation and promote prosperity, in a sustainable way.

Big Changes at Work

Via Start, Grow, Transform » Kristin Wolff »

Thanks to NJ.. on Flickr

Last week we were drafting a set of policy recommendations for a project. We’d drafted an introduction that named demographics, technology, and the competitive landscape as among the most significant domains of change in the workplace during the past decade. At that point I realized how many times I’d seen this collection of words and phrases in a bulleted powerpoint list, or similarly glibly treated as if the meaning (and implications) of these change were self-evident.

We decided to say what we meant. Here’s the list we came up with in answer to the question “How is the workforce landscape different today than ten years ago?” We know it’s not complete, but it’s a start. We’d love to know your thoughts.

Key Workforce Trends

“Growth minus Jobs.” While economists debate the causes and implications of the trend, job growth following the last two recessions has been far lower than what was expected. In our current “job-less recovery,” the seven million private sector jobs lost in the 20 months between December 2007 and August 2009 are returning an anemic pace (and many of them do not pay family-sustaining wages), while labor force continues to grow by 1.3 million people per year.

“Millennials and Boomers Sandwich Gen-X.” For the first time in our history, it is commonplace for four or even five generations to occupy the workplace at the same time – challenging tradition hierarchies, management practices, and raising serious equity issues as “baby boomers” delay retirement and firms resist taking on new (younger) full-time employees who are far more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than their more senior colleagues (and peers).

“Wanted: Life-long Learners.” The demands on all workers to develop new and more diverse skills throughout their working lives – as the baseline required for good jobs increases – raises complex challenges for employers and government (who pays?), difficult decisions for workers (“Do I train for two years in hopes I get a job at the new Google facility?”), and disrupts assumptions about what it means to be a student (non-traditionals are the new traditionals).

“Anywhere, anytime, any device connectivity.” We’re only at the beginning of understanding how connecting people to data, information, and each other will change the way we live work and learn, but the implications for workers – who’s talents can be tapped globally, firms – who’s value chains now include customers and competitors, and communities – which will thrive based their uniqueness and desirability, are significant (and mindbending).

“Show me the three Rs (Reduce, Re-Use, Recycle).” Questions about the sustainability of our consumption-based economy and its role in climate change are causing a massive rethink of public policy around energy, water, food systems, and how these and other natural resources are used in industry and commerce. This is already changing what it means for workers, firms, industries, communities, and nations to be competitive in the new new economy.

These shifts show no evidence of slowing. Public policy must also change with the times.

And today, there are few areas of public policy more important to the nation’s economic competitiveness than the skills, ingenuity, and health of its 139-million person workforce.

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