Editor's
note: Last year, after a European vacation, longtime Renaissance
Rock Island leader Dan Carmody submitted a draft of a "Vacation
Manifesto" - a series of anecdotes and ideas for the Quad Cities.
In the year since, Carmody left our area for Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he serves as president of the Downtown Improvement District. We recently asked him to revisit his manifesto. Here it is.
We welcome your ideas in the comments section of the article.
City Centre; Manchester, England. People on the street, lots of them. Regardless of the size of the town, pedestrians fill UK city centers in dramatic contrast with most American downtowns, which look as if a neutron bomb had been deployed.
Less reliance on the automobile and more fragmented retailing accounts for much of the difference. Napoleon disparagingly called England a nation of shopkeepers, and while they have many more small shops, they actually have far less retail space than the United States. America has taken consumerism to a whole new level with 28 square feet of retail space per person, compared to seven in the UK.
Fewer big-box retailers and formula restaurants allow English cities to retain more local businesses that in turn provide people more reasons to be on the street. Without the "convenience" of the big box, the same number of people must go shopping more frequently and don't take the car because they're carrying smaller amounts of goods.
Inconvenient
shopping has three other benefits: It increases public health by
increasing incidental, daily walking; it increases community
conviviality by getting people bumping into each other more
frequently; and it reduces petroleum consumption by reducing the
number of times people use their cars.
However, big-box retailing is on the rise in the Old World . "Can We Stop Chain Stores from Taking Over Our High Streets?" was a story in a May 2005 edition of the Manchester Guardian. It previewed a speech by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance entitled "Will Wal-Mart Eat Britain?" Her presentation was sponsored by a group fretting about whether the spread of chain stores would cause British cities to become either ghost or clone towns.
Stacy is an American who is working to spread word about measures some U.S. cities have taken to limit the growth of chain establishments. Arcada, California, grandfathered nine formula restaurants but permits no more; Los Angeles now limits the size of big boxes; and other places have banned them altogether.
While the horse is mostly out of the barn in the Quad Cities, is it time to figure out a way to limit runaway chain retail and restaurant growth? Each of our cities wants a healthy downtown and all the retail development it can attract to edge locations. Without much greater population growth, we simply cannot have both.
Unique, locally owned stores and restaurants are much more valuable to us than their chain cousins. They provide us with distinctive character, they buy more of their goods and services locally, and they are more likely to invest their profits back in this community.
Even
the most exotic chains (e.g., Bass Pro Shops, Cheesecake Factory, and
Whole Foods) lose their charm as they grow. By the time they decide
to invest in mid-tier markets the size of the Quad Cities, most of us
have already been there and done that. Locally owned businesses give
us our character, and we severely limit their success by permitting
unlimited chain competition.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 10: Limit Big-Box Retail and Formula Restaurants.
Many communities have limited liquor licenses for years. In similar fashion, limit the number of big boxes and formula restaurants in the region. The permitting process will make each big box and formula restaurant more valuable and will eliminate the need to subsidize their development.
For this idea to work, it has to be enforced on a regional basis. The vehicle to enforce this idea is already in place: modify the uniform zoning codes that are in the process of being adopted by all the cities in the region.
Suggested Summer Reading: The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - & How It's Transforming the American Economy, by Charles Fishman.
Outdoor Café; Budapest, Hungary. The heart of Hungary is really two towns: Buda and Pest. Set across the Danube from each other like Davenport and Rock Island, their residents live packed amidst a collection of architectural gems built (and rebuilt) from medieval times until the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in the first part of the 20th Century, then rebuilt again in the aftermath of World War II.
Dining
alfresco in one of the score of cafés along the Pest
riverfront is greatly enhanced by the dramatic view of the former
castle (now an art gallery) set into the hillside over in Buda.
Perhaps, in time, the illuminated Figge will so inspire Rock Island's
bistro set. Diners and revelers can also choose from a fleet of
riverboats whose number, size, and diversity contrast with the fewer,
bigger gaming boxes on the Quad Cities riverfront.
Budapest fuels inspiration that the division of a metropolitan area by a working river can not only be overcome but be overcome with an exclamation point!
Their nomenclature is helpful. To the rest of the world, these 2 million people inhabit a place called Budapest. One name, multiple cities, but far easier to remember because it's not a name applied over other names as is the case with Tri, Quad, or Quint Cities of Iowa and Illinois.
Can't we invent a more memorable and more romantic name than the "Quad Cities" to describe the 17 jurisdictions that make up the conurbation on the Mississippi River located 155 miles west of Chicago?
Because we could never merge city governments in different states, how about picking one name for each side of the river that put together would have meaning, and fit our context?
With the success of The Mark, why not use that name to describe the Illinois side of the river, and with the importance of the river, why not call the Iowa Quad Cities "Twain"?
Mark Twain is remember-able. His renown and association with the river are almost as great as the river itself. No other town has so honored arguably the greatest American writer of the 19th Century. The name would reinforce the return to our river roots and the strength of our Midwestern values, and would really put us on the map in a way we never will be as we continue to refer to ourselves as the "Quad Cities."
Existing city names could stay as neighborhood designations to ease the transition - the Davenport section of Twain, the Silvis section of Mark. This might provide the opportunity for the Illinois side to finally sort out the address system that makes 18th Street or Fifth Avenue mean very different things as you cross a municipal boundary to the great perplexity of the unknowing.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 9: Change the Quad Cities' name to "Mark Twain."
The Quad Cities needs a little more radical surgery than it suspects. The acid test remains: If what we're doing now is working so well, why are we continuing to languish?
Mark Twain.
East is east and west is west, and here is a place that they meet best.
Suggested Summer Reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
On
the Waterfront; Rovinj, Croatia. The Rock Island Armory and the
Rhythm City discussions about the Davenport riverfront came into
focus sitting in an outdoor café on the waterfront of the
Aegean Sea in Rovinj, Croatia.
Building near water isn't so much the problem; it's what we build near the water that matters.
It's all about scale and quality.
Chicago's open waterfront is often cited by those who would never build anything next to the river. Chicago's lakefront is one-of-a-kind, but the monumental wall of buildings that defines the inland edge is very important to making that waterfront special.
In Rovinj, the scale is more intimate than we can hope to achieve in the Quad Cities given the Mississippi River's more forceful nature and our larger economic base.
Chicago over the decades and Rovinj over the centuries have willed their waterfronts into compellingly distinctive signatures.
Major decisions about our riverfronts should never be made hastily. Our riverfront is the gift we will give future generations. It is the thing that will define us in the long haul.
The only advantage to having multiple communities straddling the Mississippi is that we have the opportunity to do something really, really different. If we don't take advantage of the opportunity, we might as well move to St. Louis, or Peoria, or Des Moines and enjoy communities that have taken more advantage of riverfronts with less potential.
The
problem with the Isle of Capri riverfront decision-making process
wasn't the decision. The riverfront's future is too big to be
affected by any one decision. The big problem was the process
employed to make important decisions about our riverfront.
We have no process to protect the region's greatest asset. We have not institutionalized our general interest in enhancing our riverfront the way other communities have.
Chattanooga and Nashville, Tennessee, have both established "design centers" that work to encourage good design and to provide a forum for an enlightened discussion about major projects. These design centers are the collaboration between the municipal government, the business community, community-based not-for-profits, and design instructors from state-supported universities.
Such design centers can provide a one-stop permitting procedure that makes the process more understandable to project sponsors while creating a more neutral ground that invites thorough vetting of a project early in its development. Thoughtful discussions, well in advance of a project's appearance on a city-council agenda, help make the development process more transparent.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 8: Establish the first bi-state urban design center.
Major projects do affect many people, and in a democracy projects seeking public-sector financial support should be carefully scrutinized.
The Quad Cities Urban Design Center (QCUDC) would provide a forum for vetting significant projects - say, those requesting public investment in excess of $1 million.
The QCUDC could also serve as a consultant for a number of community-planning initiatives and help to establish and promote design guidelines.
Programs at the University of Illinois and Iowa State University in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning could be important partners in the QCUDC and will help to deepen regional understanding about the importance of urban design.
Suggested Summer Reading: Design of Cities, by Edmund Bacon.
Youth Hostel; Ljulbjana, Slovenia. Found the fountain of youth in Ljulbjana, the capital of Slovenia. The project is anchored by a youth hostel constructed from a former Soviet-era prison. Local artists converted the former cells into distinctive, if somewhat claustrophobic, accommodations for youthful travelers.
Each cell is an artistic expression of freedom, human rights, and justice. It was engaging all by itself, but the real cool part of the complex is the former military compound that surrounds the hostel.
A rabbit warren of buildings has been lovingly and irreverently renovated by the university-aged crowd into a variety of venues for meeting, performing, and entertaining.
I felt like a middle-aged spy, traipsing where I wasn't invited, but found the environment unlike any campus town in this country. Early on a Wednesday evening, there were several arts installations happening, a few were playing five-a-side soccer, there was a table-tennis tournament underway, a theatre group was rehearsing, two groups were preparing fires for eventual barbecue, and still others were gathered around their hookahs up in an artistic tree house.
It
was part arts colony, part commune, part festival marketplace. But is
seemed very much that it was the space of the young people who hung
there, not the space of some aging hipsters seeking to separate youth
from their cash.
In the Quad Cities, there has been a lot of talk about engaging the young and keeping our most creative young people home.
How about next time we make available a complex of dilapidated buildings and some of the funding to improve them, we put an age limit in the request for proposals? Limiting participation to those 25 years old and under will help to empower and engage a new generation of developers. We've made such investments with long-established developers with both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.
If we want to really make the area more hospitable to talented younger people, we have to put our money where our mouth is. Retaining and attracting talented young people means making the Quad Cities a cooler place. If we want to become cooler, young people have to lead the way; otherwise, it's like a teen dance planned by adults: dull and unsuccessful in engaging the intended audience.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 7: Set age limits on development requests for proposals.
Put a request for proposals out on a set of dilapidated buildings and provide part of the funding to renovate the complex as we have done in so many other instances, but restrict the entries to people under the age of 25.
Suggested Summer Reading: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum.
Wind Turbines; Eastern Austria. The United States currently has 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, produces 8 percent of the world's petroleum, and is the home to 5 percent of the world's population, yet it consumes 25 percent of the world's petroleum production.
The
single biggest threat to our economic security is our dependence on
foreign sources of oil, much of it coming from countries that do not
like us very much.
In 1956, M. King Hubbard, a Shell Oil scientist, predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. It did, and we are now producing one-half of the oil that we did that year. He predicted that world oil production would peak in 2000, and while he may have missed that mark by a few years because of oil embargoes and prolonged recessions, we are getting close to the peak of world oil production.
It's not that we're going to run out of oil anytime soon, but with demand for oil skyrocketing in China and other developing nations, the cost of oil is set to increase dramatically in the coming years.
Petroleum is such a unique commodity. Its ability to deliver so much energy in such a small unit has made both the automobile and the airplane viable. Our ability to convert to a more renewable resource to transport ourselves has been limited by the size and weight of batteries that make other forms of energy usable by the engines that propel us.
Electric power can be replaced with more renewable means. Nuclear power is increasingly getting a second look at least as a midterm replacement before the full implementation of a more renewable power source.
What do significantly higher petroleum prices mean to the way we build cities? Public transport becomes more attractive, as do bikes, walking, and living closer together so that walking improves as an option.
The bewildering trend of increasing size in new-home construction as household size shrinks will likely reverse itself with substantially higher heating and cooling costs.
Auto use may decline enough that the current I-74 bridges may have enough capacity to sustain that corridor that has become the region's Main Street.
With more walking and cycling, people will be more fit, and there will be a reduction in medical costs with less obesity.
Finding new sources of energy will be imperative. One of the largest sources of found energy is conservation - doing what we do with less energy. It is encouraging to know that after years of blackouts and energy shortages, the average Californian consumes 60 percent of the electricity of the average American.
Renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass will grow as sources of energy.
Could a long-term regional economic development strategy be built around regional self-reliance in energy? We have a leg up with nearby nuclear and coal-fired electric plants.
Because the federal government refuses to tackle this tough issue, what if we were to work with MidAmerican to craft a regional energy strategy that would make the Quad Cities energy-independent by 2015?
Vacation Manifesto Idea 6: Energy independence in the Quad Cities by 2015.
Developing a regional authority to invest in alternative energy and transportation systems instead of continuing down the sure path to energy ruin will take sacrifice and creativity. Making the Quad Cities energy-independent by 2015 by conserving energy, using renewable sources of energy, and using existing coal and nuclear facilities may just be the way to reclaim economic vitality.
Suggested Summer Reading: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, by David Goodstein.
The Gardens Hotel; Manchester. In the European Cup championship match, Liverpool came back from a three-nil deficit at the half to tie Milan in regulation. They then proceeded to win the shoot-off, much to the joy of those gathered in front of the television in the Gardens Hotel lobby.
Following that historic match, a person of Chinese lineage wandered over to inquire how I got the wireless Internet service to work. In the course of our conversation, he let on that he was an accountant, a Manchester native who worked for a smallish accounting firm of 40 or so, and that he was back for some meetings.
Upon further discussion it turned out he lived on the eastern shore of Maryland, and no, he didn't run his company's U.S. Affiliate, as it only has offices in Manchester and London (though it is considering sending most of its back-office jobs to India).
Was he collecting huge amounts of frequent-flier miles? Nope. He only came back four times a year on average and kept in touch with his staff and customers via a small camera mounted to his laptop and his Internet-based video-phone service.
When I asked why the eastern shore, his first response was that it was because he didn't like the town in Pennsylvania where his wife lived.
How'd you meet your wife?
We met via the Internet.
And with that I had my solution to helping the U.S. balance the trade deficit.
With their strong cultural preference for baby boys and with equally strong incentives to limit each family to one child to curtail runaway population growth, China has about a 3-million-per-year surplus of males to females.
Internet matchmaking offers a much better solution to this demographic landmine than polyandry, bachelorhood, or war, but perhaps my view is affected by being the father of six daughters.
It's such a small world, after all.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 5: Use Internet dating to help solve our trade deficit with China.
Suggested Summer Reading: I Can't Believe I'm Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating, by Evan Marc Katz.
Kosice, Slovakia. Rudolf Schuster and U.S. Steel prove that we're a much better place when we learn from each other.
Consider Rudolf Schuster. A native son of Kosice, Slovakia, he served as mayor in the early 1980s, before rising in the ranks and becoming a fairly unpopular, high-ranking Communist official in the Czechoslovakian government.
At the peak of his career, he was appointed ambassador to Canada. While in Canada, Schuster was inspired by the downtown-revitalization program that transformed its capital city, Ottawa.
After the Eastern Bloc crumbled, Schuster returned to Kosice and got himself re-elected mayor. To complete his rehabilitation from Communist to civic do-gooder, he led a downtown-regeneration program and conducted a number of promotions, including hosting the world's largest Macarena dance (70,000 participants). He succeeded in revitalizing both himself and Kosice's downtown.
In a Nixon-like fashion, he rises from the dead and is chosen the first directly elected president of the newly independent Slovak Republic in 1999.
Meanwhile, the once-proud product of quintessential American capitalist Andrew Carneige, U.S. Steel, has spent the past 30 years selling off assets and seeking protection from international competitors behind the skirt of the federal government's anti-dumping rules.
In 2000, however, U.S. Steel purchased the assets of VSZ, a state-owned steel producer with a large plant in Kosice. Five years later, that plant is producing 5 million tons of steel and earning three times more per ton of steel produced than its U.S. plants.
These profits will go untaxed until the end of this decade per the development agreement U.S. Steel negotiated when it purchased the plant.
U.S. Steel subsequently purchased a Serbian steel company based upon its success in Kosice and together these former Eastern Bloc operations have re-energized a long dormant company.
In 2005, U.S. Steel made roughly half of its worldwide profits from the plants in Slovakia and Serbia.
In the mayor's case, embracing Western notions of community development rescued a floundering Communist, while in the latter case embracing the remnants of a centrally planned economy has rescued a floundering capitalist entity. Strange bedfellows indeed.
If capitalists and Communists can better each other with collaboration, why can't those of Christian and Islamic traditions or, even more difficult perhaps, those on either side of the aisle in Washington, D.C.?
Vacation Manifesto Idea 4: Don't give up on either ourselves (success may be closer than we think) or each other (yesterday's enemy may be tomorrow's friend).
Reinventing ourselves as a community takes looking in unusual places and putting the same building blocks together in different ways. Sometimes what we need is across the street, while at other times it's across the globe.
Suggested Summer Reading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs.
Stonehenge and Bristol, West of England. Dyslexic economic development shorthand: It's a long way from IH to HI.
IH is for International Harvester and represents our economic past, when industrial production was the bulwark of our economy.
HI represents the three new legs of the post-industrial economy that must be joined with manufacturing if we are to have a sustainable chair at the table of economic plenty. HI, for higher education; HI, for high tech; and finally, HI, for how you doing? (hospitality industries of the experience economy - retail, food, beverage, lodging, and entertainment).
Nearly all developed countries are going through this transition to a less-industrial future, one based more upon human talent than transportation or raw materials that guided earlier eras of economic development.
Our success is not guaranteed. The lesson from Stonehenge is that the large stones perched on top came from at least 200 miles away. It took the west of Britain thousands of years to successfully reposition itself. How long will it take the Midwest?
Much of our economic-development activity has been focused on place-making. Re-inventing obsolete industrial or transportation complexes, returning to waterfronts, and regenerating historic cores are all aimed at creating compelling places to better welcome creative people needed to grow our new economy.
I stood in one place in Bristol, England, and saw an IMAX theatre, a botanical center, a science museum, waterfront housing, a convention center, a riverfront park, a conference center, a waterfront public library, a core downtown with extensive history and great old buildings, and an active club/pub district.
Sound familiar?
While we have had success making our cities more interesting, we are up against great competition from cities around the globe.
The ingredients to form a compelling place are here in the Quad Cities, but unfortunately they are sprinkled in an un-compellingly, almost random fashion from Museum Hill in Davenport to the Family Museum on the Iowa side and from The Quarter to The District on the Illinois side.
Weaving various venues together in more persuasive fashion will likely determine whether we fully take advantage of our large investment in public and quasi-public facilities and deliver on their promise to make the Quad Cities a place more conducive for attracting, retaining, or creating creative talent.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 3: Connecting pockets of excellence in compelling fashion will determine whether the various Quad Cities' central-city experiments of the past 10 years succeed or fail.
Light rail offers an opportunity for a compelling connection between key assets within the historic core on both sides of the river and may be more important to the future of the Quad Cities than a new I-74 bridge.
Suggested Summer Reading: Paradise of Cities: Venice in the 19th Century, by John Julius Norwich.
Soviet-era Worker Flats; Anywhere in Eastern Europe. We may have won the Cold War, but our complacency will keep us from winning the economic wars with those we freed from their centrally planned bureaucracies.
From
the window of my daughter Tara's bedroom in the apartment of the
third host family she lived with during her Rotary Exchange in
eastern Slovakia, eight-story Soviet-era worker flats filled the
horizon as they do in cities of all sizes in countries once set
behind the Iron Curtain.
Tara's host family unit was large and nicely appointed. Three college-educated children, a construction-company manager dad, and a part-time teacher's assistant mom enjoy the view but not the hike up the stairs every other day when the elevator malfunctions.
I'd wager greatly that they and others will succeed in building a better life for themselves in the years ahead. They are motivated; students and their families are very serious about their studies; and it's only a matter of time before they sort out new opportunities in the post-Socialist new-world order.
With 1 billion hungry in China, 1 billion hungry in India, and 1 billion hungry in the former Soviet countries, there are 3 billion motivated people out there seeking a bigger piece of the economic pie.
Competing against these motivated people reinforces the need to retain and attract people of talent, meaning that place-making is important, but most important is the need to create people of talent from those already living in the Quad Cities.
Education and training are economic development these days. We leave children behind at our own risk.
We need talented workers to fill jobs, and we need to reduce the costs associated with those who don't fully participate in the economy. Social programs, police enforcement, and prison are expensive alternatives to not educating kids.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 2: Hungry in Hungary.
They're hungry in Hungary. Worldwide competition makes attracting, retaining, and creating people of talent the center of economic development. Place-making helps attract and retain talent, while education creates talent.
Successful places will focus resources on education and place making.
Suggested Summer Reading: Three Billion New Capitalists, by Clyde Pestowitz.
St.
Stephens Square; Vienna. In Europe, churches and cathedrals are
used for museums, the arts, and even as billboards. About the only
use that doesn't occur within churches is the practice of religion.
The secularization of Europe was a hot topic in drafting the
constitution for the European Union (EU).
Last summer, the voters in France and Holland rejected the EU Constitution, and efforts to formulate one Europe from many European states went down in flames. But the role of faith and Christianity in Europe remains a hot topic.
Medieval, Christian Europe gave birth to pluralism when a French pope and a king had a profound disagreement on how to appoint bishops. From that moment on, western Europe developed much differently from that part of Europe under the control of the Byzantine Church or the regions in Africa and the Middle East where Islamic traditions prevailed.
Western Europe was probably the weakest of these three competing traditions in the year 1080, when the Investiture Controversy between Pope Gregory and Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire kicked off the democratic project that permitted the development of representative democracies and capitalism. The Byzantine model yielded royal absolutism in the form of the czars that laid much of the groundwork for the successor totalitarian regime - the USSR.
The lack of pluralism in Islamic states remains a challenging issue to the present time.
In a historical sense, then, Western Europe's growth and development are directly linked to the Roman church's embrace of pluralism. This pluralism gave birth to the Enlightenment in the 1500s that put man more at the center of human existence than most other cultures. The Enlightenment led to modern secular societies, which is how Europe sees itself today.
The modern secular states in Europe are in crisis. Birth rates in nearly all European countries have waned over the past 50 years. The birth rates in Germany are so low that the population in 2050 will be reduced by the increase in population that occurred during reunification with East Germany. Spain is expected to number 30 million in 2050, down from 39 million in 2005.
Immigration from the south and east fills voids created by low birth rates. Unlike similar southern immigration into the United States, such immigration is largely Islamic. If birth rates don't change, the face of Europe will be very different by 2050.
The role of faith in society is a both crucial and complex.
In Europe, modern secularism produces a society incapable of perpetuating itself. The fundamentalism of modern Islamic states seems to prevent the full development of human potential.
Here in America, conflict between faith and secularism is all around. We claim to be a more religious nation than our European peers yet practice materialism second-to-none.
Balancing our faith with fine secular traditions such as tolerance, equal protection, and pluralism is the key to maintaining a healthy society. Nobody seems to be getting it right these days.
Vacation Manifesto Idea 1: Better defining the role of faith in society is one of the most important issues of our time.
