What’s Infrastructure Got to Do With It?

It’s simple: without infrastructure, places fail. End of story.

For places to thrive, they need infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be planned, paid for, operated, maintained, and eventually replaced. It needs to be right for the city, county, place or region. It needs to respond to the needs, priorities and aspirations of the community. The infrastructure for civic success depends on good planning.

It’s the 21^st century, and it’s probably time we take a fresh look at what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and the results we’re expected to achieve. In cities of all sizes, travel patterns and habits are changing, transportation technologies are evolving pretty rapidly, and we’re seeing a different set of expectations about how the infrastructure helps the city best express its economic success in this new millennium.

In other words, we need good planning now more than ever.

You Don’t Have to be Huge to Succeed

Recently, DOT Secretary Foxx announced the finalists in his “Smart City Challenge” initiative. These cities aren’t in the top 10 cities, population-wise, but they’re all pretty big.  Did I say “top ten>” Yes, there currently are exactly 10 incorporated cities in the U.S. with populations over 1 million, and these ten collectively make up much of the social, cultural and economic prominence of our country on the world’s stage. And yes, New York City (1), Los Angeles (2), Chicago (3), Houston (4), Philadelphia (5), Phoenix (6), San Antonio (7), San Diego (8), Dallas (9) and San Jose (10) do mean a lot to our country, and to our country’s standing in the world economy. But these 10 cities account for just about 25 million people, which is less than 8 percent of the United States’ population.

So, let’s consider the 92 percent of U.S. population, and look at the rest of municipal America. For this, I'm relying on my friends from the National League of Cities. According to NLC, the Census Bureau reports there are almost 20,000 local municipal governments in the U.S. As just mentioned, 10 of these have populations of more than 1 million. Moving on through population cohorts, there are about 100 cities with populations over 200,000, and 90 percent of U.S. municipalities have populations below 25,000.

So, we see the vast majority of Americans (and the bulk of U.S. economic activities) are located in places that have populations below 200,000. This is an incredibly diverse macrocosm, but has a few common features. For one, there are a lot of truly nifty things that take place in these smaller and mid-sized places. Another common element is that most of these places have small professional staffs and finite resources; not that their larger-city counterparts don’t face those same issues, but smaller places have to be extremely judicious in how they deploy skilled staff and how they harness the smaller economic resources they face. Related to the resource issue is that most smaller places’ leaders and planners are nervous about being “first out of the gate” when taking risks or trying innovations, and so they really want to learn from one another, and build progress experientially and incrementally.

What is “Good Planning”?

There are a lot of practices that could be labeled as “good planning.” Here’s my principled view:

Good planning in the 21^st century has three attributes:

1. It is data-driven,
2. It is performance-based and results-oriented, and
3. It is inclusive and considerate of the community’s priorities and aspirations.

Planning and Civic Success

Here’s the premise, in a five-step argument:

1. For many places, success in the 21^st century is different than their visions of 20^th- or 19^th-century civic success.
2. 21^st-century places – whether cities, metropolitan areas, counties, towns, or regions that span multiple local governments – have the capacity to succeed.
3. Cities, towns, regions and other places can succeed when they can make the choices that are right for success.
4. For success to occur, these places must be empowered to act on their choices.
5. Good planning can lead to good choices.

“Civic success” is a pretty wide-ranging term (never mind the fact that I may have just invented this term). Every place will define its success in a different fashion. Some will focus on economic indicators, others may focus on social or quality-of-life indicators, some places will focus on natural resources or environmental indicators, and others will define their success in completely different terms. That’s okay. The underlying assumption is that a community’s civic success is defined in a way that is measurable and that reflects what is important to that community.