Committee on the Environment

Why regions treat their cities like deadbeat uncles

  • 1.  Why regions treat their cities like deadbeat uncles

    Posted 07-14-2015 02:39 PM
    This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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    Why Many Cities are seen as the Deadbeat Uncle in their Regions 

    As the then deputy secretary of DOT told me early in Obama's presidency, the President checked personally that the departmental silos open up to collaboration in the Sustainable Communities Partnership he had initiated between the departments of housing (HUD), transportation (DOT) and environment (EPA). (White House blog). The strange bedfellows were forced together based on the insight of the former community organizer that sustainable communities cannot be achieved by individual departments without looking at a bigger interconnected picture. The grant was described in these words:
    The Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program will support metropolitan and multijurisdictional planning efforts that integrate housing, land use, economic and workforce development, transportation, and infrastructure investments in a manner that empowers jurisdictions to consider the interdependent challenges of: (1) economic competitiveness and revitalization; (2) social equity, inclusion, and access to opportunity; (3) energy use and climate change; and (4) public health and environmental impact.
    Sustainable Communities Partnership between HUD, DOT and EPA
    This partnership came up with a $165 million grant program to be awarded to various applicant cities to do regional planning of a kind not seen in a while. But just as the grantors had to collaborate, so did grantees: To receive money a proposal had to be truly regional and it needed to include partnerships, the more unconventional the better.
    With these requirements the grant program recognized that cities and regions are intertwined, that problems do not stop at jurisdictional boundaries and that it is time to resolve urban issue on the regional scale.

    Christopher Alexander, in his seminal 1977 book "A Pattern Language", had arrived at a similar conclusion. He organized the entire global built environment based on people formations from family and work....
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    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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