The city is a collective. A place where various communities, economies, and human-ecosystems layer and connect. These dense system of inter-connectivity could be home to many million or many thousands, the number is not important. In my opinion it is the ordered chaos of interwoven purpose that typifies "the city".
The interwoven activities of people and enterprises form the city's fabric.
Thus, a healthy city is one that exhibits a vibrancy in these qualities. The synergies and positive feedback-loops created within a city act as a catalyst for even bigger and more vibrant activities. The ability for a city to magnify the lives and actions of its inhabitants is a central element to my research.
To revive Cleveland, we must first isolate the strengths of the city. Examining the corridors of infrastructure, rivers, avenues, railroads and highways lays a framework for how goods, services, and people move about the city. Before we can offer lofty dreams of light rail and streetcar networks, we must see if we are using our current assets properly. Determining which economic engines are true anchors of productivity in the city should be followed by aggressive public policy to enhance and support these institutions. Small businesses are the engines of innovation and can feed off the success of major industry. This is the kind of synergy that a city can offer. Lastly identifying the resilient communities that have outlasted the sprawl-and-flight history of the city can give policy makers insight into which communities could serve as hubs of future residential activities.
However, we must do more than look at the current strengths of the city, we must look backwards through history to watch the rise and, in all too many cases, fall of institutions within the city. Did we lose jobs to globalization? Did they become obsolete? Or did the CEO move the jobs just a few miles out into suburbia?
The revival of Cleveland would mean its return to national significance. The best way to do this is to determine what assets brought about its initial "boom" and see how many of them can be repaired. Add in the new and burgeoning strengths of the city (read: the Cleveland Clinic was not a 19th century economic powerhouse) and top off with a look to the future to find which areas Cleveland has never taken advantage of, but could.
The Cleveland Clinic was recently named the #4 Hospital in the U.S. by US News and World Report
There are global, national, regional and hyper-local economies that a city can tap into, but there are also limiting factors such as barriers to entry. Cleveland may never be able to compete with Palo Alto, CA in the technology category, but the biotechnology field is ripe for development. Currently Cambridge/Boston is the American Mecca for this kind of research, but Cleveland could certainly take on and excel in this sector.
The city is the collision of everything that man has made; it is chaos with a purpose. There is a gravity that pulls toward the City the culture and advancements of a society. Only in 20th Century America have we seen Newton's famous apple break from its branch, and fly up toward the heavens.
Pericles, a famous politician of Athens, made a speech at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War in honor of Athens' fallen soldiers. In the speech he said, "all good things flow into the City, because of its greatness." Cleveland is surrounded by and filled with assets that provide incredible opportunity for growth. The current and historic institutions yield a framework, that if nurtured, can bring the flow of people, businesses, and all good things back to it.
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