RECONOMICS (teaching version)

We humans like to control things, even those things we don’t understand and that can’t—by their very nature—be controlled. We assign roles, budgets, and missions that pack ambitious, dynamic agendas into tight little packages, and then wonder why good stuff seldom comes out of those boxes.

As already stated, resilient prosperity is the goal of a most intelligent places, whether or not they use the term. It could be considered a “universal” target for community and regional futures. Most places already have everything they need to create resilient prosperity, but it can’t manifest because they try to pack that grand mission into a narrowly-focused existing agency that can’t handle it. Such places assume that revitalization must emerge from their economic development or redevelopment agency, or real estate investors, or their planning department, or their mayor’s or governor’s office, etc. In other words, they’re prioritizing structure over function.

As a result, when the right vision, strategy or resources emerge from an effective-but-unofficial local leader—such as a neighborhood group, a community foundation or a student group—opportunities often die on the vine. But even when renewal efforts sprout within an “approved” entity, they usually get constricted by the limitations of that agency.

At some level, public leaders are aware of their ignorance regarding complexity. This is why you seldom see an agency charged with revitalizing the entire community. No one wants to be in charge of an activity they can’t define; whose principles, models, and cycles they can’t explain. Better to break it down into controllable specialties, and hope that the overall goal magically takes care of itself.

Economic revitalization strategies are sometimes simple to describe, but seldom easy to implement. One accepted strategy, for instance, is called “plugging the leaks.” It comprises the filling-out of local supply chains and/or the strengthening of local industries. When companies purchase good or services from outside the region, revenue is “leaking” out of the region’s economy. A good example of plugging such a leak is the way many U.S. regions that have a strong craft brewing industry are now growing their hops locally, rather than buying them from England or Germany, or from the other side of the U.S. The current rebuilding of local food systems is that same dynamic on a more holistic scale.

“No one else but an architect could solve the problems of the contemporary city.” This pronouncement by the 1994 Pritzker Prize winner, architect Christian de Portzamparc appeared in a 2017 ArchDaily interview by Vladimir Belogolovsky.

No one but an architect would say such a thing. Few architects are able to get their heads out of the building envelope, except to see how their design might fit with the architectural vernacular of the city. An architect who even cares about—much less understands—the economic, ecological and cultural complexity of an urban area and its rural surroundings is a rare bird indeed.

On the other hand, putting an architect is charge would probably be vastly preferable to putting a civil engineer in charge: the architect would likely do less damage. Now, if Portzamparc had said “landscape architect,” he would have been a bit closer to the mark. But only a bit: their scope is more holistic, but they are generally no more knowledgeable of process or strategy.

Strategies live in the mind: they die on paper. Many folks confuse strategies with plans. But plans are just thoughts frozen in time. Other folks confuse strategies with actions. But actions are just tactics: strategies determine tactics. Others confuse strategies with goals, such as when they say “our strategy is to make this a more sustainable / equitable / prosperous community“.

The first step in creating an effective strategy is to make sure you’re addressing the problem, not the symptom. For instance, a city suffering from “blight” makes it sound as if vacant and derelict buildings are the problem.

In reality, poverty might be the problem and the buildings are only the symptom (or, to be medically correct, the “sign”). Of course, poverty is not the only cause of blight: bad planning (especially bad transportation planning, like urban highways) is also a common cause. Determining the underlying problem that needs to be addressed by your strategy can only be done if you have a very clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve, and a well-researched map of the renewable natural, built and socioeconomic assets you have available. (Note: “renewable assets” are also referred to as “problems” or “blight”.) Working from the right starting point is essential.

A strategy is a technique that simplifies, speeds, and/or helps secure the achievement of a goal. A strategy can be devised for ANY situation. If it fails, it’s because it didn’t fit the situation (or didn’t have an implementation process: more on that later). For instance, your project didn’t fail because it lacked sufficient funding, but because its strategy didn’t take your available funding into account. Your program didn’t fail because your citizens lacked sufficient motivation, but because your strategy didn’t take their level of motivation into account.

Photo credit: Adobe Stock

The need for a strategy depends on the goal, not the activity. For instance, let’s say you’re in charge of renovating an urban park. Refurbishing a park is fairly straightforward, so you might not need to devise a new strategy.

But if you don’t have the necessary funding, you need a strategy to rectify that. Your strategy might thus be to tie the park renovation to a larger goal that has broader support, such as revitalization of the adjacent neighborhood.

But, if you make advancing neighborhood revitalization a goal of your park project, you’ll need a strategy to make sure it happens. Of course, there’s a chance that the renovated park will be all that’s needed to trigger adjacent revitalization, but what kind of professional relies on chance?

The right vision and map directs us to the right goals.
The right strategy drives us to success.

Many factors contribute to success, of course, like design, efficiency and quality of work. But, as mentioned earlier, strategy is the only element of an endeavor whose sole function is success. If it’s a bad strategy—or if the competition has a better strategy—failure is still possible. But without a strategy, failure is likely.

In the world of marketing, maybe the best-known strategy is “price skimming.” Every consumer is familiar with it too, even if they don’t know its name. Price skimming is the strategy of setting a high price during the launch of a new, innovative product and then lowering the price over time to access different points on the demand curve. Some call it the “early adopter” strategy, since there’s usually a subset of buyers who will pay extra to be the first on their block to have your new widget.

This strategy works like a charm. Most consumers largely ignore advertising copy and judge the value of a product (or service) primarily by its price. So, starting with a high price is the most effective way to elevate the market position of the product, and thus boost what people are willing to pay. Marketers know that they can always lower a price, but can seldom get away with raising it. Like all good strategies, price skimming is simple, effective, and broadly applicable.

A good vision statement from Millvale, Pennsylvania, facilitated by evolveEA.

The same strategy can often be applied to multiple communities, despite differing strengths, weaknesses, and cultures.

How is that possible? That’s where the vision comes in: if it addresses the unique needs and dreams of the place, the strategy can be relatively generic.

Dreams + research + deadlines = goals.
Cohesive set of goals = vision.

Why do so many cities write plans and start projects without a strategy or vision? Because few public leaders understand how programs, visions/asset maps, strategies, policies/budget, partnerships and projects (tactics) all fit together.

But not all visions are created equal. Some are deeply flawed. Why? Because they are based on daydreams, rather than data. Visioning should be a research process. Daydreams will reveal what you want, but data will help reveal what you need. That’s why the map of renewable assets is combined with the vision portion of the process. If data drives your vision, it will ipso facto drive your design, strategy, plan, etc.

Mapping tools have evolved tremendously in recent years, and are becoming more affordable. Likewise, having a GIS (geographic information systems) expert on staff is now normal for all but the tiniest of communities: it wasn’t long ago that only large cities had such capabilities.

Detroit launched its Motor City Mapping Project in 2014, in order to get a handle on its vacant properties. It’s a city-wide initiative,  and the Detroit Land Bank now uses it to determine which vacant structures should be demolished, and which should be rehabilitated. Two years later, the Western Reserve Land Conservancy implemented that same technology to create “property dashboards” in Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio.

Imagine the regenerative power of having dashboards that include all of the eight sectors of renewable assets documented in The Restoration Economy: infrastructure, brownfields, heritage, disaster, ecological, watershed, fishery and agricultural.

U.S. portion of a CHAT map.

GIS isn’t just crucial for urban areas: the restoration of natural assets is increasingly managed by such systems. For instance, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates the strategic, science-based conservation and restoration efforts of public agencies in 19 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces, which together manage some 3.7 million square miles of North America’s wild and scenic territories. They have created an online mapping tool called Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (CHAT) to dynamically reveal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to their missions.

Mapping technologies are also becoming more affordable: even ESRI, the leading (and traditionally most expensive) vendor is now offering less-expensive cloud-based tools such as ArcGIS Online to replace dedicated local servers. Their new ArcGIS Hub is especially exciting: it makes sharing open GIS data with public and private partners far easier. This, in turn, is the key to creating a complete resilient prosperity program—ideally based on the RECONOMICS Process—online. That will be the game-changer.

So, both your vision and your strategy must be based on research, not assumptions. Your vision is your dream and your map is your present reality, but the dreamers must be knowledgeable and aware. One might say that the vision maps the “soft stuff” while the renewable asset map maps the “hard stuff” (tangible assets).

But, even if informed by research and mapping, a vision without a strategy is still nothing but a dream. And a strategy without a vision is meaningless. A vision/map and strategy together can change your world (if you have a proven process for implementing them).

There’s nothing grand about visions and strategies: we all create, use, and change them constantly. Here’s a totally superficial example to show how mundane and ubiquitous strategizing is. Let’s say you’re the male host of a talk show, and an upcoming guest is an actress with a reputation for being narcissistic and obnoxious. You decide to take her down a notch on your show, so you research embarrassing facts from her life. Thus, your vision is to publicly humiliate her, and your strategy is to ambush her with facts she’d rather keep secret.

But she is expecting this, and has a strategy of her own: to make you like and desire her. She deploys tactics that charm you. It works. Suddenly, your goal changes. Your vision is now to marry her. Your quickly-adopted new strategy is to charm her. Your tactics are to compliment her and avoid embarrassing her. Her strategy trumped your strategy. She wins.

Again, the strategy’s purpose is to achieve the goal: if the goal changes, so might the strategy. But one should be cautious of changing a strategy if the goal remains unchanged. The primary mechanism of a strategy is to guide decision-making. Decisions often have to be made in stressful or chaotic circumstances, so we’re tempted to “wing it”. Those who are able to keep their strategy in mind under pressure are often the victors.

Photo of Lakewood (Chicago) store courtesy Whole Foods Markets.

A November 29, 2016 article by Lyneir Richardson in the National Real Estate Investor was titled “How the Strategic Opening of Retail Stores Can Revitalize City Neighborhoods”.

It described six examples of struggling Chicago neighborhoods that had been revitalized by the opening of new retail in the right place, at the right time.

The inclusion of “strategic” in the title was telling, given the long history of failed attempts to revitalize places via new retail. So, was it the retail or the strategy that revitalized these places? Both, of course: a strategy without tactics (action) is useless, and action without a strategy is often counter-productive.

Since downtowns are the most common focus of revitalization efforts, let’s use them to illustrate a common lack of strategic thinking. It should obvious to anyone that 1) businesses need customers, 2) customers who return frequently are best, and 3) customers are more likely to visit frequently if they live nearby. But as glaringly-obvious as those statements are, many downtown revitalization initiatives ignore them.

Local leaders look at their downtown’s paucity of stores and restaurants and think “we need more stores and restaurants.” So they launch incentives—from tax breaks to cash handouts—to artificially stimulate the opening of more businesses. A year or two later, those businesses are usually dead. Why? Because they didn’t have enough customers. The downtown needed customers, not vendors.

As mentioned in the Clearwater story, residents have far more “revitalization patience” than retailers. Someone renting a downtown loft in an repurposed warehouse can go for years without a downtown hardware store: they just drive or take the bus to one elsewhere. But a downtown hardware store can’t survive long without customers. An exception is downtown “central markets”: they can attract shoppers from a large geographic area by adding entertainment, cultural elements, and critical mass to retail, and can thus be excellent revitalizers.

That’s the simplest form of strategic thinking, yet time after time, downtown revitalization efforts focus on commercial redevelopment, rather than residential. Thus the rise of mixed-use redevelopment. But even mixed-use can be overdone: sometimes, all that’s needed is residential redevelopment.

Create the customers, and businesses naturally follow. Retail is an outcome of downtown revitalization, not a cause (as with all rules, there are exceptions to this one, as we’ll see in a moment). Hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted annually, simply because cities rush into action without a trace of strategic thinking. But places that recognize the value of this simple “customers drive retail” strategy tend to produce dramatic results. Kansas City, Missouri enjoyed 39% growth in downtown residents from 2010 to 2018, versus 7% growth in its metro areas. Chattanooga, Tennessee added 14% more downtown residents in the same period, versus 7% growth in its metro areas. Both cities previously had downtowns on the verge of death.

How are the right strategies created?

Countless streetscaping and façade renovation projects go by the grand name of “revitalization.” If they are, in fact, a tactic/project in a larger revitalization strategy/program, that’s fine. But if they are just isolated, one-time projects, then citizens will likely be disappointed when the project is over, and revitalization hasn’t manifested. Regeneration is an ongoing process, not the result of a quick fix. Moreover, it’s a journey, not a destination: the process of regenerating is itself revitalizing.

Sometimes, an experienced person possessing deep familiarity with a place will be able to intuit the right strategy on the spot (making it look deceptively easy). Other times, a long series of public engagement, visioning, and partnership meetings is needed for the right strategy to emerge.

An option between those two extremes is to conduct (or commissioning) a process analysis. A process analysis provides the locally-appropriate perspective and understanding needed to design an entire comeback process: regenerative program + regenerative vision & map + regenerative strategy + regenerative policies/budget + regenerative partners + regenerative projects.

Visions can be good, bad or mediocre. Visioning is a very different activity from strategizing, and we’re focusing here on the element of strategy. But let me toss in one tip about creating a vision. A vision that’s inspiring, appropriate, and achievable often derives from asking two questions: 1) Under what circumstances would our problems become assets? and 2) What opportunities emerge when we combine (integrate) our problems?

Take Detroit, for example. It’s a huge city (140 square miles), and—after half a century of population loss—two intrinsically-linked problems emerged: too much vacant land and too few people.

Applying Question #1, vacant land becomes an asset if repurposed to produce food or energy, and low population becomes an asset if reducing food or energy consumption is a goal.

Applying Question #2, the juxtaposition of low population with copious amounts of food-and-energy-generating space means Detroit is uniquely positioned to become the world’s first food-and/or-energy-independent major city. Not just planting a few urban gardens (like everyone else), but 100% self-sufficient via industrial-scale production. With all of the spin-off jobs and economic benefits that come with any industrial hub.

That might be an inspiring, appropriate vision.

It wouldn’t be an answer to all the city’s problems, of course, but it would dramatically reposition the city in the eyes of the world.

Rather than being an iconic victim of the decline of the manufacturing economy, Detroit would be an icon of the global restoration economy: repurposing old assets, renewing quality of life, and reconnecting citizens to their food sources.

NOTE: That’s only an example of the visioning process; not an actual recommendation. Detroit is doing a lot of things right these days, and might well become an icon of the restoration economy without any significant focus on urban farming. Repurposing their industrial buildings for new forms of manufacturing—such as small-scale, artisan or robotics—is one option that already has some local traction, for instance.

Planners plan, just like writers write. But some writers are also publishers, and so too are some planners strategists. But we must avoid the very common tendency to conflate strategizing with planning. They are two very different processes, and two very different skill sets.

It’s relatively easy to write a plan if given a clear vision and strategy. So, planning can—and usually should—be a separate process run by different people. Planners have skills and perspectives (especially if they are engineers by training) that are often not appropriate for strategizing. If your goal in writing a plan is to go through a visioning, strategizing, and planning process, good on you. But if the goal is simply to produce a plan, boo on you. In a stable world, a plan could be a good thing, if well-researched and written by someone with deep insight. But who has a stable world?

Strategy is where the process of changing a complex adaptive system is simplified. It’s where uncertainty and surprise are both expected and welcomed.

A healthy, living river pulses with periodic floods (surprises) that erode banks in some places, and deposit that sediment in others, so it’s always changing its shape (more surprises). To an old-school civil engineer, a good river is one that never floods and never changes its shape. In other words, a dead river.

As mentioned earlier, a basic function of all engineering is to remove surprises from a system. This changes healthy complex living systems into unhealthy complicated mechanical systems. Complex systems have distributed controls; engineers tend to want centralized control. Strategizing requires a risk-taking mindset. Engineers are risk-eliminators, not risk-takers.

Los Angeles has been trying to restore the ugly, lifeless concrete ditch they call the Los Angeles River for well over a decade. They also want to revitalize the properties and neighborhoods bordering it, which have been devitalized and fragmented by this monstrosity.

Los Angeles “River”. Photo: Adobe Stock.

While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did respond with a restoration plan about a decade ago, many city leaders feel that the Corps is the major obstacle to their dream.

In February of 2019, they demanded that the federal government give them back their river. They felt that the only agenda of the Corps of Engineers was flood control. LA officials claim that the Corps’ mission “does not include myriad issues his agency’s County Flood Control District regards as essential: water conservation, movement of sediment, graffiti removal, ecosystem friendly vegetation, homeless encampments and recreational opportunities.”

The good news? A new generation of civil engineers—arising from the modern dam-removal and climate resilience trends—is far more collaborative. They bring in biologists and community revitalization experts who are well-versed in the complexity of living systems. This combination of skills can yield wonderful surprises.

So, strategies should be created by people who aren’t intimidated by complexity or terrified of surprises. They should also be intimately involved in the visioning process, and they should have a vested interest in the outcome (provided it’s based on shared community goals).

The bottom line is that there’s no “right” profession that should create the strategy. What’s important is that it’s the right strategy. What’s also crucial is ensuring that all stakeholders are invited to help create the vision that the strategy delivers.

The person or organization responsible for the strategy must be identified. If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. But we shouldn’t just toss the job to the first person (such as the planner) who comes to mind.

If your community or organization hires a strategy director, know that their job isn’t to sit around dreaming up strategies: it’s primarily a research position. Awareness precedes insight. They must be supremely aware of the environment in which you operate: trends, technologies, players, etc.

I spent 6 years as the Director of Strategic Initiatives for a professional society in the construction industry. The organization had some 16,000 members (architects, engineers, and product manufacturers), but it hadn’t done anything new in 25 years, and was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The new Executive Director wisely knew that he would have his hands full restructuring the organization, and wouldn’t have time to focus on strategic research, so he hired me to do that. Part of my job was attending industry conferences to get a better feel for where our organization fit in the scheme of things, both present and future. A superior strategy derives from superior awareness.

This applies to communities, as well. It’s vitally important to provide both strategic leadership training and a learning environment for local residents. Like so many important and mysterious elements of life, leadership is an emergent quality of living systems: we never know when or where in the community a leader will pop up, so we should invest in as many people as possible.

Success isn’t just about who creates the strategy: it’s also about who implements it. Personality counts, so don’t become so dependent on your strategy (or process) that you forget to put the right people in charge. As with football teams, political, business, and non-profit leaders tend to be strong on defense or offense: seldom both. Economic revitalization often requires an offensive strategy. Climate resilience often requires a defensive strategy. Achieving both simultaneously requires a strategy that produces more of what you want while protecting what you have.

US Army landing at Anzio on January 22, 1944.

Putting a defensive strategist in charge of an offensive operation can be disastrous, as we discovered in the Battle of Anzio during World War II. The amphibious landing took place on January 22, 1944, and the operation ended June 5, 1944 with the capture of Rome.

On the surface, that would seem to be a success, but the goal wasn’t just to take Rome: it was to weaken German forces and prevent them from rejoining their main force. In that, it was an abject failure. It also should have taken far less time and cost far fewer American lives to accomplish what it did.

The problem was U.S. Army Major General John P. Lucas. After taking the beach with almost no resistance, he went into defensive mode, digging in on the coast to protect against counter-attack.

He should have taken advantage of the element of surprise and moved swiftly towards Rome, flanking the Germans and cutting them off from support. Instead, the Germans moved their forces to the beach and bombarded the U.S. soldiers mercilessly for weeks. The Army finally sent Lucas home, and brought in Major General Lucian K. Truscott. Truscott had an offensive mindset, and swiftly got the troops moving towards Rome. Truscott wasn’t necessarily smarter than Lucas: he simply had a personality that was appropriate to the job at hand.

How qualified are you to create a strategy for your community?  Maybe more than you think.
While simply having a strategy sets a community or region apart from most of its peers, it’s not enough to guarantee success. To state the obvious, your strategy must be 1) appropriate for your place and time, 2) better than your competitors’ strategies, and 3) well-executed.

Let’s take another quick look at an strategic example from the business world. Three new airlines—all funded with oil money and all with ambitions of global dominance—have arisen in the United Arab Emirates: Emirates (founded 1985), Qatar Airways (founded 1993), and Etihad Airways (founded 2003). As the latecomer to the party, Etihad has been playing a game of catch-up.

In 2011, Etihad’s CEO, James Hogan, decided that the fastest way to catch up would be via a strategy of acquisition, rather than “organic” growth. It made sense, on the surface.

But his timing was bad, due to a drop in oil prices (probably unavoidable). And his execution was bad, in terms of choosing their purchases (definitely avoidable). The company spent billions on major stakes in struggling airlines, only to see them become worthless as badly-managed airlines (like Alitalia) filed for bankruptcy, and badly-positioned airlines (like Air Berlin) posted huge losses. In May of 2017, Hogan was fired and replaced.

Some public leaders might find that story depressing. After all, if a sophisticated chief executive at a multi-billion-dollar company can screw up a strategy, what chance does a small-town mayor have of getting it right?

A very good chance, in fact. A unique characteristic of strategy is that one’s ability to do it right is highly dependent on one’s intimacy with the players, dynamics, and trends of a specific situation. It’s far less dependent on one’s education or overall experience. In other words, strategy is extremely context-sensitive. Hogan had a background in regional carriers, but the players, dynamics, and trends of the global carriers were new to him. Likewise, just because a mayor successfully revitalizes a village doesn’t mean s/he is qualified to revitalize a nation.

Tactics vs. Strategies

While we’re on the subject of the airline industry, let’s look at a more-recent disaster created when a CEO abandoned a good long-term strategic decision for a short-term tactical decision. As mentioned earlier, the duration of the action and intended impact is often the only differentiator between a tactic and a strategy.

Image courtesy of Boeing.

In early 2011, Boeing chair and CEO James McNerney intended to design a totally new aircraft to replace the ancient 737. That was the right strategic decision. But by August of that year, it was clear that customers didn’t want to wait for a new design, and five airlines placed orders for 496 re-engined 737s.

So McNenerny abandoned his strategic decision, and made a short-sighted tactical decision to stick new engines on slightly-modified version of a plane that first flew in 1967. The problem is that short, wide high-bypass modern engines don’t fit well on low-slung aircraft designed for long, narrow, low-bypass engines. The multiple hardware and software “fixes” added to the plane to manage that bad design didn’t work very well, and hundreds of people died in the subsequent crashes. McNenerny lost his job in 2015.

The result of abandoning that good long-term strategy for an expedient tactic is the greatest crisis in Boeing’s history. The company went through the entire month of April 2019, without selling a single airplane. And that loss of income comes as massive lawsuits are being filed by airlines hurt by their inability to fly the 737 Max aircraft they have, or to take delivery of new equipment that were counting on. In December of 2019, they suspended production of the MAX, and a week later, the current CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, was fired.

Othertimes, a truly strategic decision is made, but it’s the wrong one. Scana Corporation used to be South Carolina’s largest public energy utility, tracing its history back to 1846. A single bad strategy devised a decade ago resulted in the company’s disappearance in 2019.

Around 2008, they had to decide between upgrading a dangerous nuclear power plant or expending into safe, renewable energy. Nuclear was what they knew, so they stuck with it. But the cost of that renovation ballooned to over $20 billion, and they abandoned the project. That left them in dire financial straits, and they were acquired by Virginia’s Dominion Energy in January of 2019.

Around the same time Scana was making that fatal decision, NextEra Energy—the largest U.S. producer of renewable power—was doubling-down on their strategy. Given that photovoltaic energy is now about 1/100th the cost of nuclear (when full-cost accounting is applied), that would seem to be a no-brainer, strategy-wise. In stark contrast to Scana’s crash-and-burn, NextEra’s shares have doubled in value since 2014.

Teddy Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War.

Public leaders are always admonishing unemployed or underemployed citizens to enroll in education or training course that will match their skills to the changing economy. But sometimes, entire communities need to be retrained for a new economy, especially when they’ve been overly-dependent on a single industry. Worker retraining for in-demand skills is just one of several revitalizing tactics for a community, but that same training is strategic for the individual. It’s also an example of fixing the present (tactics) and the future (strategy) together.

Again: tactics are for achieving short-term goals, such as a platoon of soldiers taking a hill. Strategies are for achieving long-term goals, such as winning the war, which involves deciding which hills need to be taken.

To recap: the first step to creating a strategy is to know what you want (vision). If you’re now saying “well, duh”, you’d be shocked at how many places are spending millions on projects without knowing what they’re trying to achieve, other than “more”.

Timing, Scope, and Starting Point

The right strategy can arrive at the wrong time.
While there are always ways to boost the economy and quality of life of a place, some times are better than others to launch all-out revitalization programs. Revitalization is like farming: there’s a time for preparing the soil, a time for planting, a time for harvesting, and a time for resting.

There’s also a time for restoring farmland back to the original wetland to achieve flood resilience, and a time for repurposing exhausted farmland, such as for renewable energy production. Of course, not all old assets need to be repurposed, but we should explore any such opportunities before embarking on renewing their current form.

Repurposing can also involve expanding a project’s scope by adding new purposes to a viable current function. For instance, a switch from toxic, soil-depleting industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture keeps food production as the central purpose. But it adds carbon sequestration, soil rebuilding, watershed restoration and enhanced biodiversity to the mix of goals.

The right strategy at the right time can still fail, if you get the scope wrong.
Too often, scope is taken for granted. An organization focused on downtown will automatically devise a downtown revitalization program. A city or county agency will automatically create a citywide or countywide program. A good strategy will take scope into consideration. In fact, adjusting the scope of an effort (up or down) is sometimes all that’s necessary to revive a faltering initiative.

For instance, if your goal is to boost quality of life—including air quality, water quality/quantity, human health, safety, recreational opportunities, etc.—that usually can’t be done at a downtown, or even a community level. You’ll need to regenerate your surrounding neighborhoods, watershed, family farms (local food system), green spaces, and so on. That would require at least a countywide scope, if not a regional or even statewide scope.

But even finding the right time and scope isn’t enough if your starting point is wrong.
A good strategy will identify the right focal point to begin the revitalization process.

You want to score some quick and early “wins” to boost confidence and gather momentum. Few communities have the funds to repurpose, renew, and reconnect all their assets at once.

Much reconnecting is now needed in cities worldwide, after decades of unplanned or badly-planned sprawl. Thus, public transit is often most efficient starting point: it can unify physically-isolated neighborhoods and other assets into a vibrant community.

Acidic runoff water from an abandoned coal mine is blighting this town’s future.

In some places, heritage will be the starting point, such as restoring a historic downtown theater. In other places, remediating brownfield sites should be first, in order to create “shovel-ready” opportunities for redevelopers.

Elsewhere, restoring natural resources—fisheries, farmland soils, watersheds, ecosystems, etc.—will be the obvious first step towards revitalization. All too frequently these days, disasters are the genesis of revitalization and resilience initiatives.

Identifying your ideal timing, scope, and starting point are all functions of a strategic analysis. But they will accomplish nothing if they don’t lead to action.

For both individuals and communities, action is often the best therapy for inertia and depression. This advice might seem at odds with the earlier advice to create a vision and strategy before acting, but if your first goal is activate the populace, completing a successful physical project might be the best strategy for achieving it. But creating a vision is also action, so choose carefully. In some cases, creating your renewable asset map will be the best first step: it’s an easily-understandable goal, and the process of creating it—especially if you primarily use local volunteers—will boost the residents’ awareness of their opportunities, thus inspiring new hope.

Reframing Assumptions

Good strategizing, especially when dealing with social issues, often involves reframing our perceptions and assumptions.

For instance, many cities are being redesigned for the convenience of humans, getting away from previous plans that prioritized the convenience of deadly 3000-pound steel projectiles (cars).

Creating an effective strategy for making a place safer and more efficient for pedestrians might thus mean reframing the problem from “pedestrians crossing streets” to “cars crossing sidewalks”.

Planner Brent Toderian takes it a step further, and refers to cafes and street seating as “pedestrian parking”. That perspective makes it clear who has priority, which helps keep decision-making properly focused.

Image credit: U.S. Federal Highway Administration

Since strategies are driven by vision + challenge (what one wants plus what one must overcome to get it), identifying the actual challenge is crucial: too often, we confuse cause and effect, as mentioned earlier.

For instance, is your affordable housing crisis driven primarily by a paucity of inexpensive residential units? Or is the real problem too many people with low incomes? If the latter, then equitable economic revitalization becomes the primary challenge, not cheap housing.

Or maybe the real problem is that too much of your citizens’ income goes to car payments, car insurance, car repairs, and gasoline. If so, the challenge might be creating more public transit and transit-oriented redevelopment. Don’t start strategizing until you’ve examined your assumptions.

A vision can actually be written so as to embody (or at least imply) a strategy.

For instance, Mark Gerzon’s new book from Berrett-Koehler is titled The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide. In it, he describes a vision/strategy for restoring good governance and social cohesion, which would greatly boost socioeconomic revitalization in the United States.

He calls citizens and leaders who put the nation’s interests above political interests “transpartisans”. Here’s his combined vision/strategy:
“Transpartisans are open to learning from each other, instead of insisting they already have all the answers. They work respectfully with people they disagree with, instead of vilifying and avoiding them. They’re willing to try new solutions, instead of clinging to the old approaches. And after the campaign is over, they insist their elected representatives come together to govern, not to just continue campaigning.”

The social fragmentation problem he’s addressing in that book in no small thing. In 1960, a poll asked Americans if they would be displeased if their children married someone of the opposite political party. 4% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans said “yes”. When the same poll was conducted in 2010, it was 30% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans. Just a few years ago, a different study showed that Americans of all stripes would pay money to avoid having to listen to the opinions of someone from the opposite party. If members of a society consider each other the enemy, and won’t even speak to each other, that’s a society on its way down.

Nature conservation is one traditional area of disagreement between conservative and progressives. But consider that there are no truly pristine ecosystems left on the planet: all conservation now requires some degree of restoration, even if it’s only reconnecting to other ecosystems. Consider also that restoration is a far less partisan issue than conservation—almost everyone loves to make ugly, dying places more beautiful and productive—and that partisanship is blocking much progress these days.

Therefore, my recommendation is to focus on the “re” stuff that people already agree on, rather than trying to convince people to embrace conservation. The more we restore, the more we understand the true cost of not conserving, so one leads to the other.

There are three types of organizations that desperately need their own unique strategies for advancing—or becoming a part of—the process of enhancing revitalization and/or resilience: governments, foundations and institutions of higher education.

The Role of Governments in Advancing Resilient Prosperity

As originally suggested in The Restoration Economy, there are three basic personality types at work in the world (from the development perspective). They correspond to three basic modes of wealth creation, and three corresponding types of government policy:

• Sprawlers expand cities and extract virgin resources;
• Sustainers maintain cities and conserve nature;
• Revitalizers renew cities and restore nature.

Where do real estate developers fit in that scenario? Developers are usually Sprawlers. Redevelopers are usually Revitalizers. The fact that densification (“intensification” in Canada) is replacing sprawl in most nations means that Revitalizers are displacing Sprawlers.

I say “usually” because not all redevelopers revitalize. Even a lot of “new urbanist” redevelopments are highly destructive, replacing interesting urban environments with hyper-commercial sterility. Many of them are the urban equivalent of replacing a forest with a tree farm. The right thing (walkability, in this case) can always be done badly.

Poor implementation aside, a taxonomy such as the one above can greatly simplify the process of crafting policies and choosing policymakers. If you’re building a new nation and need new cities, Sprawlers are the folks you need. But who on Earth is in that situation these days?

What we’ve got is a planet burdened by badly-planned, unplanned, or simply obsolete cities. For them, we need the Sustainers and the Revitalizers. Sprawlers are counterproductive when one is heavy on damaged or underused built assets, heavy on overused natural assets, and light on healthy greenspace and agricultural land.

So, an initial step on the path to a brighter future is for governments to realize that derelict natural and built assets are doorways—not obstacles—to urban and rural economic growth.

Some U.S. states are blessed with governors who understand the key role urban revitalization plays in state economies. For example, on January 15, 2015, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a $1.5 billion Upstate New York Economic Revitalization Competition. Three years earlier, he had offered $1 billion over 10 years to restore the greater Buffalo economy, a program that’s working wonders. Cuomo also has an annual $100 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative, which awards $10 million to the one community in each of ten regions that comes up with the best revitalization proposal.

But, for the most part, citizens everywhere are rightly disgusted with their state and national “leaders”. The good news is that the quality of mayors seems to be improving. Nonetheless, serious problems remain, and a very large percentage of them are directly or indirectly related to revitalization and/or resilience. So, what almost all places need it someone to create a more coherent focus on these areas, so weaknesses / threats can be identified, and strengths / opportunities can be leveraged. For now, let’s call these imaginary professionals “RISING PLACES Practitioners”.

Government-appointed RISING PLACES Practitioners could help redevelopers by providing real-time mapping of local property renewal, repurposing, and reconnection opportunities. They could land-bank them to speed property assembly for large projects. Granted, communities can do all this without creating any new positions or departments. But why should something as crucial as renewal be homeless, lacking a dedicated champion?

In this disorganized, vision-less environment, many developers become professional devitalizers. Instead of aiding local regeneration, they foster degeneration (professional degenerates?). But we shouldn’t blame them. We kept electing people who let developers create places without hearts, populated by over-medicated, underpaid, socially-isolated, traffic-numbed commuters seeking joy as consumers. Together, they often built places not worthy of the work it would take to revitalize them.

Fixers are ready and willing to invest in your place, IF you inspire confidence in your local future (they want your rising tide to raise their boat), and get out of their way. Many distressed places can’t afford capital-intensive projects to fix their present. But they can afford a strategy to fix their future, which inspires the necessary confidence.

In her article, “It Takes a Village: The Rise of Community-Driven Infrastructure” in The Atlantic (January 30, 2015) , writer Greta Byrum says, “A decade ago, Philadelphia’s outdated sewer system…was crumbling, causing a nasty brew of storm-water, raw sewage, and pollutants to flow directly into local waterways. But the cash-strapped metropolis… couldn’t afford to build a new system. So the city decided to think small—and local, and cooperative—to construct something big and different. The city rolled out its “Green City Clean Waters” plan in 2011: a 25-year effort to let residents take the lead in creating a web of small interconnected “green” infrastructure projects like roadside plantings, green roofs, porous pavements, street trees, and rain gardens…The key to the “Green City Clean Waters” plan was building layers of community engagement and partnerships over technical and governance systems. …schools and libraries will teach kids about water with hands-on active learning projects like rain gardens, while the city enforces requirements for the replacement of non-porous surfaces, offers funding and support for neighborhood initiatives, and streamlines bureaucratic procedures to facilitate their approval and success.”

Despite the focus on dysfunctional leadership in this chapter, it should be acknowledged that the right leader at the right time can do wonders. My 2008 book, Rewealth, showed how Bob Corker was the perfect mayor for Chattanooga at the perfect time, arriving with his big-money friends just as a resident-led revitalization program had perfectly set the scene for investment in redeveloping the downtown waterfront. Ten years earlier, he would likely have been a disastrous mayor for Chattanooga.

Another example was California Governor Jerry Brown’s terms as mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007. Brown’s “10K Plan” successfully attracted 10,000 new residents to Oakland’s ghost town city center. This was a high point for a city long-plagued with bad governance, the highest per-capita crime rate in the country, and possibly the nation’s worst police department.

Despite a boost during the Brown years, Oakland is a classic example of how an inept government can undermine even the most opportune of circumstances. After all, Oakland has sunnier weather than its wealthier, fog-plagued neighbor across the bay: San Francisco. Accessible waterfronts are powerful revitalizers, yet this desperate city has more waterfront than 99% of U.S. cities. Oakland enjoys an excellent harbor, the fifth-busiest container port in the U.S. (with excellent freight rail connections), and it’s surrounded by lovely hills that boast glorious views of San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay.

It also enjoys another proven revitalization factor: tremendous racial diversity: African-American, Latino, Asian, and Caucasian. Top this off with the fact that it’s within one of America’s most prosperous regions, and it’s a city that has everything going for it.

Yet it doesn’t. Today, the only thing Oakland seems to have going for it is cheap real estate. The city is attracting many wealthier residents from San Francisco, one of the most unaffordable cities in the nation. This should be a positive, yet poor governance has managed to turn it into a negative. Instead of guiding the redevelopment so that all citizens benefit from it, the city has allowed developers to build isolated islands of prosperity. This has inflamed resentment in a city that already suffered from a high degree of economic inequity.

One thing I’ve noticed in virtually every city in which I’ve worked is that newcomers are often the most valuable participants in a revitalization process. This is especially true in cities with a long history of struggle: newcomers aren’t plagued with the “we tried that and it didn’t work” syndrome. In Oakland, tons of newcomers bring desperately-needed money, and what do the natives call them? Invaders. With poor governance, blessings can turn into curses.

Progressives are tired of corporate control of government. Conservatives are tired of government inefficiency. But both want to see their communities revitalized, and their children growing up healthy, happy and secure. That makes the pursuit of resilient prosperity a path to more functional governance.

Unfortunately, too few government leaders have a clear idea of what factors contribute to revitalization and resilience, and which ones retard them. This makes it difficult for them to create initiatives that stimulate, manage, monitor, and report efforts to create resilient prosperity.

The Role of Foundations in Advancing Resilient Prosperity

In his 2014 book, Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, & Center, Henry Mintzberg says that healthy societies are built on three balanced pillars: 1) respected governments; 2) responsible enterprises; and 3) robust voluntary associations (nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, etc.).

When local, state, and federal funding for community improvement decreases to a crisis point, foundations often step in. There are several varieties of foundations, though they generally fall under two general labels: private or public.

Private foundations get their funding from an individual, a family, or a company. The best-known are those set up by the industrialists and robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries: Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and so on.

Private foundations created by commercial banks often focus on community revitalization. This benefits the community and the bank, since revitalization increases both the value of real estate and the success of businesses. This reduces mortgage and business loan defaults. The Bank of America Charitable Foundation was created in 1958. Its mission statement says “the Foundation funds (local) institutions to help enrich the community and advance overall community revitalization.” A more-recent such creation is the TD Charitable Foundation, created in 2002 by Canada’s TD Bank. Their stated mission includes “community revitalization and the preservation and development of affordable housing.”

There are two kinds of public foundations: grant-making charities (often fighting diseases or social problems on a national or global basis), and community foundations. What they have in common is funding derived from diverse sources; individuals, corporations, public agencies, and other foundations. An example of a grant-making charitable group is the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (Australia), which has a “Repair-Restore-Renew” disaster recovery program.

Community foundations (often referred to as “place-based foundations”) are also grant-making public charities, but they differ in two ways: 1) their focus is defined by geography, rather than by issues, and 2) they tend to focus more on providing logistical support to local non-profits, rather than just handing out money. In a few cases—such as one of my clients, the Calgary Foundation—a community foundation is so successful that they start handing out grants far afield from their initial geographic scope.

This section will focus primarily on the revitalizing roles of private foundations. We’ll return to community foundations later, since they are especially well-positioned to lead communities into the next generation of effective, efficient and equitable resilient prosperity programs.

For the past two or three decades, most philanthropy related to helping communities and the natural environment has been focused on “greening” or “sustainability” efforts. This is all well and good, but let’s face it: it’s a bit late. As noted earlier, sustainable development should have been our mode for many generations already.  Our world is now so degraded that only restorative development can give us a healthier, wealthier, more beautiful future, especially in the face of rising populations.

In many cases, restorative philanthropy is hidden behind the labels of “sustainability” or “resilience”. As mentioned earlier, reducing new damage and new waste is vital, of course. Anyone who’s satisfied with sustaining the world as it is just isn’t paying attention. Their heart’s in the right place, but we need to revitalize the communities we’ve already created, and replenish the natural resources we’ve damaged and depleted.

Now, restorative philanthropy is taking hold, joining the government and business spending that has long-dominated revitalization efforts. Philanthropic organizations increasingly realize that revitalizing communities and restoring natural resources is by far the most effective use of their precious funds.

The trend can only grow, since recycling and retrofitting our cities—plus repairing our natural resources—is the ONLY sure way to increase health and wealth in our broken world. Today, it’s hard to find a major private foundation that isn’t focusing on renewing the natural, built, and/or socioeconomic environments to some degree. A few quick examples:

• The New York Restoration Project is developing a shareable model for community revitalization with $250,000 from the Knight Foundation;
• The C.S. Mott Foundation funds the Flint Area Economic Revitalization for that stricken city;
• The Kellogg Foundation has given $2.4 million to LINC Community Revitalization Inc. in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is supporting many revitalization efforts in Detroit;
• The distressed Anacostia area of Washington, DC wants to repurpose the remains of an ugly abandoned river bridge as a public park. The 11th St. Bridge Park combines four powerful revitalizing elements: connectivity, water, greenspace, and pedestrianism. Early foundation backers included the Educational Foundation of America, Horning Family Fund, Prince Charitable Trusts, and Fetzer Memorial Trust.

While generally a negative, socially-destabilizing force, today’s wealth concentration trend has one positive effect: a growth in philanthropic funding. Zachary Mider, in the May 12-18, 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek, says “Over the past few decades, the rise in fortunes of the country’s richest people has created a golden age of philanthropy, comparable to the one that spawned the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations a century ago. …Because Congress offers tax deductions for philanthropy, this growing breed of donor is deciding the fate of billions of dollars that would otherwise flow to the government.”

In the U.S. in 2013, university business schools received 67 single-donor gifts of over $1 million, the most ever in a single year. A 2014 study from the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy projects that a record $27 trillion is expected to be donated by Americans to charities between 2007 and 2061.

It’s not just “rising money meets rising need”: there’s a supreme level of satisfaction that comes with bringing dead or dying places back to life, and this motivates donors.

Restorative philanthropy is now regenerating, renovating, renewing, remediating, replenishing and revitalizing more of our world with each passing year. Add to this grant-making the rapid growth of restorative impact investments—often by the same philanthropic entities—and the numbers start to get serious.

As regards revitalizing—or at least supporting—poverty-stricken neighborhoods, government programs tend to focus on what’s urgent, often at the expense of what’s important. Addressing needs that are both urgent and important—such as food assistance, healthcare, etc.—tends to be capital-intensive, but they help make poverty survivable. Making poverty escapable is a bit less urgent than eating, but no less important. It’s also less capital-intensive, which is why that tends to be the focus of many foundation and other privately-funded efforts.

Some private foundations—such as the Walton Family Foundation, Orton Family Foundation, and Kresge Foundation—have practiced restorative philanthropy for decades, often focused on the U.S. “Rust Belt”. The Surdna Foundation is unique in that they focus on both community revitalization and nature restoration.

The best way to describe how private foundations can put a distressed city on the path to rapid, resilient renewal is via a dramatic success story. Let’s revisit Chattanooga, Tennessee for a moment.

Chattanooga repurposed and renewed their old Walnut Street Bridge for pedestrians and bicycles, thus reconnecting with North Chattanooga on the other side of the river. Photo by Storm Cunningham.

In 1969, Walter Cronkite announced on national TV that Chattanooga had been labeled “the dirtiest city in America” by the U.S. government. Air pollution was sometimes so bad that people had to drive with their headlights on in the middle of the day. Motivating by a potent combination of humiliation and regulation, the city spent the next decade remedying the situation.

Chattanooga eventually won the EPA’s first Clean Air Award. In the process or restoring their air quality, the people realized that they could actually work together productively. That led to what the city did after they cleaned their air, which earned them global renown.

By the early 80’s—despite their cleaner air—the city was still losing 5000 manufacturing jobs annually. Crime was high, racial problems were rife, and the city was dysfunctionally divided…except those stakeholders who had worked together on the air pollution problem.

In 1986, that group helped form a revitalization process that took they city from basket case to a revitalization “poster child”. Two private foundations—both built on the fortunes of independent Coca-Cola bottlers—were directly responsible: The Lyndhurst Foundation and the Benwood Foundation. Their funding kicked off two years of public engagement and visioning, via the non-profit Chattanooga Venture. Virtually every good thing that has happened to the city in the past 30 years has its roots—directly or indirectly—in Chattanooga Venture’s network of “fixers”, and in their ongoing revitalization program.

The Lyndhurst Foundation, led by Jack Murrah (now retired), provided catalytic funding for virtually every major initiative that ignited Chattanooga’s rebirth. The Benwood Foundation provided follow-on support for most of these renewal initiatives, with a heavier focus on arts and culture. Chattanooga Venture created stakeholder cohesion.

Venture’s mission was to engage the public in the creation of a shared vision of the community’s future. That vision integrated the renewal of their natural, built, and socioeconomic assets with their dreams. It provided a home for that vision, and the resulting continuity allowed renewal momentum to build. Besides visioning, Chattanooga Venture provided learning: lectures by revitalization leaders from other cities, and field trips for local leaders to revitalized cities.

Crucially, Chattanooga Venture also provided a forum for effective, transparent public-private partnering, using a simple-but-effective process. They created a task force whenever new challenges and/or opportunities were identified. They chose people for these task forces—each possessing unique resources of potential value to the solution—who were in a position to do something about it. As a result, they had ready-made public-private partnerships when the task forces made their recommendations.

Chattanooga’s best-known feature, the Tennessee Aquarium, was added to their revitalized waterfront in 1992. The 21st Century Waterfront initiative was created when the aforementioned Bob Corker (now U.S. Senator) became mayor in 2001. It expanded and renovated the aquarium, Discovery Museum, and Hunter Museum of American Art, and created pathways from the Hunter to the waterfront. By 2005, when the 21st Century Waterfront plan was finished, the Tennessee Riverwalk had been expanded to 11 miles of trail down to the Chickamauga Dam, and over 1100 trees had been planted on this old industrial land.

Every $1 of public money invested in recreational space and art tends to attract about $13 of private investment. Chattanooga spent $9 million remediating the waterfront site of an old enameling plant. Via ecological restoration, they created the 22-acre Renaissance Park. Developers have now surrounded the park with $110 million worth of condos, stores, restaurants and a LEED-certified shopping center.

In 2011, Volkswagen opened the world’s only LEED Platinum-certified auto manufacturing plant on what was previously a highly-contaminated waterfront brownfield. The 1400-acre parcel was once an ammunition plant, manufacturing up to 30,000,000 pounds of TNT per month for World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

The transformation is dramatic: the new plant has 33,000 solar panels generating 9.5 million watts. VW went beyond green, to regenerative: they restored two creeks on the property to enhance habitat for native species, providing a wildlife corridor around the plant.

How did Chattanooga clinch this $1 billion, 3200-employee prize, over the dozens of cities vying for it? They offered $577 million of incentives to VW, but other cities made similar offers. The clincher: VW wanted the waterfront trail extended to their site, so employees could enjoy walking to the downtown. Quality of life and connectivity were the differentiators.

Mayors and public leaders from around the globe make pilgrimages to witness the “miraculous” rebirth of Chattanooga. All of this came about because a private foundation funded the creation of what became a very effective revitalization program that included all of the elements of the RECONOMICS Process. But they accidentally killed the ongoing program element of their process, as described in the case study in Rewealth.

In Jane Jacob’s 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she advocated for both ongoing efforts and for adaptive management: “In its very nature, successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal-oriented, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along.” That’s what Chattanooga did for almost two decades, and it worked beautifully.

Partnering with a Community Foundation for Resilient Prosperity: Many foundations that attempt to revitalize a community—or make it more resilient—have a problem: When the only tool you have is money, every problem looks financial. Money is what most foundations bring to the table.

At the worst foundations, it’s the only thing they bring to the table. At the best foundations, money is primarily used to help birth and perpetuate good ideas until they can feed themselves. And those good ideas are often promulgated by the community training provided by those same foundations. Community foundations are often very good at this, so they can make ideal partners for revitalization efforts.

The first community foundation (The Cleveland Foundation) was created by Frederick Goff in Ohio in 1914. There are now over 1700 community foundations around the world, with 700+ in the U.S. Community foundations tend to have a high level of public trust and a broad focus (often related to quality of life). They engage all levels of public and private leadership, and seldom operate in silos.

My first encounter came in 2007, when I keynoted a conference sponsored by the Buffalo Community Foundation (NY). But I didn’t realize their true potential until I keynoted the Vital City event held in 2014 by The Calgary Foundation (Alberta, Canada) and met their CEO, Eva Friesen. The range of projects they sponsor that contribute to resilient prosperity is truly inspiring.

The Calgary Foundation is playing a key role in shifting a city best known as an “oil town” towards more-diversified economic growth based on renewing their existing assets. They’ve funded a wide array of projects that renew their heritage, neighborhoods, green infrastructure, arts, education, and more. In other words, they’re perfectly positioned to be the heart of an resilient prosperity program.

Restoring the Heart Creek Trail.
Photo credit: Friends of Kananaskis Country.

For example, after the catastrophic flood of June, 2013, the Calgary Foundation’s Flood Rebuilding Fund granted nearly $8.5 million via 125 grants to groups across Alberta. Environmental stewards Friends of Kananaskis Country was one of those recipients. I was kindly taken on a hiking tour of the flood-damaged Heart Creek Trail, which was magnificently rebuilt with both Calgary Foundation and provincial funding.

Most community foundations already have an extensive and functional network of both funders and fixers in place. They only need to add an appropriate process to turn these valuable resources into a renewal engine.

On October 2, 2014, the Council on Foundations (Washington, DC) published an article by Scott Westcott titled The Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines played a key leadership role in developing and executing a long-range community improvement plan.

Here’s an excerpt from that article that illustrates how well-positioned community foundations are as the potential nexus of a resilient prosperity program: “A few years back, leaders in Des Moines, Iowa, faced a common dilemma. While there was no shortage of people and organizations working to better the community, there was little alignment or master planning to coordinate the efforts. ‘The city had a plan, Polk County had a plan, the United Way had a plan – there were lots of plans,’ says Kristi Knous, President of the Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines. ‘What was lacking was a process that involved community input and tied everything together to create an integrated approach to moving the Greater Des Moines area forward.’ Recognizing the potential of a more integrated approach, the Community Foundation saw the unique opportunity to play a key leadership role in creating a sustainable future vision for Greater Des Moines.”

Community foundations would need training to better-understand revitalization, resilience, and adaptive management. But for most, this added responsibility would involve few new activities: just a strategic process for better-integrating, focusing and delivering what they’re already doing. The downside is community foundations’ lack of official authority.

But cities and counties could endow them with power via a public-private partnership. The legal mechanism to do so would vary with local laws. For instance, Iowa has statute 28E.4, which says “Any public agency of this state may enter into an agreement with one or more public or private agencies for joint or cooperative action.”

The result? A public-private resilient prosperity partnership. In fact, a formal partnership between a city or county government and the local community foundation might well be ideal.  Such partnerships would enable elected leaders to instantly create a resilient prosperity program using a trusted, existing infrastructure. In one fell swoop, the funding mechanisms and project evaluation / implementation processes of the community foundation would enable the city to launch a system with no added bureaucracy, and little new public expense. It would also open significant new public and private funding sources to the community foundation.

States, provinces, and nations don’t have such a shortcut available to them. But most have the resources to create their resilient prosperity program from scratch, which would give them the control they usually demand. Such higher-level partnerships could actually be fairly simple, with very small budgets. If they did nothing more than encourage and facilitate the creation of local resilient prosperity partnerships—and then supported them—they’d be performing a valuable service, likely with an impressive ROI.

One of the most important factors in creating a prosperity partnership would be making it resilient in the face of changing political administrations. For instance, Philadelphia’s Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) was formed in 2009 to revitalize the city’s waterfront. Then-mayor Michael Nutter appointed all board members. But at its October 2014 meeting, the DRWC board changed its bylaws so that ten Board members would be chosen by the board itself, with the mayor choosing just three.

In a November 17, 2014 article by Jared Brey in PlanPhilly, Matt Ruben, chair of the Central Delaware Advocacy Group said “Our biggest concern moving forward was, ‘How do we ensure continuity at the DRWC when a new mayor comes in?’ Now DRWC has effectively made itself mayor-proof, and we can stay focused on the waterfront.” The best leaders know when it’s time to share or transfer power.

This partnering approach suggested here could be considered a repurposing of existing social infrastructure. With those 1700 community foundations worldwide, a global network of local resilient prosperity partnerships might be the quickest and most politically-resilient path to revitalizing our planet.

The Role of Higher Education in Advancing Resilient Prosperity

When did you last meet someone with a Ph.D. or a Master’s in revitalization? Or resilience? Or adaptive management? Despite trillions of dollars spent annually worldwide on bringing places back to life—and despite the high rate of failure of such expenditures—academia largely turns a blind eye to regeneration.

They don’t mind teaching and researching the technical disciplines that renew specific assets: there are many courses in historic preservation, brownfields remediation, infrastructure renewal, and the like. But when it comes to the process of reversing the stagnation or decline of a place, our institutions of higher learning seem content to allow their students to remain in a state of ignorance.

If you wanted to appoint someone locally to head-up your revitalization and/or resilience efforts, wouldn’t you prefer to hire a person with relevant training, certification, or degree? That’s how all other hiring works.

Universities must take seriously this challenge of creating professionals who revitalize in a world that’s simultaneously experiencing rapid urbanization, agricultural depletion, natural resource collapse, not to mention the global climate crisis. They must realize that urban planning degrees don’t address revitalization. Nor do degrees in public policy, public administration, public works, architecture, landscape architecture, civil engineering, and so on.

The best launching point for such a degree would be one grounded in the real world, not in academic theory. This could start with a partnership between a university and the city in which it’s based:

• The school would get access to local data, lessons learned, and government internships.
• Local officials could do classroom lectures, while getting access to new research and curricula.

How could a discipline and profession focused on revitalization and/or resilient prosperity come about? There are three standard routes:

• Academic: This would require a benefactor to endow a chair to fund and advance research, curriculum development, and degrees;
• Governmental: A national agency (such as HUD or EPA in the U.S.) might perceive the need for such a discipline at the local, state, and national levels, and provide funding to schools or organizations to create the appropriate research, curricula, and certifications;
• Private: A professional association could be formed for this purpose. Its members would come from the myriad fragmented current disciplines that address revitalization. This could be a new organization, or a new focus of an existing organization. One such is revealed in Chapter 12.

It’s not that universities don’t study strategy, adaptive management, revitalization or resilience: the problem is that they don’t teach it in a way that produces people prepared to manage the renewal of a place. This is a waste, because there are myriad academics doing work of crucial importance to advancing strategies and processes for both revitalization and resilience.

For instance, in his Harvard Business Review article “The Execution Trap”, Roger Martin, former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, says separation of strategy and execution is a major flaw in executive thinking. We are all arguing the relative importance of good strategy versus good execution as if they were unrelated, so thinkers and doers work in dysfunctional isolation from each other. Communities suffer a worse problem. Not only do they separate implementation from strategy, but what they refer to as “strategy” is often just hope.

Martin says separation of strategy and execution is promulgated by management consulting firms. Why? Because it allows them to blame failures on clients’ flawed implementation of their genius strategy. Urban planning firms also tend to avoid implementation. When a plan fails, they blame the mayor, the city council, unruly developers, or the citizens (NIMBYism, etc.) for screwing up their plan.

The psychological and health benefits of living in a revitalizing place are legion. Some are surprising. Did you know it cuts your electricity bill? Research led by Ping Dong of the University of Toronto found that people who feel more hopeless about their economy and employment opportunities prefer brighter lighting. 20.6% more power is used per 1 point less hopeful (9-point scale) folks feel about the future.

Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan.
Photo via Adobe Stock.

Another insight into the revitalization dynamic that we wouldn’t know without academic research is why post-disaster cities are often more-resilient cities. In 2012, Eiji Yamamura of Japan’s Seinan Gakuin University published a paper called “Atomic bombs and the long-run effect on trust: Experiences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, based on researching survivors of those 1945 atomic bombings.

He found they were 16%-17% more likely than normal to trust other people. Trust is a crucial element of revitalization. It’s the transactional lubricant of all economies: the more there is, the more efficiently they operate. Those leading post-disaster rebuilding projects should tap this silver lining.

Due to the lack of academic and practitioner rigor, a large “superficial revitalization” industry has emerged, as described earlier: mayors desperate to be seen as “doing something” commission comprehensive plans with no intention of implementing them. Or they buy instant “revitalization” in the form of street banners, planters and façade renovations.

Some folks criticize downtown or Main Street façade improvement programs as superficial revitalization strategies that don’t address underlying problems. They say they just provide visual revitalization. But as long as they call them façade improvement —and not revitalization—such efforts are worthwhile and honest. The fact is, most “revitalization” initiatives are themselves a façade.

Some say that commissioning a new comprehensive plan will revitalize the community. Some say a community-led visioning session will do the job. Others say that tax breaks for employers will do it. The list goes on, and they are all façades…all are superficial efforts that—lacking a strategic process—don’t change the fundamentals, and so won’t change the socioeconomic trajectory.

The social impacts of revitalizing a place are probably far deeper and broader than we know. I’d love to see graduate students comparing the health and psychological factors in revitalizing versus devitalizing places. Even better: randomized controlled trials for various revitalization tools and factors. A great step towards this hard-data direction is the new ISO 37120 standard, comprising indicators for city services and quality of life. This combines government-collected “Big Data” with citizen-acquired data. As wearable technology becomes more ubiquitous, these quality of life indicators will come closer to real-time.

Many cities are being hit with rapid population growth at the same time they’re experiencing rapid aging, deterioration, and design obsolescence of their infrastructure. So, we encounter places that brag about their growth while they are actually in decline. The traditional assumption is that loss of population leads to economic decline, but it’s not that simple. In 2019, Maxwell Hartt of Cardiff University published “The Prevalence of Prosperous Shrinking Cities“, which explored the results of his research into this dynamic in U.S. cities.

Here’s an excerpt from that paper’s Abstract: “The majority of the shrinking cities literature focuses solely on instances of population loss and economic decline. This article argues that shrinking cities exist on a spectrum between prosperity and decline. Taking a wider view of population loss, I explore the possibility of prosperous shrinking cities: if they exist, where they exist, and under what conditions shrinking cities can thrive. Examining census place data from the 1980 to 2010 U.S. Census and American Community Surveys, 27 percent of 886 shrinking cities were found to have income levels greater than their surrounding regions.”

So, places can shrink and grow simultaneously. That’s not news to those of us who have studied revitalization for decades, but it’s news to most public leaders. They not only don’t understand how to revitalize: they don’t even understand the dynamics that drive devitalization. Most young people want to leave the world a better place, and choose studies in various forms of public management and policymaking, but few universities teach anything directly related to revitalization. Seems like a mismatch. So again: why isn’t community revitalization taught in universities? Money and (again) fear.

Money because most universities only have one mode for entering a new realm of research and curriculum development: If someone walks through the door with a big check and asks them to focus on a subject, they will endow a research chair and create coursework. Otherwise, forget it. Academic institutions (with very few exceptions) have almost no internal capacity for institutional innovation.

Fear because revitalization is an emergent quality that seems magical…thus non-intellectual and non-academic. Why do all medical schools teach brain structure and function, but few teach consciousness? Fear of ridicule. Consciousness is also an emergent phenomenon, reeking of mysticism. Appearances are everything in today’s image-conscious, corporate sponsor-driven world of academic research. The best place to develop a revitalization discipline might be at one of the 40+ universities that study and teach complexity science. They are already comfortable with the concept of emergence.

Many academics are happy to work on a piece of the urban, rural, or environmental revitalization puzzle. But they shy away from taking responsibility for understanding the whole. It’s the same with public leaders: If a place revitalizes, they get the glory. If it doesn’t, it’s not their fault: they did their part of the puzzle. Fear of failure is also why we can’t earn a degree in revitalization: academics perceive its complexity and worry that it’s not understandable. So why risk studying or teaching it? (Then again, they teach economics and psychiatry, both of which suffer far worse from lack of logic, rigor and predictive ability.)

Places are like people: About 1% are born into great wealth, and thrive no matter how poorly they perform. But for most places and people, life comprises a pattern of initial growth, followed by alternating devitalization and revitalization. The causes, frequency, and amplitude of these economic, social, and ecological tides vary from one place to another. But the underlying dynamics are universal, and deserve to be studied rigorously.

Since resilient prosperity programs work by regenerating the natural, built, and socioeconomic assets of a place, they touches on many scientific and engineering disciplines. Such work needs to be supported by an appropriate economic, legal, and policy environment, so it also touches many academic areas that might be less obvious.

Adaptive management can be seen as bringing the scientific process to management: hypothesize, experiment, document, adjust hypothesis if necessary, experiment again, and so on. In other words, adaptive our assumptions and our methods quickly and reflexively as experience reveals their inadequacies.

Today, many universities offer certificates, undergraduate areas of focus, and graduate degrees in the disciplines that are growing in size and importance as a result of the adaptive renewal megatrend: restoration ecology, infrastructure renewal, urban regeneration, urban planning, brownfields remediation, and the like. But the schools of management and schools of public policy have been largely left out.

Researching, developing, and teaching the process of creating resilient prosperity in virtually all coursework related to the natural, built and/or socioeconomic environments would be a great way to adaptively renew current curricula for the challenges of the Anthropocene. It’s an appropriate skill set for academic, business and government leaders alike.

Partnering with a Business for Resilient Prosperity

Those readers whose primary motivation for learning about the revitalization process is to improve environmental health might shudder at the title of this section. The thought of becoming financially dependent on corporate support for such work is perceived as rife with danger.

As the Monsanto (now Bayer) quote above indicates, their suspicions are well-founded. Too many corporate social or environmental responsibility efforts start and end in the marketing and public relations departments. That said, there tends to be a fairly direct correlation between public ownership and ethics: publicly traded firms are far less likely to factor the public good into their decisions. But that means the reverse is also true.

A local, small-to-medium-sized (SME) employer might well be a good home—or at least sponsor—for your resilient prosperity efforts. This could be in addition to partnering with a community foundation or public agency, but possibly stand-alone. Larger private firms could offer this service to multiple communities, wherever they have offices. Given the outcry against excessive corporate influence in state and federal governments, this might sound unlikely. But local political dynamics are usually healthier than national, since public and private leaders have more face-to-face interaction. Plato knew this: he warned that democracy doesn’t work with more than 10,000 citizens, since they wouldn’t personally know—or know someone who personally knows—the candidates.

Mayors are very different animals from senators and presidents (watch Benjamin Barber’s TED talk on “Why mayors should rule the world”). So too do local employers behave differently from those lobbying national politicians, even within the same firm. Some corporations that push national policies that are against the public interest are wonderful employers, and responsible local community members.

Change arises from individuals. Stasis arises from institutions. This is despite the fact that so many institutions say they exist to change things for the better. An institution’s survival is based on the current system, not on change. When polio was eradicated, the entire reason for the existence of the March of Dimes disappeared. They cleverly reinvented themselves to fight something that would never disappear, something that had myriad causes: birth defects.

Other such institutions take a different approach to institutional survival. They actively suppress promising new innovations that might prevent the problems they solve, thus maintaining the status quo on which their existence is based.

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Gus Speth in the July 2011 SOLUTIONS Journal, titled “American Prospect: Decline and Rebirth”: “…there is a deepening sense that this nation’s challenges have grown so large that they exceed current capabilities. … in a 20-country group of America’s peer countries in the OECD, the U.S. is now worst, or almost worst, on nearly 30 leading indicators of social, environmental, and economic well-being. Even a well-intentioned and highly capable government in Washington, DC, would have severe difficulty successfully addressing the current backlog of major challenges. And, of course, the good government the American public needs is not the one that it has or is likely to have anytime soon. …(however) Americans are already busy with numerous, mostly local initiatives that point the way to the future.”

But a more practical approach for many places is to simply adapt to this new reality. Facilitating a local resilient prosperity program goes far beyond mere philanthropy, which is the hands-off way most companies try to help their local communities. This would be a much more intimate and far-reaching relationship, designed to tap the many assets a firm can bring to a community. At the same time, it avoids the abusive “company town” dynamic common in lumber, mining, oil, and steel-making communities of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

This approach might work best in small communities that don’t have the capacity to do what needs to be done, and in larger areas lacking effective regional governance. It would, of course, necessitate the presence of a trusted, civic-minded firm with both the necessary will and resources.

With the growth of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), many companies offer employee volunteer programs, giving them a number of paid hours per month to work on local civic, environmental, or humanitarian projects. In most cases, the employees choose the project. It might be helping house-bound old folks, cleaning up a stream, renovating a derelict house for the homeless, assisting in a shelter for battered spouses, and so on.

Think of how much more effective these hundreds or thousands of annual volunteer hours might be with a little more focus and strategy. Hands-on labor, such as converting a vacant lot into a community garden, will always be valuable. But knowledge workers from the white-collar ranks could apply their management and computer skills to provide the usually-absent programmatic side of the equation.

They would become the “connective tissue” bridging the disparate Top-down, Bottom-up, and Middle-Out efforts to improve the community. They could also help bridge disconnects among the various projects that improve the local natural, built, and socioeconomic environments. Such integration is where efficiencies and synergies will be found. This multiplies community benefits with no budget increase, simply by effectively connecting isolated initiatives.

The private partner could even provide an executive as a part-time RISING PLACES Practitioner, at least until a full-time position can be created in government. All of this free labor is a form of funding on the part of the company, but direct funding—such as impact investments—would also be a possibility.

Since the company’s own employees are directly involved in the projects, they will be motivated to bring investment opportunities to the attention of the firm’s management, whether it’s start-up money, bridge financing, or for expansion. The company could create a revolving loan fund for such needs, giving employees discretion over how it is used, which would both improve and speed decision making.

One way the company could help ensure that projects are truly desired by the community would be to offer matching funds, and let the community crowdfund the qualifying amount. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation is using exactly that model for community redevelopment projects, via a partnership with crowdfunding platform Patronicity.

With proper training, the community would then have a RISING PLACES Practitioner (or Resilient Prosperity Director, or whatever you wish to call them), plus a program, a team, and funding that can’t be interrupted by elections. This could be a permanent arrangement, or an interim fix as the city or region builds its own capacity.

These days, cities privatize many previously-public services, such as water, fire, jails, and even police. If they are open to that, they should be open to the idea of outsourcing a needed service that isn’t being provided—growing resilient prosperity—especially if it’s being done as a voluntary public service, rather than to generate profit.

The story of Cummins in Columbus, Indiana provides evidence that some companies can be trusted to this degree.

Cummins plant in Columbus, Indiana.
Photo credit: Cummins, Inc.

When I was doing some work in the very rural Ohio town of Grand Lake St. Marys a few years back, several folks encouraged me to visit the city of Columbus, Indiana, about a 3-hour drive from there. They said it might be the most beautiful small city in the Midwest. Unfortunately, my schedule didn’t allow it. But I’ve since learned why Columbus is so charming, and why it’s a beacon of economic stability in a generally-distressed region.

Columbus is a small city (population: 46,000), but local employer Cummins is no small company. Its 2014 revenues were about $19.2 billion. It was founded in the proverbial garage in 1919 by Clessie Lyle Cummins, a Columbus native who worked as a chauffeur and auto mechanic. He had heard about the new diesel technology invented by Rudolf Diesel in Germany, and was convinced it was the future of truck engines.

Today, Cummins employs 17% of the local workforce. Indiana’s unemployment rate is 5.8%. In Columbus, it’s just 4.4%. An article titled An Engine Maker’s High-Tech Makeover in the June 15, 2015 issue of FORTUNE magazine quoted Jason Hester, executive director of the Columbus Economic Development Board as saying “When I was growing up, my hometown of Anderson, an hour north of here, had 20,000 GM employees, and 30 years later, it has none. Right now, in this community, if you want a job, you’re hired.”

Many one-company towns can tell horror stories related to the abuse of power in such situations. Not Columbus. From 1929 to 1977, the CEO of Cummins was J. Irwin Miller, another Columbus native. During his reign, the firm grew from $26 million in revenues to $1.26 billion.

He wasn’t just focused on his company: he loved Columbus, and knew that a thriving community would help his company thrive. Unlike so many modern executives, his attitude wasn’t “Hey: I’m providing job. What more do you want?” To ensure a constant supply of talented engineers and managers, he created the Cummins Foundation, which put millions of dollars into improving local schools. He wasn’t just focused on things, either: Miller was a major champion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And, unlike today’s slave-wage employers that make families rely on government handouts to make ends meet, he was strongly pro-union. Miller died in 2004, but some 40% of Cummins’ global workforce is still unionized.

Miller paid architects’ fees so that the town could afford beautiful buildings from the best designers. Columbus is now considered a national architectural showcase, which gives it a far better tourism economy than any other city in the region. Their library was designed by I. M. Pei. A local church was designed by Eero Saarinen. A school was designed by Richard Meier. Hester says “Cummins can attract employees who, but for these amenities, would not come here.”

The Robert N. Stewart Bridge in Columbus, Indiana, with the Bartholomew County Courthouse in the background.
Photo credit: tpsdave via Wikipedia.

But this isn’t just a story of good corporate citizenship: it’s a story of adaptation, resilience and ery good strategic thinking. For Cummins to remain a stable employer, they needed to maintain healthy profit margins. The firm’s greatest crisis came in 1997. Diesel engines are inherently “dirty”, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that Cummins engines were being built in a way that enabled truck owners to easily disable the emissions controls. The EPA fined the company $83.4 million, the largest civil penalty in environmental enforcement history.

An even greater challenge was that EPA accelerated the deadline for lower-emission engines from 2004 to 2002. This threw all U.S. truck engine manufacturers into crisis, not just Cummins. But, under the leadership of then-CEO Theodore M. Solso, Cummins reacted differently from the others. He knew his competition’s strategies would all take the normal route of fighting the environmental regulations, so he took a different path.

While other firms fought and sued the EPA, Cummins created a strategy that turned the situation to its advantage. It became the first company to meet the new standards—which most industry players were saying was impossible—thus giving them a competitive advantage. He boosted R&D spending 60%, which produced their breakthrough “deep spray” fuel injection process, which met EPA standards without hurting fuel economy.

By 2010, their two largest competitors in the big-rig engine market—Detroit Diesel and Caterpillar—had given up, leaving Cummins dominant, with today’s enviable 39% market share. In fact, one of their most profitable divisions makes components that help other engine manufacturers reduce emissions.

This combination of civic investment, worker respect, environmental responsibility, and institutional adaptability makes Cummins a candidate for “ideal employer”. Not all communities can attract such companies, but all communities can seek—even demand—similar values and behavior, especially when offering economic development incentives such as tax holidays.

If they are fortunate enough to land a Cummins-style business, they will likely have an idea partner or host for their resilient prosperity program.