Robert Varley, Director of State and Local Affairs for Dominion Gas Company, and Kurt Karakul, President of the Third Federal Foundation participated in the introduction as both corporations were providing financial support for the series.
The panel presentation included Dan Moulthrop of the Sound of Ideas and ideastream as moderator, and:
David Beach, Director of the Green City Blue Lake Institute at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History who emphasized the importance of regionalism, of development on the regional scale.
Lavea Brachman of Greater Ohio and the Brookings Institution talked about the impact of state laws on incentivizing policy change in general with particular reference to regionalism.
Andrew Jackson of Greater Cleveland Partnership emphasized the importance of neighborhood development (in contrast to the downtown development orientation).
Robert Jaquay of the George Gund foundation and the Fund for our Economic Future also talked about neighborhood development, and how a cross-disciplinary approach that takes into account both economics and ecology leads to sustainability. Jaquay thought that the (most?) appropriate scale to work at is the city neighborhood along with their neighborhood development corporations.
Wendy Kellogg of CSU and the Ohio Balance Growth Program thinks it’s all about the water, and our inland sea. Relate both the economy and ecology to the land-lake relationship. Remediation is much more expensive than good planning.
I was intrigued by the idea of combining both neighborhoods and regionalism. Dividing the whole county into neighborhood planning zones (like Cleveland’s) but using appropriate scales of ecology and socio-economy would really change the suburban map. Envision productive neighborhood nodes connected by green spaces. Imagine Cuyahoga County divided into planning neighborhoods. Some of the benefits of regionalism could be achieved, but at the planning neighborhood level we could address sustainability and resiliency. At that level there would also be opportunity for a lot more civic participation.
Ecological concerns could address sustainability. Socio-economic concerns could address resiliency. To focus on sustainability without considering resiliency is short-sighted. As more of our systems are centralized and nationalized, like the power grid or just-in-time food delivery, they become brittle instead of resilient. Natural disasters like Katrina or social interventions like 9/11 expose how fragile the big systems can be. Networked, redundant systems provide strength and the resiliency to respond to challenges.
Each neighborhood could have its own educational system, public safety and justice system, ecological system, economic system, public health system. At the neighborhood planning level the various systems could be overlapped and put to work symbiotically.
It would be a retreat to the past in some senses: Cleveland used to have a series of neighborhood police stations with officers walking the beat in their neighborhood. This could be revived in the context of planning neighborhoods, and policemen could work with neighborhood watch groups that might also take on some of the aspects of disaster response teams. Policemen might patrol on bicycles and foot as well as in cars, because their jurisdictions would be smaller. At the regional level there would be provisions for back-up and specialized crime responses, but the routine aspects of policing and misdemeanor justice would take place in the planning neighborhood. Hopefully, the people living in the area would be empowered to help reclaim and maintain their own safety.
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