The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

It Plays in Peoria

I spent some time last week in Peoria, a central Illinois city that deserves a good look from any Midwestern factory town trying to reinvent itself in the age of globalization. Not that Peoria has all the answers or has solved all its problems. But it's asking the right questions and coming up with a few answers.

While I was there, I had the chance to talk with some civic leaders and visit a very impressive community college -- time well spent considering the importance of community colleges to the Midwest's future.

Peoria has a reputation as the epitome of Middle America ("If it plays in Peoria..."), a one-time whiskey capital (Hiram Walker), and the headquarters of the giant Caterpillar heavy equipment manufacturer, which once employed 40,000 people in the Peoria area and absolutely dominated the town.

Like many Midwestern factory towns, Peoria has been through crisis -- in Peoria's case, two devastating strikes against Caterpillar in the late '80s and early '90s. The strikes were a byproduct of globalization, specificially overseas competition from companies like Komatsu. Caterpillar fought this competition with outsourcing and cutbacks. The United Auto Workers struck back. The union lost big, but the strikes split the town. Many people predicted the departure of Caterpillar and the slow death of Peoria.

Instead, Caterpillar stayed, if much reduced. And the town fought back.

Can Global Cities Work?

Crain's Chicago Business, the city's business weekly, has a first-rate lead article this week on Chicago after 21 years of the reign -- there's no other word for it -- of Mayor Richard M. Daley. The article is of greatest interest to Chicagoans, of course. But it also raises crucial questions for anyone interested in global cities, and whether they can work.

Chicago is a global city -- perhaps the only one in the Midwest. These cities are the places where, increasingly, the world's business is done. They have the most corporate headquarters, the key global business services, the universities, the foreign students, the busiest airports, the immigrants and the most vibrant culture. As the Crane's authors Greg Hinz and Steven R. Strahler make clear, they also have problems that, as this global era dawns, are nowhere near being solved.

The big problem is that global cities make some of its neighborhoods and their citizens very rich and very well-served, while leaving most of their people farther behind than before.

Guest Post: The Midwest's Creative Winter

by Aaron M. Renn and Carl Wohlt

The Midwest was the Silicon Valley of the industrial revolution. It was home to innovators and entrepreneurs across a range of domains from technology to transportation to business models. The Midwest didn't just invent manufacturing technology, it understood the potential of what that technology could unleash, and positioned itself to reap the commercial harvest of that innovation.

Today it is a different story. The Midwest was in many was a victim of its own success. It built such powerful champion industries, firms, and cities that it no longer had to innovate in order to prosper. So it didn't, and ended up losing its creative edge.

Despite the focus on changing that dynamic, a recent survey shows how far the region still has to go. Fast Company magazine just released its 100 Most Creative People in Business list. Here is the regional breakdown of their honorees:

The full list, color coded by region, is available for download.

The Midwest only manages to place six people on the list, and three of them are in Chicago. (The South doesn't fare much better).

A European Lesson for the Midwest

The European Union and its future are much in the news right now. Basically, the EU has two problems -- an immediate problem that it may or may not solve and a built-in historic problem that will affect everything it does in the future.

All this seems far from the American Midwest. But I'd like to dig into this in this posting, for two reasons:

First, I have a personal interest in the EU and some considerable knowledge. I lived and worked in Brussels for four years as a foreign correspondent and watched the Europeans using economic tools to change their history. I covered the creation of the euro, the EU currency. In many ways, I felt the evolution of the EU was the most impressive economic, social and political development of our time. If it fails now, we've all lost something important.

Second, several thinkers have suggested the EU as a template for the future Midwest, a means of overcoming the Balkanization of our region and uniting its states in a true regional powerhouse. For reasons I'll explain, I think this goes too far. But the EU members have indeed done something that we desperately need to do, which is to create a web of interlocking economic projects across political boundaries. How they've done this, and the problems they face now, are signposts for the Midwestern future.  

Most people think of the EU as an economic union, a "common market" formed for economic reasons. It's not. It's a political -- even an historic -- union. Its basic purpose is to prevent the rise of another Hitler.