The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

What Is the Midwest? Where Is it?

Writing about the Midwest presents a problem unknown to those who write about, say, the South or New England. The problem is that no one can define, with any precision, just what the Midwest is.

I made a stab at it in my book on the Midwest, Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism. I based my definition on what I could see and sense when I was doing my research. So I've been charmed, not to say gratified, to read a book that says that the Midwest exists as it is today because of the four great glaciers that rolled across the region, starting about a million years ago, and that this glacial expanse pretty much matches my impressionistic definition.

Geology, it seems, is destiny.

In my book, I defined the Midwest mostly as the eight states of the Upper Midwest -- Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. But I made a point of cutting across state lines when it seemed appropriate, if only to stress how little these artificial political boundaries have to do with the reality of Midwestern life.

Company Towns, After the Company Leaves Town

Richard C. Longworth appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation today with Mayor Chaz Allen of Newton, Iowa, and Mayor Tommy Battle of Huntsville, Alabama, in a segment called "Company Towns, After the Company Leaves Town." Click here to listen to the discussion.

Higher Education Faces Reality

Apparently it's no fun being a plain old garden-variety university, doing nothing except what universities are supposed to do, which is to teach students. Every self-respecting university, it seems, wants to be a research university, churning out research that changes the world and, one hopes, bags a Nobel Prize or two.

It's not going to happen. Nor should it. Shrinking support for higher education will dash some of these ambitious dreams. As it does, it will give these schools -- indeed, all Midwestern colleges and universities -- an opportunity to rethink their real role in education and how they can best serve not only their students but the region.

Chicago: What's Changed? What Hasn't?

A few years ago, The Chicago Council published a book called Global Chicago, with two goals in mind. The first was a wake-up call to Chicagoans that their old industrial City of the Big Shoulders was gone, replaced by a global city with new strengths and challenges. The second was an attempt -- probably the first anywhere -- to study globalization's impact on cities by looking hard at one of those cities.

I was talking recently with the editor of the book, Charles Madigan, then a writer and editor at the Chicago Tribune (as was I), now Presidential Writer in Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We were exploring what's changed in Chicago since the book came out, and what is unchanged -- or still undone.

Is Regionalism's Day Dawning?

In recent years, "regionalism" has become a Midwestern buzzword. But for most of that time, that's all it was -- a buzzword, a politically correct remedy for some of the region's ills, without much evidence that it was really happening.

As one of the drum-beaters for regionalism, I'm beginning to think that the idea is sinking in, with policy-makers and politicians, and may be going beyond talk to action. If so, it's a sign that the Midwest is getting serious about reversing its decades-long decline and joining the 21st century.

This is one of the good things I took away from our Global Midwest Initiative's regional conferencethis week in Cleveland. The theme of the conference was new energy -- how the Midwest can make the transition from old, fossil-fueled energy to renewable energy -- and how to pay for it. Both speakers and attendees brought a high level of expertise to the conference and produced some solid roadmaps toward future progress. (We'll be posting soon a full report on the conference on this website.)

High Energy in Cleveland

Renewable energy is the buzzword du jour everywhere, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the Midwest. This is a region with lots of sun, water, wind, biomass -- all the ingredients of the green energy industry. It also is a region with an economy that desperately needs the kick start that energy investment could supply.

But like so much else, renewable energy seems to be happening more elsewhere -- especially in Europe -- than in the Midwest. If our region misses out on its energy opportunities, it may miss out on its future.

All this -- how to get this energy and to pay for it -- will be the agenda in Cleveland on Oct. 18 at a major conference at the City Club sponsored by the host of this blog, the Global Midwest Initiative of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. I'll be there to emcee this conference, but the real stars will be speakers who wrestle with these issues every day.

The conference is our third annual conference and the first to be held outside Chicago. Click here for the venue and agenda.  It will be open to the public.

Where Globalism Lives

In this global era, ranking global cities has become a parlor game for pundits, almost an industry in itself. All cities, it seems, want to be global, and each wants to be more global than the others. To issue a ranking of global cities is to invite debate and dispute which, I guess, is one of the purposes.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has learned about this because it has joined with the Chicago-based accounting firm, A.T. Kearney, to rank the world's global cities, with the results published in Foreign Policy magazine. Kearney teamed earlier with Foreign Policy to rank the world's most globally-linked countries. But globalism does not descend evenly on entire countries: rather, it is concentrated in cities, so the focus has shifted to global cities.

The first ranking came out in 2008. A newer ranking is just out, with the raw results published in Foreign Policy's latest issue and a more complete and nuanced report scheduled for later this month. Here is the listing of the most global cities:

Despite Blago, Chicago Soars

A couple of new rankings of global cities are just out, and Chicago scores big. For Chicagoans swimming in the swamp of the Blagojevich trial, the idea that their tarnished town might be leading the world's way into the 21st century is cause for astonishment, even derision. But these rankings aren't frivolous and a look at them might tell us something not only about Chicago but about what it takes to be a global city.

The first listing was done by A.T. Kearney and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and is just published in Foreign Policy magazine. The top five cities are the ones you'd expect -- New York first, then London, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong, the true big apples among global cities. But Chicago ranks next, in sixth place among all the world's cities, ahead of Los Angeles, Singapore, Seoul and Shanghai. You can see the bare-bones listing in Foreign Policy. Kearney and the Council will publish a more detailed report in early September, showing why we ranked the cities as we did and comparing this year's lineup to the 2008 one.

Kearney, like the Chicago Council, is based in Chicago, so some hometown boosterism could be suspected here. But the other ranking comes from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the London-based accounting and consulting firm, and the Partnership for New York City, and they seem to like Chicago, too.

A Rural Remedy

Driving the rural Midwest can be a distressing, depressing experience. The countryside is as beautiful as ever -- not just the rolling hills and forests that look like a Grant Wood painting come to life, but even the flatter vistas across fields of corn and beans, so lush in summer and still majestic in winter, as evocative as the ocean, primed to spring into life almost any day now. The white farmhouses, red barns and blue silos seems to paint the spectrum of America.

But look closer. Too many of the farmhouses are derelict, their families gone, their land consolidated into the farm next door. Too many farm towns are derelict, too, their main streets reduced to a bar or two, their schools closed, their groceries replaced by a Casey's out on the highway, their residents often people who are there only because they are cheap places to live. Even more substantial towns are dog-eared affairs. Their population has been shrinking for decades. The high school graduates smart kids who leave and don't come back. On the edge of town stands a half-empty industrial park, the symbol of an earlier grab for prosperity that didn't quite work out.

Many of these towns look like they've surrendered to an economy, now global, that has no place for them. Some truly have surrendered and may have no future. But others realize that the world has changed and they must change with it.

To these defiant places, Mark Drabenstott has something to say. Drabenstott may be the leading thinker on rural issues in the Midwest. For years he was director of the Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. More recently, he has been working with the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He's studied and consulted around the globe and looked hard at his own Midwest.

The result is a major report called "Past Silos and Smokestacks: Transforming the Rural Economy in the Midwest," which The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has just issued. It's the Council's latest Heartland Paper, a series intended to analyze the Midwest's biggest challenges and draw a roadmap to solutions.

An Investment in Investing

The goal of this Global Midwest site is to help Midwesterners think like Midwesterners -- that is, as inhabitants of a big and important  heartland region, not as the isolated denizens of a bunch of states. For this reason, I'm thrilled by the publication this week of our latest Global Midwest Policy Brief, on the need to generate a regional venture capital fund, to re-energize the regional economy.

(These Policy Briefs are periodic Global Midwest publications dealing with problems that affect the entire Midwest and urging policies to solve them.)

It takes a lot to kick-start innovation and promote new ideas -- smart people, good ideas, stimulating education, helpful business services. But what it really needs is money -- especially adventurous money, put up by investors who are willing to take a risk on a new and unproven idea. This money is called venture capital and, to a startling degree, it's what the Midwest doesn't have. 

The author of this Policy Brief is Frank E. Samuel Jr., an Ohio lawyer and scholar who helped set up and run that state's Third Frontier Project, which aimed to promote high-end projects there. Samuel wrote a Brookings Institution report called "Turning Up the Heat: How Venture Capital Can Fuel the Economic Transformation of the Great Lakes Region," and his Policy Brief is a compact version of that report.

Samuel's proposal is to help existing venture capital funds in the Midwest by (1) setting up a regional fund of funds that would invest in these existing funds, enabling them to expand their lending, and (2) encouraging Midwestern governments, universities, foundations and other entities to focus on venture capital investing. 

His overall point is that, while the Midwest has some venture capital available, there's not enough of it, and it isn't enabling the region to compete with capital-rich regions on the two coasts.