The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Revival in Middletown

Muncie, Indiana, is an interesting place, for both historical and modern reasons. It became famous in the 1920s as the subject of Middletown, a classic sociological study of a typical American industrial city. Today, it's too often held up as the example of a typical industrial city when the industry goes away.

Now, Muncie is trying to face the future and change its luck. I was there recently to take part in programs centered on the Muncie Action Plan, a long (51 pages) and detailed (47 proposed actions) drawn up over the past two years by many (2,000 people) of Muncie's citizens, all aimed at revitalizing their town.

This is important, for symbolic and other reasons. Muncie really is typical of tattered old Midwestern industrial cities. It has 70,000 people. It's home to a big university, Ball State, that like too many Midwestern colleges and universities, has never played the role in town that it should. It gave birth to some major corporations -- Ball Glass and Borg-Warner, among others. It has lost these corporations, plus the civic leadership they provided, plus the jobs they supported, plus the prosperity they generated and, especially, plus a whole generation of young people who would have worked there and are either unemployed now or long gone to other places with jobs.

In other words, if Muncie can fight back from its post-industrial doldrums, this gives more hope to many other Midwestern cities that are trying to do the same.

A New Map for the Chicago Region

Any astronaut looking down from space at night would spot a solid band of bright light wrapped around the southern end of Lake Michigan. The lights go on somewhere north of Milwaukee, stay on as the band moves south through Kenosha and Racine and turn into the glare of Chicago before sweeping east across northern Indiana, finally fading into the blueberry belt of southwestern Michigan.

What our astronaut is seeing is a megalopolis, a super-city, a midcontinental metro -- a region. From orbit, it looks like one big urban area. He can't see any state lines or town lines, which makes sense, because it's hard to see them even from ground level.

But they're there. Oh boy, are they there, and they keep this Chicago region from acting like the one big city it really is. Down here on the ground, it's not one big region but three states, 21 counties, dozens of towns and a couple thousand townships, school districts and other jurisdictions and taxing bodies, all out for themselves, with little regard for the other state, town or jurisdiction next door.

Obviously, this Chicago region is much less than the sum of its parts. This is the conclusion of anyone who's tried to get these many parts to work together and, more immediately, of a major new study by the very authoritative Paris-based economic body, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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.

Drifting in the Driftless Area

I spent the last week in Galena, a gem of an old Victorian town, nestled in the hills and forests of the so-called Driftless Area, in northeast Illinois near the Mississippi River Valley. I came away thinking how this area could be more than the beautiful but generally depressed region it is now.

Galena itself seems to be doing fine. It is a tourism and second-home mecca, packed with good restaurants and refugees from Chicago. But the Driftless Area itself is divided between four states and some 25 to 35 counties, depending on where you draw the boundaries. None of these jurisdictions -- not the states nor the counties -- has been able to work with the others to leverage the region's scenic potential and combat the economic distress that, like the scenery, they all share.

How Not To Build an Economy

You can bet on it.

Any time a Midwestern company announces it wants to (1) move, (2) stay, (3) grow, (4) shrink, (5) hire, (6) fire, (7) come or (8) go, you just know that some government or governments will throw money at it to persuade it to do what it was going to do anyway.

As we've written in earlier posts, Midwestern states are doing this more and more in a desperate attempt to hold on to investment and jobs. Cities do it, too, none more vigorously than Chicago, which has just done it again, giving $3.1 million to a steel company which may or may not need the money.

States on the Ropes

 We've written in past postings about the inability of Midwestern state governments to meet the challenges of a globalizing economy. For years, these state governments have been too small, too parochial, too dominated by rural interests to respond to the real needs of a global and urbanizing society.

Now, they're just too broke.

This is a national problem, not just a Midwestern one. But the Midwest, which depended for so long on a now vanished industrial basis, is perhaps deeper in the hole than other states and needs more desperately to find solutions, not only to recover from the current recession but to restructure its entire economy.

The Midwest Is Going Regional

Everyone who's studied the Midwestern economy agrees that strictly local solutions don't work, and it's time to work regionally. Everyone also agrees that Midwesterners are just too ornery by nature to accept the cooperation that regionalism requires. 

It's beginning to look as though everyone is only half right. Regional arrangements are sprouting like corn in June. It's too early yet to say what they'll yield, or how deep their roots go. But for now, regionalism looks like an idea whose time has come.

We've written about some of these projects in other posts, but it's an encouraging exercise to review this progress. At the least, it shows that Midwesterners, after years in denial over the state of their economy, have awakened to the realities of coping in a global economy.  

Do Midwestern States Even Talk to Themselves?

Regular readers know that this blog takes a dim view of Midwestern states -- not the states themselves, which have their charms, but their governments, which seem to work overtime to keep their towns and cities from tending to the prosperity and welfare of their citizens.

Two recent publications once again raise the issue of whether states have any use at all. The first is a posting by the superlative urban blogger, The Urbanophile, known to his friends as Aaron Renn. In the first of two installments entitled "Are States an Anachronism," Renn makes the case for the affirmative, listing the reasons why states "are downright pernicious in their effects on local economies." Since this installment quotes lavishly from my book and blog, it gets no argument here. Renn promises a second posting soon, rebutting this contention and making the case for states.

The second publication is the real subject of this blog today. The Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published a series of maps on communications -- mostly cell phones and text messaging -- between different parts of the United States. Fast Company recently covered the research in their Co.Design blog. 

The assumption here is that people communicate most often with other areas where they have business or friends -- in other words, with areas that have the most to do with their lives. By charting these call patterns, we can identify natural regions -- states and cities that are closely connected.

An Ambitious Regional Project

Many Midwesterners are talking about abandoning their traditional competitive cussedness and seeking a regional future. Some -- not many -- are doing something about it.

The latest and perhaps most ambitious regional approach is a plan for a two-state region radiating from the Quad Cities to embrace 50 counties, maybe more, in Iowa and Illinois. It's called the Midwest Intellectual Property Management Institute, or IPI for short. Like the European Union in its early days, it's off to a modest start -- just a couple of specific tasks. If it works, it could become a sort of Midwestern version of the EU, leveraging the region's strengths into new economic vitality.

Is There a Place for Small Colleges?

They're strewn across the Midwestern landscape, as iconic of an endangered way of life as the small towns that house them. A few offer advanced degrees, but most are four-year colleges, conferring bachelor degrees only. Largely founded by religious denominations, both Protestant and Catholic, they defend that doctrinal purity today against the pressures -- mostly economic -- of a world that may go on without them.

These are the mini-institutions of higher education, private colleges and universities of the Midwest, most of them no more than a few hundred to a couple thousand students, overshadowed by the giant state schools that dominate Midwestern education, dwarfed even by the community colleges that increasingly compete with them for students.