The Uses of Regionalism

For the past three years, Aaron Renn has been one of the most thoughtful and provocative commentators on Midwestern affairs, with a special focus on its cities. His blog, www.urbanophile.com, is must reading for Midwesterns concerned about cities, transport (including high speed rail), urban design, infrastructure and other issues. Like most good bloggers, he has a coterie of commentators, a sort of Greek chorus challenging and amplifying his ideas.

Most recently, The Urbanophile has been chewing on the issue of regionalism -- what it is, how it works, whether it's a good idea for dealing with the Midwest's many problems. I think it is. Aaron has his doubts. The debate is joined, and I urge everyone concerned with the Midwestern future to read it.

Regionalism is the use of coherent regions to deal with common problems. Almost always, these regions cross political boundaries -- state and county lines, city limits -- to link people and places with a common history, economy or culture.

If this sounds obvious, it's news to most Midwesterners. When I was researching my book, Caught in the Middle, I found that (1) the impact of globalization was affecting the entire Midwest more or less equally, for the obvious reason that the entire Midwest has its economic base in farming and heavy industry, and (2) that no one was looking at this situation from a regional Midwestern perspective.

Instead, all thinking and all action was locked up within state lines. Each state was competing with every other state, when the real competition had moved 10,000 miles away. I met experts -- business people, academics, government officials -- who knew everything there was to know about, say, Ohio or Illinois but who had no idea what was going on next door, across the state line.

Perhaps this balkanization once made sense, when the economy was strictly national. It makes no sense at all today, when the Midwest has to leverage all the strengths it has got. It makes even less sense, when you consider that states are artificial constructions, existing within arbitrary borders fixed more than 200 years ago, and enclosing people who have literally nothing in common. Chicago is simply a different society from southern Illinois. Eastern Michigan, around Detroit, has nothing in common with western Michigan, around Grand Rapids. Ohio, with its three Cs --Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati -- is three states, not one. Indiana is at least three states, maybe four. Even once cohesive states, like Iowa, are split now between metro and non-metro.

In this situation, it makes more sense for Chicago to work with Milwaukee or Grand Rapids, and for southern Illinois to work with St. Louis. Cleveland has more in common with Erie or Pittsburgh than it does with Cincinnati, whose real region lies across the Kentucky line. The states bordering Lake Michigan or any Great Lake should be jointly promoting this economic and touristic asset. The Quad Cities are divided by more than the Mississippi River: they should be working together like the one city they really are.

Other ideas abound. Some involve treating the entire Midwest as a region: a Midwestern congressional caucus only makes sense, for intance, as does a single Midwestern office in Shanghai and other foreign cities. This is megaregional thinking. Other ideas will be more effective on a microregional basis, like many of the suggestions above.

But also none of this is happening. A key reason is the stranglehold that the individual states have on most activity within their borders. Bruce Katz at the Brookings Institution has written on the control that states like Ohio have over what their cities can do -- zoning, annexation, taxation, and the like. States determine where money is spent on highways and other infrastructure, usually without any references to where that money is best spent. States oversee all marketing for the states, usually control school districts, dominate universities and community colleges and delegate other authority to state officials, including legislators, many of them incompetent and almost all of them interested only in their home districts, none in the general welfare. As James Duderstadt of the University of Michigan has written, legislators are more interested in landing a prison for their home town than they are in state universities, with the result that every Midwestern state now spends more to take care of its prisoners than to educate its children.

This focus of public life on state capitals never has worked well. Right now, it's not working at all. Even before the recession, states didn't have enough money to meet the real needs of their citizens, especially those in cities. With the recessions, most states are broke. Saddled with constitutions that mandate balanced budgets, all are slashing vital spending, including spending on education, while borrowing against the future to pay their bills. 

Returning to normal, after the recession, means only returning to an inadequate status quo ante. Midwestern cities and regions should seize this opportunity to kick the states -- or at least to kick the habit of depending on the states -- while they're down. I find that economic development officials, educators, businesses, even mayors see the need to join hands with counterparts across state and county lines. They'll never have a better opportunity than now. 

For more information on the Midwest, visit the Global Midwest Web site.

Comments

[F.K. Plous]

Regions undoubtedly exist culturally and economically, but they have no political existence because the U.S. Constitution created only states. How is a region supposed to pursue its economic and political interests when it has no executive, legislature or courts? The Constitution does permit states to associate or affiliate to pursue mutual objectives through an interstate compact, but as Longworth points out here, state boarders to not necessarily align with regions, so that states entering a regional compact would include substantial areas (e.g., southern Indiana and southern Ohio) that rightfully belong to an adjacent region. Absent some form of regional government, states will always be privileged and regions will remain more of a cultural artifact than a politico-economic reality.

[Aaron M. Renn]

Thank you for the kind words about my blog. I try!

One of my observations is that state governments are to some extent gigantic welfare agencies. That is, they exist more or less to redistribute income and provide a social safety net, both to individuals, but also to struggling regions. This is a proper role for government, of course. But what often happens is that other services that the government should be providing - notably highway spending - becomes repurposed as a tool for welfare. Since metro areas are the economic engines of the economy, it should come as no surprise that they get short changed in this calculus.

[Gingerman]

There are, of course, different levels of regionalism. The "Midwest" is one. The "Chicago Region" is another. Change in our thinking and practice must take place on both of these levels -- for our environmental and economic futures.

Many issues, resources and interests at play in regions (big and small) are not under the formal or sole jurisdiction of state government. People thinking regionally will seek out such interstices and opportunities in our existing arrangements.

An interesting example of thinking about the Quad Cities region that shows some of the possibilities (possibilities that rely on regional initiatives, not on state government) is "The Vacation Manifesto: Radical Ideas to Grow the Quad Cities," published in the River Cities Re@der in 2006: http://www.rcreader.com/
news/the-vacation-manifesto-radical-ideas/

I should mention that the author, Dan Carmody, has since moved from the Quad Cities to Fort Wayne and most recently to managing Detroit's Eastern Market. He's an interesting and energetic doer and thinker about regional connections. These days, he's especially concerned with food systems and the economic health of rural and urban areas, which are more closely connected than we may first think.: