The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Meeting of the Minds in Chicago

Can major research universities use the immense resources at their command – the storehouses of data, the research techniques, the expertise in analyzing problems, mostly their sheer brainpower – to help solve the problems of the great cities where many of them reside? It seems obvious that the answer is yes, but for many universities, this leap from theory to practice remains a step too far.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs held a three-day conference this week to explore what can be done about this. In many ways, the conference – called “Global Urban Challenges: The Role of Research Universities” – was unique. It certainly was useful. Whether it changes the world and the universities’ place in it remains to be seen.

Paying for the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes are literally the future of the upper Midwest. This is a region built on natural resources, on its fertile land and rich lodes of iron and coal. As the economic benefits of those resources dwindle, our future now relies on how we use our one remaining untapped resource. The Lakes are the greatest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, and reviving the Midwestern economy depends on whether we use them wisely and well.

Which is why a vote by an obscure subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representative threatened to pound a nail into the Midwestern coffin. Presumably driven by the budget-cutting madness in Washington, the House Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee voted to cut funds for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative by nearly 80 percent. It seems at least some will be restored, but we’ve been reminded that our economic future depends on the whims of Congressmen who wouldn’t know a Great Lakes if they fell in it.

The Crisis of Food Deserts

Urban food insecurity is one of the crushing issues that plague American cities. It’s a fancy name for food deserts – the vast tracts of inner cities that hold millions of America’s poorest people but lack grocery stores or other sources of decent food for them to eat.

Much of the debate so far on what to do about this has been distorted by hype, ideology and wishful thinking, mostly from good-hearted activists who think that urban farms or non-profit agriculture will solve the problem.

A new and much-needed report has just been issued on this problem, by the Emerging Leaders program of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and it should become the basic text for any city trying to feed its poorest people. The report is called “Feeding an Urban World: A Call to Action,” and it’s hard-headed, sensible, devoid of false optimism and rigorously sourced. It lays out the problem, reports on how some cities are beginning to deal with it, and suggests a way forward.

Guest Post: What the President Should Say at Argonne

by Steve Brick, Senior Fellow, Energy and Climate, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs

President Obama is coming to Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, on Friday, March 15, and he is expected to talk about energy policy. For more than four decades, we have heard US Presidents call for national energy policy, make grave declarations about the urgent need for change, and chart bold courses to effect that change. We have also, invariably, seen these bold plans founder on the shoals of political intransigence, economic short-termism, and public apathy.

Here are two suggestions for concrete things the President can do to encourage innovation, improve energy security, and take meaningful steps to reducing greenhouse gases.

Chicago Regional Unity? Milwaukee Takes The Lead

We've written here before about the report earlier this year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which urged closer cooperation between the balkanized towns and cities in the Chicago economic area, around the south end of Lake Michigan.

Now, one of those cities, Milwaukee, has taken the lead. But Chicago also is paying attention. Good things might be about to happen.

A Budget Chop for the Midwest

Back in the pre-recession days before he was elected, Barack Obama went before a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and told them they shouldn't look to any Obama Administration for great outlays of new money for cities. He wasn't kidding.

Jacob Lew, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, had a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times forecasting some of the cuts Obama will propose in his budget for the 2012 fiscal year. The article was titled, "The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us," and it contained a sampling of budget cuts that Obama will propose to reduce a crippling federal deficit, which is forecast to be $10.4 trillion over the next decade.

Some of these cuts will go straight to the heart of what Midwestern cities do. At least one will impact the future of these cities' single greatest resource, the Great Lakes. Whether these cuts are wise or not will be debated in the months to come. Some will become reality, which means Midwestern cities have to start thinking now how they are going to reach important goals without the winds of Washington behind them.

A Green City for the Midwest

Not all the interesting ideas about the Midwest come from the Midwest. A consulting firm in suburban Boston has floated an idea for a "green city" to be built within an existing Midwestern city "that would offer a living, breathing opportunity to create an entire clean-tech infrastructure." They pick the Midwest because it's "an area of our country that's seriously in need of reinvention." Their idea is to build this "sustainable sub-city" within Detroit -- not exactly a trail-blazer in the move away from a fossil-fuel economy.

The authors are Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, of the Innosight consulting firm in Watertown, Mass. The article, "Copenhagen: Why the US Should Build a Green City," appears on the Conversation Starter blog of the Harvard Business Review.

Their model, Masdar, in the UAR, is not yet a city, just a project being built in the desert outside the city of Abu Dhabi. Johnson and Suskewicz recognize that a greenfield project like this isn't feasible in the Midwest, which is not so much trying to create a new economy as to transition from an old economy. Instead, they want to revive a "declining industrial city."

Presumably, this project would be based on electric cars, public transport powered by alternative energies and on the clean/green technologies that all cities must adopt, sooner or later, if they are to survive in a post-carbon world.

As mentioned, Detroit doesn't jump to mind as the optimal site for this experiment. It is probably the world capital of fossil-fuel economics and the local opposition to new technologies remains intense. In addition, Detroit's survival as a city is still in doubt. If this "green city" is built in Detroit and the city fails anyway, that would be the end of the experiment.