Obama: The Metro President

During the campaign, President-elect Obama spoke about his plans for urban policy:

"Yes, we need to fight poverty," he said. "Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America. That is the new metropolitan reality and we need a new strategy that reflects it -– a strategy that’s about South Florida as much as Miami; that’s about Mesa and Scottsdale as much as Phoenix; that’s about Stamford and Northern New Jersey as much as New York City. As president, I’ll work with you to develop this kind of strategy and I’ll appoint the first White House Director of Urban Policy to help make it a reality."

More on the speech and Obama's metro perspective from the Washington Post:

America's metro areas are the "backbone of regional growth," as he put it in a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "Washington remains trapped in an earlier era," he said, "wedded to an outdated 'urban' agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas, an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both."

Obama's emphasis on the metro instead of the city is based in reality: The old lines are blurring as employment patterns have scattered across regions, poverty is growing faster in many suburbs than it is downtown, and more immigrants are settling in the 'burbs. A recent report by the Brookings Institution found that the top 100 metro areas generate three-quarters of the country's economic output while covering 12 percent of its land area. ... The same [metropolitan focus] goes for spending on public transit. "If he frames something like that as being about metro competitiveness, he can do a lot," Lang said. "It should be, 'Hey, suburban guy sitting in traffic, would you like transit?' instead of 'I'm going to take your money and spend it in places you don't visit.'" ... But dominating Obama's platform are ideas geared more toward the metropolis as a whole: a big investment in infrastructure, including mass transit and inter-city rail, that he now also bills as a jobs measure; a network of public-private business incubators; new green-technology industries; a White House office of urban policy that will goad governments within metro areas into working together.

Mayors like this package partly because, aside from infrastructure spending, it doesn't cost much in a time of low budgets. Cities need a president who understands that they "are no longer the basket case they are often described as from Washington," said Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (D). "The skills we need in a president aren't the old skills of putting together a benevolent program for communities that will always be disempowered. We need someone who's done what Obama has done, to go into communities that have been hard hit and understand their assets, mobilize people to help them solve their problems."

The Chicago Tribune suggests Obama will go beyond steel and concrete:

With a variety of news outlets reporting that Barack Obama will form an Office of Urban Policy to coordinate the new administration's efforts on cities, this question looms: To what extent will architects and urban planners will be a part of that team? Will design issues get a hearing at the presidential policy table?

Chances are, they will.

The broader point is this: Much of Mayor Richard M. Daley's success can be attributed to his sensitivity to architecture and design issues. He hasn't marginalized them, as other mayors have, shunting them off to lower-level aides. He's made such issues a key part of his administration, personally reviewing major projects himself. At one point, in the mid-1990s, he had three architects in his cabinet. And the results speak for themselves.

....

The news about the Office of Urban Policy is good news. It proves Daley's contention that Obama's election would be good for cities; the mayor said there would be no need to get the president-elect, a former community organizer on the South Side, up to speed on urban issues. Now let's hope that Obama and Jarrett make some design-savvy people a part of the Office of Urban Policy.

If the financial, economic, and energy-environmental mess facing the planet is going to be solved, it will be in places like Maplewood. It won't be up to someone else. While a more unified approach from all layers of government would be good news, the question remains whether we can govern ourselves not just as a place, but as a constituent in a successful metro region.