Carol Coletta is stimulating some interesting new thinking at CEOs for Cities. Here are some reflections from their recent annual meeting via their blog.
- Those longing for economic and job stability are waiting for Godot. Turbulence is the new normal, and the only logical response is to build resilience.
There is great power in setting simple, straightforward goals.Variety, convenience, discovery, opportunity are city advantages there to be tapped.Where is your Department of Discovery? Who Is your Commissioner of Variety?You can’t deliver a safe city in the way you deliver pizza. Diffuse problems need diffuse solutions.The public sector is good at fire engines. It is not good with smoke detectors. But smoke detectors are the reason deaths from fire are down so dramatically.How do you link together the small core (anchor institutions), the committed community and a large group of participants?Cities with diffuse networks are more resilient than those with tight, overlapping networks.Universities should strive to be the host of the party than the life of the party.Find the supernodes in your community, and use them to bridge the community quickly.We must find smart ways to put underused capacity to work in cities.“I am so much cleverer than you” because I use ZipCar. “It is the highest and smartest form of car ownership.”If you want to make progress, pick a problem that is on fire or one that is long-term. Otherwise, “ok” will be good enough.How do we reinvigorate what gets lost as we adopt new technologies?How do we energize the community about being much more thoughtful about what we’re doing?Thoughtful discourse on public policy is made more difficult because there is no stability in personnel and there is no institutional memory.Cities are important as unfolding collections of innovations.If we are going to innovate as we did in the 19th century with parks and libraries, we will have to support things that seem odd today.Creativity is at the user end rather than with providers.Retain the capacity for doing weird and odd things. This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:18 am and is filed under Community Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
