Which metro is America’s healthiest? You might guess it’s Los Angeles, what with all those washboard abs you see at Venice Beach, Santa Monica or Malibu. Or, maybe Denver or Boulder, considering all the mountain biking, rock climbing and winter sports they’re famous for.

You’d be surprised.  The fittest metro in America is Minneapolis-St. Paul, according to the annual American Fitness Index™ (AFI) that was just released by the American College of Sports Medicine’s (ACSM).  The Twin Cities finished third last year; this year they edged perennial winner Washington, DC into second place. Their winning rank reflects their relatively low (and rapidly-diminishing) smoking rate, their above-average percentage of regular exercisers, moderate-to-low rates of obesity, asthma, diabetes, and other chronic concerns, and rising share of farmers’ markets (indicative of a trend towards healthier dining). Boston takes the bronze, with Portland, Oregon fourth and Denver in fifth place. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Oklahoma City ranks as America’s least fit metro, followed by Louisville, Memphis, Birmingham, and Detroit.

The AFI rates the relative fitness of America’s 50 largest metros based on data from the U.S. Census, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), and The Trust for Public Land City Park Facts, among other sources.  The AFI takes both personal health indicators (statistics on specific diseases, obesity, smoking levels, etc.) and community and environmental factors (health care access, community resources that promote fitness, etc.) into account.

The above map shows us which cities are fit and which are not so fit, but it doesn’t tell us why that might be or what it reflects.  So, with the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I took a quick look at the demographic, economic, and geographic factors that might be associated with better or worse fitness across metros. Correlation is not causation, of course—what we are looking at here are simply associations. But they are thought-provoking enough to suggest other avenues of research.

Many people think fitness is better in warmer locations. Not so much. Each of the top five metros is pretty chilly, and the top ranked Twin Cities are among the coldest locations in the United States—certainly compared to warm and sunny LA, which languishes in 41^st place.  Our analysis found no correlation between fitness and January temp and a negative correlation between fitness and July temperature (-.49).

Perhaps more to the point, fitter cities are also more affluent. There are considerable correlations between fitness and several measures of economic development including average wages (.56) average income (.47) and economic output (gross metro product) per capita. The scatter-graph above charts the trend for income.

Fitter cities are better educated. There is a close correlation between fitness and the share of adults with a college degree (.64), as the above chart shows.

Fitter cities are also more innovative. There are significant correlations between fitness and the concentration of high-tech industry (.42) and the level of innovation (measured as patents per capita, .48).

Fitness is associated with the kinds of work we do. Metros with a high share of professional, technical and knowledge jobs are fitter (with a correlation of .58), while those with working class jobs are less fit (with a negative correlation of -.56)—see scatters above and below.  A paradox, perhaps, because working class people put more physical effort into their jobs, but sedentary professionals are much more likely to pursue vigorous exercise in their leisure time, while blue collar workers dedicate their downtime to, well, leisure.  Also, fitness shows no correlation to hours worked.  It does however show a modest correlation to the unemployment rate (-.29).

Which brings me to the last chart (see above), which compares metros’ rankings on the Fitness Index to their reported levels of Well-Being. Perhaps not surprisingly, the correlation (.71) is the highest of any variable in our analysis. To the chronically under-employed, their richer, thinner, happier neighbors must seem unbearably smug.

From “the Biggest Loser” to Oprah’s documented struggles with her weight, fitness is a signal obsession of American popular culture. We suffer from no dearth of health, fitness, and nutritional experts; celebrities, politicians, and even First Ladies exhort us to eat better, exercise more, and get fit. But we need to face up to the fact that healthy or unhealthy lifestyles are not simply the result of good or bad individual decisions.  They are inextricably tied up with the nature and structure of our culture and society. America’s increasingly uneven geography of fitness is perhaps the most visible symbol of  its fundamental economic and class divide.

“Beautiful Places: The Role of Perceived Aesthetic Beauty in Community Satisfaction” is a new paper on regional studies that I wrote with my MPI colleagues Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick.

Here’s the abstract:

This research uses a large survey sample of individuals across United States locations to examine the effects of beauty and aesthetics on community satisfaction. The paper conducts these estimations by ordinary least-squares, ordered logit, and multinomial logit. The findings confirm that beauty is significantly associated with community satisfaction. Other significant factors include economic security, schools, and social interaction. Further, community-level factors are significantly more important than individual demographic characteristics in explaining community satisfaction.

Read the full paper here.

Fiat is looking to follow Mini’s lead when it comes to customization for consumers. “The personalization is something that customers want.” The design centers inside the dealership will be a lot like the ones you’d find in a new subdivision, with lots of choices. “Those are all of the different 14 interiors, exteriors,” Soave said, “but you can mix and match, and that’s part of the deal.”  … these design centers are not strictly up-sell areas. Depending on the shopper, though, they can be.

The full story is here.

Social media is redefining the landscape of everything we do, from the way we connect to family and friends, how brands and celebrities capture attention, to the way business and journalism function. Hundreds of millions of people across the world use social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If any technology promised to shatter the constraint of geography, overcome distance, and flatten the world, social media would be it.

But a quick look at the map below, from the NetProspex 2010 Social Business Report, shows this is not the case at all, certainly not for the United States.

The map shows the 50 leading social media cities in the United States. It is based on data collected by NetProspex on social media adoption and used by more than two million business professionals.

The level of geographic concentration is pronounced, though the leading social media metros are not surprising. San Francisco and San Jose, Silicon Valley, top the list, with New York City, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Salt Lake City, L.A., and Atlanta rounding out the top 10.

But what are the characteristics of America’s leading social media centers? What factors are associated with its greater adoption and use in certain kinds of metros?

With the steady statistical hand of Charlotta Mellander, I decided to take a look at a range of factors that might be associated with geographic centers of social media. We examined key factors like economic development and income; clusters of high-tech industry; the human capital; creative class vs. working class job structures; the presence of artists, musicians, designers, and other artistic creatives; and openness to diversity and tolerance for immigrants and gays and lesbians (see the note on sources at the end of this post). We ran a basic correlation analysis and generated a series of scattergraphs plotting social media centers against these factors.

The chart above summarizes the key findings of our analysis. These are preliminary, exploratory analyses that simply point to associations between variables. We don’t make any claims about the direction of causality, and we acknowledge that intervening variables may come into play. So what do we find?

Economic Development and Income: It stands to reason that the adoption of the use of social media at the city level would rise alongside local incomes and the overall level of economic development. And that is what we find. Social media is associated with both economic output and income. The correlations for each are substantial (in the range of .6 and .7).

High-Tech Industry and Innovation: It also stands to reason that social media would be more commonly used in places with higher levels of high-tech industry and higher rates of innovation. And again that is what we find. The correlation between social media centers and concentrations of high-tech industry is about the same as for economic development (ranging from .6 to .7). While social media at the city level is correlated with the rate of innovation, measured as patents, the correlation is more modest (about .4).

Human Capital: Social media use is also associated with higher levels of human capital, measured as the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree or more education (with correlations in the range of .55 to .6).

Creative Class vs. Working Class: The class structure of the economy also seems to play a substantial role. Social media centers are also associated with higher concentrations of creative class jobs in fields like science and technology; business, management, and finance; arts, culture, and entertainment; and health care and education (with correlations in the range of .55). Social media centers are also significantly associated with artistic and cultural creatives specifically (with correlations ranging from .525 to more than .7). On the other hand, places with a larger blue-collar working class labor force tend to have lower concentrations of social media (with correlations ranging from .-3 to nearly -.4).

Openness to Diversity: I’ve long argued that openness to diversity – measured either as openness to foreign-born people or to gay and lesbian populations – reflects a place that is open to new ideas generally and enables outsiders to mobilize resources efficiently around these new ideas and firms. Open places benefit from low barriers to entry to talented people, and benefit from their ability to capture a greater flow of creative, innovative, and ambitious people. Both measures are closely associated with social media centers. Social media centers are closely associated both with the Gay Index – a measure of the proportion of gays and lesbians in a metro area (with correlations ranging from .62 to nearly .7) – and the share of foreign-born people in a metro (with correlations of .6 and higher).

While social media allows us to connect instantaneously to people all over the globe, the geography of its professional use in the United States is concentrated. The leading social media metros in the U.S. are richer, more technologically advanced, have higher levels of education and higher levels of the creative class, and are more open to diversity of all sorts. The geography of social media thus both reflects and reinforces the increasingly uneven and spiky nature of America’s economic landscape.

Notes on Data and Sources: Social media metros is from the NetProspex 2010 Social Business Report based on data on social media use by more than two million business professionals. The variable is logged in the scattergraphs above.

Economic Output is gross domestic product per capita and is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. High-Tech is based on the Milken Institute’s Techpole measure – regional high-tech intensity compared to national high-tech intensity updated with current data. Innovation is patents per capita and is from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Creative class includes the share of workers in science and technology; business, management, and finance; arts, culture, media, and entertainment; and health care and education. Working class includes the share of blue-collar workers in production occupations, maintenance, construction, and transportation. Bohemian Index is the share of adults in artistic and culturally creative occupations. These variables are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Human capital is the share of adults  with a bachelor’s degree and above. Gay Index is the share of adults that are gay and lesbian and is based on research developed by Gary Gates and his collaborators. Foreign-born is the share of adults who were born outside of the United States. These variables are from the U.S. Census American Community Survey.

Is a new world financial order emerging from the economic crisis? Will Asia’s rising financial centers displace the long-held dominance of New York and London?

The newly released edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), an annual competitiveness ranking of the world’s leading financial centers, provides useful data with which to assess the evolving landscape of global finance.

The map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), shows the world’s leading financial centers based on the GFCI ranking.

London and New York remain the world’s leading financial centers. But, Hong Kong and Singapore, which hold the third and fourth spots, are gaining ground, according to the report. Tokyo takes the fifth place and Shanghai has surged to sixth, giving Asia four of the top six spots overall. Chicago, Zurich, Geneva, and Sydney round out the top 10. Toronto, with its strong stable banks, ranks 12th overall but makes the list of the world’s eight leading “broad and deep” financial centers.

It’s true that big international economic crises – like the financial panic and Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s — have a way of upending the geopolitical order and hastening the fall of old powers and the rise of new ones, and we may be in the early throes of such a shift now. But what factors can help us better understand the shifting landscape of global finance today?

In his magisterial book, Capitals of Capital, the economic historian Youssef Cassis writes that financial capitals, once established, “have incredible staying power.” The rise of major financial centers correlates with the rise of the nation’s economic power, but with a considerable time lag. The United Kingdom lost its position to the United States as the world’s largest economy in 1872 and the largest exporter in 1915. By the middle of the 20th century, America’s economic output was twice that of all of Europe combined. But it was only after the war that New York unseated London as the world’s financial center.

To get at this, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I looked at the economic might of financial centers themselves and of the nations in which they are located. We ran a basic correlation analysis and generated a series of scattergraphs. The data cover 52 global financial centers. We stress that that these are preliminary, exploratory analyses that simply point to associations between variables. We don’t make any claims here about the direction of causality, and we acknowledge that intervening variables may come into play.

There is a clear connection between economic heft and global financial centers. This holds both for the financial center itself and the nation in which it is located. Our measure of metropolitan economic output comes from our research that uses satellite images of the world at night to derive a systematic measure of economic output based on light or energy emissions which we dub as our “light-based regional product” (LRP). A city’s global financial center score is reasonably associated with its LRP (.46) and slightly more so with its LRP per capita (.53). Both correlations are substantially higher than for a city’s population (.35).

The same basic pattern holds at the national level. Global financial centers are more likely in bigger economies. The GFCI is reasonably associated with economic output measured as gross domestic product per capita. The correlation was .28 when we used the combined score of all of a nation’s financial centers, and even higher (.51) when we used the score of its highest-ranked financial center.

Global financial centers are also more innovative. GFCI score is modestly correlated with patenting overall (.28) and slightly more so with patents per capita (.32).

The ability to attract talent has long been a defining characteristic of leading global financial centers. Cassis writes that: “The crucial contributory factor in the financial center’s development over the last two centuries, and even longer, is the arrival of new talent to replenish their energy and their capacity to innovate.” So we looked at the relationship between global financial centers and a proxy measure for openness to global talent  - data on attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities from Gallup surveys. And we found a reasonably close association. The correlation was .4 when we used the combined score of all of a nation’s financial centers and .51 when we used its highest-ranked financial center.

We also looked at the relationship between global financial centers and another measure of openness – attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, also from Gallup surveys. And we again found a reasonably close association. The correlation was .32 when we used a nation’s highest-ranked financial center, and it was .27 (though not statistically significant) when we used the combined score of all the financial centers in a nation.

The economic crisis is altering the landscape of global finance, but change in the world financial order occurs slowly and gradually. Global financial centers have long staying power, and shifts at the very top follow long lag times. Asian financial centers, particularly Hong Kong and Singapore, have gained ground on London and New York, and Shanghai has risen rapidly to the top echelons of the global financial system. Our analysis finds a close association between global financial power and economic power more generally at the local and national level – and this bodes well for rising Asian centers, more so for Shanghai than for the smaller city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. That said, their rise may be hindered from intense and growing regional competition among one another. Our analysis also finds a close association between openness and financial power which may hinder their rise to preeminence. Even though Asian centers, from Hong Kong and Singapore to Shanghai, are striving to improve their talent-attracting game, they still do not offer the level of openness, fluidity, and amenity found in London and New York. The interaction of these two factors – economic power and economic openness – will shape the evolution of the global financial system and its pinnacle powers for the foreseeable future.

Check out this video (via Urbanophile) on New York City’s wide-ranging efforts to improve quality of place. It’s shifting from a car city to a “city for people” – expanding bike lanes into a networked cycling infrastructure and upgrading its bus system. The environment benefits, it’s easier to get around, streets are safer, and neighborhoods are quieter - all of which make the city a more desirable place to live, work, and play.

Here’s a fantastic video, “Love Letters to Syracuse,” that illustrates the transformative, community-building role public art can play. For the project, artist Steven Powers painted bold, vivid messages about the city across old train bridges. The messages came from residents who were asked what they loved or hated about the community. See for yourself (via the Sustainable Cities Collective).

A LOVE LETTER TO SYRACUSE from samuel j macon on Vimeo.

This is the longer, unedited version of my column in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.

What a dramatic shift. Just a couple of decades ago, the suburbs were the locus of the American Dream. More than their sprawling, large-lot homes and big wide lawns, their shopping malls, industrial parks, and office campuses accounted for a growing percentage of the nation’s economic output.  A good many of them formed into Edge Cities—satellite centers where people could live, work, and shop without ever having to set foot in the center city.

With millions of homes underwater or in foreclosure, our suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible hits from the great recession. In a stunning reversal, big cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle have become talent magnets at the same time, drawing ambitious people, empty-nesters, young-families, and even a growing number of offices back to their downtown cores. As inner city neighborhoods are being gentrified, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs, where one third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities, according to a Brookings study. And suburban poverty populations are growing at five times the rate of those in cities.

I myself am a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool urbanist; I’ve lived in inner-cities for most of my adult life. But I believe my urbanist fellow travelers are making a big mistake when they impugn suburbanization wholesale. Suburbs don’t always grow at the expense of cities; suburbanization and urbanization alike are parts of a larger process. Studies reveal that, counterintuitively, suburbs don’t draw most of their populations from the inner city, but grow by attracting people from small towns and rural areas further out, as well as immigrants from foreign countries, more than 50 percent of whom bypass cities and settle directly in the suburbs of larger metro areas, according to research by Brookings’ Audrey Singer.

Great metropolitan areas are like economic suns; their gravitational appeal is irresistible. Suburbs and cities are mutually dependent; they blur into each other at the margins. And the most successful suburbs share many attributes with the best urban neighborhoods: walkability, vibrant street life, density, diversity.

Density, the clustering of people and firms, is a basic engine of economic life—for cities, suburbs, and nations. When interesting people rub against each other, they spark new ideas; the clustering of economic assets and activities accelerates the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises and dramatically increases overall productivity.

The idea that such clustering only happens in Manhattan-style urban centers is shortsighted and parochial—it’s characteristic of Silicon Valley too, and Nashville, whose cluster of musicians, composers, studios, publishers, and record companies has made it the most concentrated center of commercial music-making in the world. But we need more of it and too many of our suburbs and exurbs don’t have much of it at all. The key to our suburbs’ renewal is not beautification but densification. As our suburbs become more clustered, they’ll become more economically energetic—with benefits for us all.

Renewing our suburbs is part and parcel of broader economic recovery. The very act of restoring them—of retrofitting them for the new ways of living and working that our emerging new economic order requires–will help bring back prosperity overall.

Sources: Map by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute. Data from Christopher Leinberger.

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Though some of our most stressed suburbs might have passed the tipping point— like those brand new unsaleable houses on the far-out fringes of L.A. that were bulldozed to the ground not too long ago, double-paned windows, granite countertops, whirlpool baths, and all—most of them aren’t going to fade away. Just over half of Americans live in the suburbs, and the great majority of them are content to stay. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of suburbanites are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with where they live; 57 percent rated their communities as the “best” or “near-best,” according to a survey I conducted with the Gallup Organization and report in my book Who’s Your City? A separate Pew survey identified the group of Americans that is most satisfied with their living choices as college-educated suburbanites–62 percent of whom said there was no better place for them to live.

Even before the recession, our changing demography had begun to alter the texture of suburban life in favor of denser, more walkable, mixed-use communities. Ozzie and Harriet stereotypes notwithstanding, the average age of marriage has been rising, households have gotten smaller, and single people now outnumber marrieds. Only about one in five American households consists of two parents with children living at home, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Many baby boomers who are in their empty-nester phase are looking to downsize, and younger Americans faced with a stagnant economy are putting off having families a little longer and are staying put in their apartments or moving home with mom and dad.

The recession accelerated this process of change. Much has been made of the shift to a so-called “new normal” where consumers scale back on debt, purchase less material things, spend more time with family and friends, and seek greater meaning in their lives. It may sound like the wishful thinking of crunchy granola, ivory tower pundits —only it really is happening. Even builders and realtors have taken notice. According to an eye-opening 2009 survey commissioned by Builder magazine, home buyers are no longer willing to drive to the furthest edges of developments to buy the biggest house they can afford. In fact those are precisely the kinds of homes that are not selling.  Real estate development expert Arthur C. Nelson predicts that we will have a surplus of as many as 22 million large-lot homes by the year 2025.

Today’s buyers—surprising numbers of them single women— are looking for smaller houses closer-in, with access to parks and cultural amenities. There is a rapidly growing market for super-energy efficient homes under 1,300 square feet – quite a departure from the 5,000-6,000 square foot McMansions of just a few years past. “We are entering a new era of home building, where buyers look for spiritual satisfaction rather than material gain,” the Builder study concludes. Not the kind of language we’re used to hearing from the construction industry.

While most suburbanites are happy with where they live, growing numbers are increasingly unhappy with how much time they’ve been spending in their cars. More than half of Americans would prefer to walk more and drive less, a 2003 national survey reported, and more than a third would prefer to live in walkable communities, according to research by Jonathan Levine of the University of Michigan and his collaborators. Commuting by car is not only time-consuming and expensive, according to research by the Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman, it is also one of life’s least enjoyable activities. Most suburbanites don’t want to move to the city; they’d like the best aspects of city life—its liveliness, its amenities, its walkability—to come to them.

Sources: Analysis by Patrick Adler; graphics by Michelle Hopgood of the Martin Prosperity Institute. List of walkable suburbs from Christopher Leinberger. Human capital refers to adults with a bachelor’s degree or more; travel time to work is one-way travel from work to home. Human capital, income, and travel time to work data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Walkable suburbs are some of America’s best places to live; they provide a model for renewal for their sprawling, spread-out siblings. Relatively dense commercial districts, with shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, as well as a wide variety of housing types, have always been a feature of the older suburbs that grew up along the streetcar lines of big metro areas. A 2007 study by suburban redevelopment expert Christopher Leinberger found more than 150 walkable places in America’s 30 largest metro regions–places like Hoboken, Montclair, Maplewood, and Princeton in New Jersey; Stamford and Greenwich, Connecticut; Brookline, Massachusetts; Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; and Royal Oak and Birmingham, Michigan, outside Detroit. Newer versions of walkable suburbs can be found in regions that developed later, like Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley; Santa Monica; Boulder, Colorado; Coral Gables, Florida; Decatur outside Atlanta; and Clayton near St. Louis.

These are the places where Americans are clamoring to live, where housing prices have held up even in the face of one of the greatest real estate collapses in modern memory, as Leinberger documents in his book, The Option of Urbanism. The desire for walkability can be measured in dollars and cents. Houses in walkable neighborhoods command higher prices than houses in more distant, less dense locations. A recent study by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities analyzed the sales of 90,000 homes in 15 major metros. In 12 out of 15 of them, walkability commanded a premium—sometimes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in places like the D.C. suburbs.

With help from my colleague Charlotta Mellander, I examined the economic relations of walkability (as ranked in Leinberger’s research and by the walkscore index) across 40 or so other U.S. metropolitan regions. We found that metros with walkable suburbs had greater economic output, higher incomes, and higher housing prices; higher levels of human capital, higher membership in the creative class; higher levels of patented innovations and of high-tech industries and employees; not to mention higher levels of happiness.

It goes both ways. On the one hand, skilled, affluent people prefer walkable neighborhoods, especially when they have young families. Many move from denser city neighborhoods, like Georgetown or Adams Morgan or Capitol Hill, to places like Bethesda, or from Manhattan or Brooklyn to Montclair or Westport or Greenwich, because they can gain security and access to good schools without having to give up amenities they left behind in the city. Whether they move to these suburbs specifically because of their walkability, their urban virtues of mixed use and generally medium-scale density ensure that the innovation and productivity-enhancing effects of clustering continue to be available to them. Just as they did in the city, people bump into each other in coffee shops and other such Third Places; they discuss projects and make deals. This sort of thing is legendary, from Silicon Valley to Nashville’s Music Row.

If America’s oldest suburbs have been its most resilient, they are not its most typical. Many of the inner-ring suburbs that boomed after World War II started out with more modest endowments of human and physical capital; some of them have since lapsed into significant disrepair. But as the metro areas continued to expand, many of these places have seen their land values rebound because they’re closer in. Ferndale, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, has gone far to revitalize itself by promoting its art scene, building affordable housing, and by marketing itself as gay friendly. Arlington, Virginia, has added density by building mixed-use high-rise complexes at its 11 Metrorail stations while encouraging the development of independent businesses in its older neighborhoods. It is a place of exhilarating contrasts, with funky coffee shops, vintage clothing stores, and places to hear indie bands close upon gleaming office towers and chain restaurants. Bellevue, Washington, just across from Seattle which has been retrofitting  and adding density and mixed-land use to its downtown for some time, recently launched a major core-building initiative, the “Bel-Red Area Transformation,” a 900-acre urban infill project that will bring mixed-use development, light rail, new streets, parks, and open spaces to a disused stretch of highway.

But not all of America’s suburbs have the option of developing compact cores along streetcar lines or transit; not all are filled with old, wonderful housing stock that is ripe for gentrification, not all of them are filled with the kinds of mega-talented techies and visionaries who are flocking to Silicon Valley. Many are sprawling, relatively characterless places, with spread out  populations living in cookie-cutter houses on large lots, who commute long distances to work. These suburbs have to rebuild from the bottom up.

In Phoenix, Arizona, three abandoned strip malls, clustered at the corner of 40th and Campbell Streets, have been converted into a restaurant, an upscale grocery, a chic bakery, and a cocktail bar. It’s called Le Grande Orange and it has become a huge attraction, both for customers and local home buyers, who want to live within walking distance of it.

National Harbor, a mix of hotels, residential units, marinas, parks, stores, and indoor and outdoor entertainment venues, is being built on the footings of two previous failed projects in Prince George’s County, Maryland. When completed, it will extend along a mile and a quarter of the Potomac.

Two professors of urban design and architecture, Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech and June Williamson of City College of New York, have literally written the book on the challenges and opportunities that our failing suburbs present—Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. Documenting strategies of redevelopment, re-inhabitation, and re-greening, they focus on what to do with superannuated or abandoned malls and suburban office and industrial parks.

As Americans take their business to larger and larger “mega-malls,” the smaller, older ones are left to languish. A 2001 PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that one in five malls were dead or dying – 7 percent were effectively dead and another 12 percent were vulnerable and likely to fail in the near future. But these troubled malls have become the sites of a wave of renewal. Outside of St. Paul, the parking lot that surrounded a dead shopping center built on land fill was turned back into wetlands—which in turn attracted new “lakefront” townhome development. In Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a dead mall on a single 103-acre superblock is being transformed into Belmar—22 urban blocks with parks, bus lines, restaurants, stores, and 1,300 new households—the downtown that Lakewood never had. Eight of the 13 regional malls in the Denver area are now planning or have completed makeovers.

But perhaps the biggest retrofit of all is happening in Tysons Corner, Virginia, the virtual archetype of an auto-dependent, sprawling edge city. Located near the junctions of three major highways, it boasts 25 million square feet of office space and four million square feet of retail space (including one of the largest malls on the East Coast). Though only 18,500 people live there, its population swells to 120,000 every day. Decades ago, developers hailed it as the wave of the future—one of hundreds of new stretched out, auto-dependent satellite centers that would render our old downtown commercial centers obsolete.  But for all the jobs it supports, stores it houses, and tax revenue it generates, Tysons Corner has been losing out of late. Its perpetual traffic gridlock and its lack of human energy have caused homebuyers to choose other places; some of the companies that were headquartered there have even moved back into the District of Columbia.

But now a major retrofit is in motion, led by its major developers and land-owners who seek to make it more walkeable, denser with a more integrated mix of uses, and more connected to the city via transit. When the D.C. Metro announced plans to build an extension to Dulles Airport that would pass through Tysons Corner, the biggest debate was not about whether or not it was needed, but whether or not to bury it underground – an expensive proposition, but one that would free up land for even more integrated mixed-use development. On June 22, 2010, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors adopted a comprehensive plan that would transform the town from “a sprawling suburban office park” to a “24-hour urban center where people live, work, and play.” There is a certain irony in this. America’s archetypal Edge City is seeking to reinvent itself as a place whose hallmarks will be walkability, green construction, access to public transportation, and abundant public amenities, like parks and bicycle trails—something that sounds very much like a real city. And, what’s also pretty astonishing is it has competition. Nearby edge cities in Crystal City and White Flint have proposed similar transit-based retrofits of hundreds of acres. It is something that needs to happen—and that is starting to happen—across more and more of our suburbs.

There are countless other opportunities for reclamation, all across America. Disused golf courses can be transformed into parks and nature sanctuaries; abandoned car dealerships can be landscaped and developed as new, mixed-use neighborhoods. Whole commercial corridors, as Dunham-Jones and Williamson put it, “are being retrofitted in ways that integrate rather than isolate uses and regenerate underperforming asphalt into urban neighborhoods.” Developers are decking over the parking lots at commuter rail stations and building high- and mid-rise office/commercial/residential complexes atop them; they are cutting streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses and adding restaurants, stores, and public spaces. While the recession has slowed down most of the suburban renewal projects, it’s provided further impetus for community service and regreening efforts. Abandoned big-box stores are being made over into senior centers and schools and libraries—amenities that are just as essential for neighborhoods as eateries and boutiques. Most of these retrofits, of course, are a far cry from the organic authenticity of “real cities,” Dunham-Jones and Williamson note, but they build community and lay the groundwork for still further redevelopment. Writ large and multiplied across hundreds of other metros, they are remaking the way Americans live and laying the groundwork for future economic prosperity. This type of strip commercial redevelopment will be the major development feature of the next generation.

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The drive to renew our far-flung suburbs may seem like a tall order for a recession-weary nation, but it’s a lot less farfetched than someone in 1950 saying that those old decrepit urban warehouse and factory districts would turn into some of America’s most vibrant and expensive neighborhoods someday. Not to mention that remaking the suburbs, where so many Americans live, is far, far more important to our overall economic recovery and broader quality of life.

Historically, America’s economic growth has hinged on its ability to create new development patterns, new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic and long depression of 1873 was forged by our transition from an agricultural economy to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities and their early streetcar suburbs. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs. The drive to remake our suburbs today, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities—and, most important, to create the strategically located pockets of density required for innovation and productivity growth—may provide our own troubled era with the fix that it so desperately needs.

That’s the title of this Wall Street Journal story on a new Rockefeller Foundation Initiative to support the creative class.

To assure the city remains the cultural and creative leader of the world, the Rockefeller Foundation is giving more than $3 million to support local artists and arts organizations.

More than 400 applicants vied for a chance to receive two-year grants, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. Eighteen winners were chosen, including Bowery Arts & Science, to project the works of poets onto walls and buildings in city neighborhoods and the City University of New York Institute for Sustainable Cities in partnership with Artist as Citizen, to create an online atlas that traces the city’s environmental transformation and maps out the future of the city’s environment …

“It’s a new business model that builds the financial resilience of the arts sector while maintaining the artistic capacity,” says Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

More than two-thirds of arts organizations in New York plan to reduce their budgets this year and 42% may cancel or postpone programs, according to a May study from the Alliance for the Arts, a nonprofit research group.

Stepping into stem the losses are organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Open Society Institute, which recently awarded $11 million to performing arts groups.

“Even before the recession, New York was losing ground as the world’s creative capital,” Ms. Rodin says. “The stakeholders of the arts and culture in New York do not want to see that happen.”

The full story is here.

The Judgment Call section of today’s Financial Times asks:

Last week, Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch announced the company was interested in buying Alfa Romeo, the Italian brand. While at Fiat, chief executive Sergio Marchionne says the company is “Italian based but not an Italian company.” In the era of global business, does a company’s national identity matter?

Here’s my answer:

It depends who you are talking about.

For companies, nationality is becoming less important. Their products have to be in the major markets, no matter where they are. You need to source stuff where the capabilities and the prices are right. One thing I learned way back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was studying the globalisation of auto manufacturing, is that it’s often harder to upgrade and transform existing plants at home than it is to set up not just new factories but whole new work systems in new places. For unions, nationality matters because factory jobs are tied to locations: it’s not as though existing workers can be transported abroad. Workers can benefit when foreign companies invest in new countries and generate new jobs overseas but often those companies prefer to operate without unions. Countries, meanwhile, worry that globalisation will hollow out their economies.

Domestic companies, politicians believe, are more inclined not just to create jobs but to invest in national projects. Maybe so, but foreign companies have considerable interest in making their offshore locations more productive and engaging local employees and communities more effectively. Corporate nationality is losing ground to globalisation. Those that try to prop it up only stand in the way of their own progress.

The rest is here.