Local time
Bruce Katz speaks with Matthew Taylor about the rise of new localism and where it leaves national politics
@bruce_katz
Taylor: The idea of localism, of devolving power, has been around for as long as centralisation. So what’s new about new localism?
Katz: New localism is a philosophy and practice of problem-solving that fits with the networked nature of the 21st century. Problem-solving is increasingly led from the bottom up, by cities. It is multi-sectoral; designed and delivered by public, private, civic, university and community labour rather than government exclusively. And it tends to be more inter-disciplinary than the bureaucratic and specialised models of siloed agencies that we developed in the 20th century. More and more we’ve understood, structurally, that many challenges require a 360-degree assessment.
For example, if you want to tackle traffic congestion, the solution may well not come from your department of transport, which will provide an engineering solution. The solution may lie with how housing is zoned or it may be technological. We’re better now at understanding that many of the major economic, social and environmental challenges we face require inter-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approaches. There is still a very important reason for national governments, but their specialised agencies are only part of the solution. Cities are now the vanguard of problem-solving because they are the engines of economies and the centres of global trade and investment, and because of the political disruption at the national level, and, to some extent, the diminishment of the nation-state.
Taylor: Listening to you talk, there’s an echo here of Robert Moses vs Jane Jacobs back in New York in the 1950s, when a powerful city planner was stopped in his tracks in lower Manhattan by a neighbourhood campaigner who championed a community-centred approach to urban planning. So, in some senses, this conversation between a more organic, networked, evolving way of thinking about change and a more top-down, technocratic, big-lever approach is an age-old dichotomy, isn’t it? Or are you arguing that this shift is occurring because the world has changed and the nature of problems has changed?
Katz: I think there is an evolution in thinking. We’ve been working at these problems for quite some time and a frustration has developed — not just in the US — with technocratic solutions, which can only go so far. We are now dealing with a city-led world and the process of adapting solutions that might work in one place to another has been sped up. Cities are looking at each other for inspiration on housing, transportation, climate change or early childhood education. They’re not trying to copycat a solution from one place and replicate it in another, because there are differences in conditions and legal structures and governance systems, but they’re looking for inspiration. The city level is just so much more pragmatic, tangible and concrete than the nation-state level that it enables quick adaptation in an urban world.
Taylor: I remember Geoff Mulgan, former director of policy under Tony Blair, saying to me that, with some things there’s a best way of doing them — a hip transplant, for example — and with others there are lots of best ways to do them. Whitehall often pretends that nearly everything is like the former and not many like the latter. Is part of the learning that the ‘pick up and plonk down’ model of innovation doesn’t really work?
Katz: There’s a different understanding of what ‘scaling’ means today. The way the US operated for a long period of time was to test policies at state level and then bring them up to the national level: think about the big domestic successes, such as the New Deal or even the Great Society. I think that’s very much a 20th century view of how transformative change happens. In this century, because so many of the solutions are networked, and so many solutions require public-private-civic finance and delivery, we’re not necessarily thinking about scaling in this vertical way. Instead, we’re looking at it in a horizontal way. We may be thinking, for example, about Nordic cities that are inventing not just new policies and practices, but new financial instruments around green infrastructure. And those practices require special relationships between cities and financial institutions, such that they need to be adapted to different modes of operation in different cities. Scaling today requires multi-sectoral players who may actually not even be in the same country because capital is so mobile. That opens up possibilities. When your national government shuts down or goes on a frolic and detour for any number of reasons, the country doesn’t stop. Cities are probably more active in the US, more experimental, more innovative, more affirmative today under Donald Trump because they realise they’re the only game in town, and they’re actively looking for models and norms to adopt and adapt.
Taylor: As you know, one of the big questions the RSA is considering is how can we develop a model of economic growth that is more inclusive. Who do you think is doing the best and most interesting thinking about that?
Katz: There are two approaches to that in the US right now that are worth looking at. First, some cities focus intentionally on labour demand. They’re trying to grow industries that can create more and better jobs with decent benefits. Pittsburgh might be the best example of that because of their focus on creating an advanced, innovative economy with next-generation technologies. Second, on the labour-supply side, Louisville is thinking about cradle-to-career development. They’re making investments in early childhood education, in our kindergarten to high school system, in degree completion and in apprenticeships and on-the-job training. In the US, like in most places, those four parts of the lifecycle of a child and young adult are very fragmented across different systems, constituencies and bureaucracies. But under the leadership of mayor Greg Fischer, Louisville has tried to bring this under one unified system. If you make investments at certain parts of a child’s life and then you make other smart investments later on, they tend to have a cumulative effect. This is the way to reduce the achievement gap and have a more inclusive growth pattern.
Taylor: Let’s turn to this issue of citizen engagement. At the national level, democracy is in a parlous state, with the rise of populism and high levels of disenchantment. But arguably, the sheer scale of national government — or, in your case, state government — is such that engagement is very difficult to do. Yet good local leaders have developed interesting and quite nuanced ways of keeping citizens in the loop and engaging them in the process of decision-making.
Katz: What really works is a participatory democracy. In cities across the country we include local citizens in local decisions — particularly around zoning and land use — that affect their daily lives and the character of their neighbourhood and community. A lot of this goes back to Jane Jacobs and the desire for citizens to be involved in major decisions that affect the shape of their places. Increasingly, we’re finding new technological ways of doing this. But you have to look at places like Helsinki to see how a city is using technology to actually involve citizens in problem-solving. Citizens there are not just affecting how government works, or the decisions it makes; they are also taking responsibility for measuring carbon emissions, for example, and changing their own behaviour to reduce them. In the US we’re beginning to focus on the Nordic model for citizen participation as the way forward.
Taylor: Is there a moment that you’ve observed when a city got out of denial, when they recognised they needed to think in different ways? I’m interested in that particular rebound moment. It may be that you don’t see the evidence of success for many years afterwards, but you can trace it back to a particular catalyst, when a city decided it just could not plough on in the way it did before, but it had to think and work differently.
Katz: In cities where you have a quiet crisis, where the shock comes over a decade or 20 years through the slow undermining of core sectors, I’ve seen leadership communicate what is happening in such a way that the broader community takes responsive action. In Indianapolis, like many American cities, the shock that occurred was the decimation of the core of the metropolis. There had been longstanding decentralisation of people and jobs to the extent that there was nothing happening downtown in the middle of the 1970s. The response was to restore the core; they understood that for a successful modern metropolis, you needed to have a centre, a heart of a community. First they chose the strategy of becoming the amateur sports capital of the US, and they built a lot of stadia to make that happen. Then they built on that to become one of the bioscience leaders in the US.
Taylor: Some 50 years ago the sociologist Daniel Bell said that in the modern world the nation-state would be too big for the small things in life and too small for the big things in life. I take the view (and I suspect you might share it) that the nation-state should think about itself as being there to provide a framework of empowerment for local initiatives and for international collaboration on genuinely global challenges. Do you see any signs of a new breed of politician who wants to work at the national level, but who understands this role of empowerment?
Katz: There is a different breed but you have to look closely because there’s so much noise coming from populism. I’ll give you one example of a new way of thinking. In the federal tax bill that just passed in the US, which for the most part just cut corporate tax rates, there was a small provision, little known, that allows individuals and corporations to defer capital gains taxes if they invest in opportunity funds and if those opportunity funds are invested in opportunity zones in low-income neighbourhoods. What’s interesting about this tax incentive is it was written by Cory Booker, the former mayor of Newark and by Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who is also a former local official. It’s unlike other tax incentives because state governors have to designate the zones, then the mayors and county leaders, along with their business, philanthropic and university allies, have to design and deliver tangible projects — they might be around real estate or entrepreneurs — while appealing to opportunity fund investors. This is not a traditional federal tax break, this is cities making their best case to investors that have pooled their capital for investment in these places. That’s new localism affecting how the national government works to give ultimate latitude and flexibility to local and state leaders. Increasingly, that’s how we’re going to operate in the US: policy is going to be designed from the bottom up.
Taylor: I suspect if you went back 50 years ago, certainly in Britain, and you talked to young progressive people they might have said, national government is where the talent is, where the big ideas are, where the ambition is; local government is parochial, it’s lower quality. But today, national politics feels pessimistic, polarised, sclerotic, while local leadership increasingly looks dynamic, progressive, bilateral, outward looking. What are the dangers here? In England, we have seen some on the left of the Labour Party wanting to push back against this kind of entrepreneurial, open, non-sectarian approach. They want proper, left-wing leaders who have a much more suspicious attitude towards business and a much more old-fashioned municipal model. Do you think that in the States it is only a matter of time before the populists say, we need to take on this rather dangerous progressivism that we’re seeing at city level?
Katz: There are populists on both the left and the right that want to deny how the world has changed, how the economy has restructured and the fact that problem-solving in this integrated, affirmative way in different communities is very much the way of the world. Centralisation dies hard. The old belief that we live in hierarchical societies rather than networked societies dies hard. We are going to have a battle between the populists, on both the left and the right, and the localists going forward. But if you’re a 25-year-old and you want to dedicate your life to making a difference and you look at all the options open to you at the community level — start a company, or go into a philanthropy, local government or a local corporation — there are more routes to solutions at that level than at government level. The entrepreneurial people will choose to go the local route, and hopefully they will decide at some point to work in national government and try to bend the will of the national government to serve the community. We’re in a battle; not one that everyone talks about, but nonetheless a battle between the nation-state and the city-state, between very different ways of operating and perceiving the world. This is one of the great unreported transitions of our time, and, structurally, it may be the most important transition of the West.
