Just Like You, Cities Need Love Too

I was reading about the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria the other day, and I was struck by this passage in the New York Times:

“We build out of brick and steel, asphalt and stone, and forget how fragile cities are until something like this happens, then we struggle to rebuild. The urge to urbanize is hard-wired in us because cities are life.

And like other forms of life, they need constant care to grow strong and productive over time.”

In the United States, at least, we spend a great deal of time talking about self-care and work-life balance, the importance of eating healthy and exercising, of taking breaks in the sunshine (but making sure to wear sunblock). We express frustration when we don’t have time to manage ourselves in the midst of managing the rest of our lives. So we kind of let it slide because it will be easier/different/better later. As a result, the U.S. is the unhealthiest country globally because of obesity and all the associated illnesses that go along with it.

The same thing happens with our cities. In a wealthy country that spends billions on its citizens through government spending, grants, and subsidies, it seems bizarre that so many of our largest and most prosperous communities see the greatest inequality. The inequality that I am referencing in this discussion is the difference in wages between high- and low-skilled workers; that difference subsequently results in a high degree of inequality in opportunities for people’s children, education, political policies, home ownership, health, and recovery from disaster.

In large cities, in fact, it would appear that economic growth correlates with growing inequality. That being said, smaller communities, which are among the least unequal, tend to struggle with weak economies, and that makes it difficult to attract jobs and workers at all levels.

In other words: if your city is wealthy, only parts of it are actually wealthy; the rest is distinctly not, which breaks the resilience of the community as a whole. Urban areas in high-wealth areas have far more services, such as grocery stores, green spaces, and health care, within ready reach. Low-income urban communities, on the other hand, tend to have food deserts, heat islands, and questionable education systems.

If you’re a small town, you are pretty equal in pay across the board, but your economy is stagnant, which breaks the resilience of the community as a whole.

Both scenarios represent communities that cannot effectively and comprehensively absorb and recover from disasters, which are becoming all too common. Earthquakes are what got me started on this, but hurricanes, floods, fires, and urban flooding are in the news almost daily as a result of a changing climate.

So. That’s frustrating. And very interesting. Because it brings us back to the idea of providing our communities with constant care to grow—and stay—strong. To be resilient.

What does that look like?

Building a healthy, thriving, resilient community means actively working to distribute social, environmental, and economic benefits equally across the entire city, not just in the areas that pay the most taxes and often make the most noise.

Building, maintaining, and encouraging equal distribution of services requires:

(1)???Understanding your community’s population, facility distribution, transportation, and land use, as well as major risk factors, e.g., hurricane evacuation, drug use, or crumbling infrastructure.

(2)???Prioritizing initiatives that provide the greatest community benefit, e.g., broadband access, transit options, or flood control. These benefits likely very depending on neighborhood, which is a good thing! And allows a targeted rollout of the initiatives you identify.

(3)???Educating your teams and your residents on how implementing strategies to identify services, implement services, and track the success of these services. We’ll call these your initiatives.

(4)???Implementing your initiatives, either one at a time or all at once, deliberately, purposefully, and with the greater outcome in mind.

(5)???Tracking success using KPIs (and all KPIs should result in a decision!), and using the results to refine existing initiatives and improve the next rollout.

Each step in the process requires active engagement by both city government and residents. You can implement every solution in the world, but if no one knows about it, it doesn’t matter.

It takes a village to raise…a village. And it takes concern, and care, and effort, to build your village into something extraordinary. Luckily, every town in America is filled with folks who care deeply about their home. So the drive is there. The desire to get it done is there. We just need to take the first steps to do it.