David Abbott, executive director of the George Gund Foundation, delivered the following speech at the Richard Shatten Public Policy Competition awards on April 27, 2006, at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. The 2006 competition involved Case economics students, who analyzed the benefits of making a public investment to improve Cleveland Public Square.

By David Abbott

I’m one of the 125,000 who work within five minutes of Public Square. So is my wife, and one of my favorite Public Square stories involves her. She’s a lawyer who frequently goes back and forth between her office and the Justice Center. One day about 15 years ago she was heading to the courthouse in a bad mood because she had just had her hair done and was really unhappy with the result. I think she was trying out a new salon or something. As she passed through the Terminal Tower onto Public Square, she came upon a guy who was a fixture on the Square for many years – a saxophone-playing street preacher. Some of you may remember him. As Jan stopped before crossing the street, the preacher turned to her and called out, “You need Jesus…especially with that haircut!”

That’s the kind of interaction you don’t get just anywhere, that only urban public places afford. And although it’s not the specific kind of encounter you might want to have every day, it falls within the general sort of street life that makes living in a city interesting and worthwhile. That street preacher has passed away, and his place has been taken by other generally less entertaining denizens of the Square. Their evident presence is, in fact, one of the issues that concerns most of us about the Square. But I submit that for the most part we wouldn’t really notice them if there were simply more people on the Square and the streets around it. Not just walking through to get from one place to another, but using the Square in other ways, like a park.

But, alas, much of the public has gone out of Public Square. Although there is often a tendency to think of projects like this in their physical dimensions, the work these student teams have undertaken is really about – and may help us achieve – increased public use. It is also quite a natural tendency to think about a project like this within its territorial boundaries. But important as it is to focus on the Square itself when thinking about revitalizing it, I contend that we must also look well beyond it if we hope to put the public back in Public Square. The Square did not decline solely because of deficiencies in its design or use or management. Important though those issues are, we cannot restore it through a focus on them alone.

If you look at a map of Cleveland, even the very earliest ones drawn by Moses Cleaveland’s surveying party, Public Square sits in the center, and from it radiate many of the streets and roads that create our community’s web of roadway connections. Public Square also sits in a vast web of other connections that drive its condition and affect its future. The same would be true of any other major development project, so let’s consider some of the forces that are well beyond the boundaries of Public Square but which nonetheless have greatly contributed to its decline.

You might have seen this story in the Plain Dealer a week ago: “Cuyahoga, Ohio losing population at high rate.” This phenomenon has been reported many times over the years in various ways. It reflects two basic issues: The first is the wrenching decline of our historic manufacturing economy and the process of reinvention that is well underway but still not moving fast enough to show up in population trends. The second is suburban sprawl – in the case of this article it reflects people leaving Cuyahoga County for outlying counties.

Our economic challenges are pretty well known even if they are not widely understood. We all know we have lost thousands and thousands of manufacturing jobs and that we are struggling to replace them with jobs in a more diversified local economy suited for the 21st century and to elevate the talents of our population to meet the needs of those jobs. But this is a long and, for many, a painful process. It is made more challenging by the hypercompetitive nature of the world economy, the bewildering speed at which circumstances change, and the unsettling mobility of companies, resources and people that we used to think of as rooted in place. The simple fact is that our region is in intense global competition with every other region and right now we are not sufficiently competitive.

When it comes to sprawl, you might think of Public Square as the beginning. The Square was laid out in 1796, and our population has been moving outward ever since. That was not such a problem when our population was growing, but the regional population – which today extends well beyond Cuyahoga County – has been basically flat for many years. But we keep spreading out. This has numerous consequences:

• It weakens and impoverishes the central city. Among other things, it creates labels – like “America’s poorest city” – that affect the entire region.
• It adds costs to all of our tax bills as we build new infrastructure such as schools, roads, and sewers, while also having to maintain the existing infrastructure.
• It causes us to pay more for transportation. According to one study we are 5th in the nation in per capita expenditures on transportation.
• It degrades the environment as we replace green space with structures and parking lots and put more pollution in the water and air.
• And because we are spreading out across a geography that has hundreds of political jurisdictions, we are dispersing decision-making authority and becoming increasingly fragmented when it comes to setting public policy. So our ability to respond in a coherent and strategic way to any issue – whether it is reinventing the economy or reinventing Public Square – is greatly impaired.

The sprawl phenomenon is not limited to Greater Cleveland, of course. It is a problem to varying degrees in every city. And it has been a major contributor to the nationwide loss of community sentiment and behavior memorably documented by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. Putnam painstakingly assembled data to show that since about 1970, virtually every form of civic engagement has plummeted. Everything from voting to club memberships to having picnics. People now spend much more of their time in individual pursuits – more time commuting, watching TV, and bowling alone rather than in leagues.

What Putnam documents is the imbalance that currently exists in the tug of war between individualism and community for dominance of the American character, a contest that runs throughout American history. From before our founding to today, we have always exalted the individual while also celebrating ways in which we sometimes pull together. At the moment it is pretty clear that individualism is overpowering efforts to pull together.

In addition to the factors Putnam identifies, I believe this imbalance is also fueled by the anti-government rhetoric of the right wing for the past several decades. It has been beaten into our heads for years that government is our enemy, and this remains a hot topic, including right now in Ohio with the so-called Tax Expenditure Limitation amendment being pushed by Secretary of State Blackwell. If we do not find ways to fight the pernicious mentality that urges us to believe that government is the enemy instead of a reflection of us, I don’t know how we can possibly expect to find community solutions to difficult problems because we no longer respect the very place where public debate largely occurs – that larger “public square” of our democracy.

I realize I have I ranged pretty far afield from the intersection of Superior and Ontario. But all of these trends, these forces, have real implications for hopes and dreams of revitalizing Public Square.

If we only looked at the forces against us, we might give up. But I don’t for a second believe we should. I don’t mean to sound a note just of doom and gloom. It’s simply important to understand what we’re up against – because even in the negative forces arrayed against the central city there are strategic opportunities.

For instance, I believe there is also a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the loss of community. As a nation and as a region I believe we’re increasingly unhappy with the pervasive sense of disconnectedness, and I believe we are going to become more and more dismayed with the results that this lack of community gives us.

George Will wrote this in one of his columns: “Clearly this nation, though steeped in the severe individualism of the frontier notion of freedom, has a yearning for the community feeling that comes from collective undertakings…The question is whether any enterprise other than war can tap that yearning.”

So, is there? Is there something that could be our equivalent of war? And, for purposes of today’s topic, is there a way to make Pubic Square what amounts to a battleground in that campaign?

There are important changes occurring in the world that favor cities. These include:

• Demographic changes – people getting married later, having fewer children, living longer – giving cities a chance to compete for a larger share of the population. You can see evidence of this change in downtown Cleveland and a few city neighborhoods.
• There is also the transformation of the world economy. Although it has immediate consequences for manufacturing centers like Cleveland, this transformation puts a premium on brainpower and on the innovation that comes from it. This means that cities have a competitive advantage because they have concentrations of educational, research, cultural and other institutions that employ and produce what Richard Florida called the “creative class.” Greater Cleveland is making real progress on this front and we are being recognized for it by such organizations as the Intelligent Community Forum that designated Cleveland as the only American city in its list of seven finalists for its Intelligent Community award – because of the creative applications of our broadband infrastructure and other efforts.
• Here’s another change that gives cities an opportunity – also from the Plain Dealer last week: The price of oil hits a record. There will of course be ups and downs in oil prices, but over time the trend will be up and this is going to drive not only the search for alternative energy but also for density, for mass transportation, and for walkable, bikeable environments – the kinds of things cities can best provide.

Like most of the other old industrial cities, however, Cleveland has been slow to take full advantage of these trends.

What can we do? I suggest we must answer George Will’s question. We have to somehow make the competitiveness of our region our equivalent of war. We have to somehow assemble enough public demand to make the changes we need in order to win in global competition. For a few people, the work of restoring a greater sense of community may be enough. For others it will be the labor of creating a vibrant economy, which underlies everything else. For yet others it will be saving cultural institutions or neighborhoods that will be lost if we don’t change our ways. For still others it could be coming to grips with the fact that if we don’t make ours a lively and attractive place, we will never see our children again because they will go elsewhere.

If you think of the issue that way – as a part of the competition that is our equivalent of war – then a strategy begins to emerge for Public Square that takes it beyond the realm of just another downtown project. And it has several aspects.

First, this means connecting Public Square to the emerging regional agenda and vision. In the world economy it is regions that matter. Regions – not cities – are the relevant units that compete with each other. But competitive regions must have competitive places within them, especially the sort of special urban districts that help to attract and keep talent. Just last week, the Fund for Our Economic Future, a collaboration of regional grantmakers, released the Dashboard of Economic Indicators as a measuring instrument to help all of us assess our region’s progress. This Dashboard was created by a team of economists, and they identified eight key factors affecting regional economic growth – one of which they call “location amenities.” And that surely includes – or should include – Public Square. An exciting urban landscape must be a key weapon in our region’s arsenal or we won’t successfully compete. If you share that view, you can express it through another effort of the Fund for Our Economic Future – a civic engagement process called Voices & Choices that is working to develop a regional competitiveness agenda. I hope you will go to http://www.voiceschoices.org to learn about it and to make your voice heard.

The second strategy point is that no matter how important one might think Public Square is, no matter how passionate about it one might become, a successful strategy demands thinking of the revival of Public Square as a means, not an end. It is a tool to forge a stronger city and, therefore, a stronger and more competitive region. It is sometimes hard for advocates of a project to think that way because it may seem like a diminished status or role. But in fact it’s essential, especially at a time when economic revival must become job number one for the whole region.

Finally, a good strategy must make the connection to a competitiveness agenda real, not artificial. Just asserting that link, slapping an economic development label on the Square, is not enough. This means that any plans, any design must seek to make the Square the kind of place that appeals to all kinds of people but especially to younger workers in the knowledge economy. That’s going to be hard. The Square is big. It’s cut up. It doesn’t lend itself to the kind of accidental encounters that fuel creativity.

In whatever manner this effort move forward, it will demand and will tax the most creative of our thinking. Between 1857 and 1867, Superior and Ontario were closed so the Square could be unified. Who says something like it couldn’t happen again? Because the famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham designed Cleveland’s mall, we are often reminded of his advice to make no small plans because they do nothing to inspire. He was, of course, right about how big plans can inspire people. But in a sense he was also wrong. Small places are important when it comes to urban design and urban life. Places where scale and size and design allow people to feel comfortable and welcome. Where interaction can naturally occur. Place matters in the competition for talent, but sometimes it is small places that matter the most.

Everything I’ve said about Public Square applies to nearly any urban revitalization project that Cleveland might undertake. But the Square does occupy a unique place in our history, our civic consciousness, and our geography. It demands special attention. Because of Public Square’s historic place in Cleveland, many might be tempted to try recreating its past. That’s a temptation we must resist. In his excellent book The World is Flat, Tom Friedman makes the case that the difference between thriving economies and declining ones is that thriving economies have more dreams than memories; declining economies have more memories than dreams. I fear that too often our community is a place that clings fervently to a nostalgic conception of our past. I don’t want to abandon our history, but the real challenge of reviving Public Square is to make it embody a portion of our dreams – and then to use this project to help make our dreams come true.

Additional reading
Transformational investments: Unleashing the potential of American cities (Speech by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution about how cities can benefit from changing demographic, cultural, and economic forces in American society)