Desperate to soothe rattled residents and visitors and to restoke their economies in the wake of terrorist attacks, mayors of some of America's great cities are becoming highly critical of the federal government's heavy-handed approaches to homeland security. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino complains that generalized, nationwide federal terrorist warnings--there have been two since Sept. 11--simply generate personal anxiety and make it tough to draw people back to the city's normal daily life and attractions. A mayor's job, says Menino, ``is to give people consumer confidence,'' a goal undercut by federal warnings without specifics.
Washington is propagating a dangerous ``bunker mentality,'' asserts Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. He cites as an example the forbidding concrete Jersey barriers that now block off areas around government offices at such sites at Chicago's Daley Center and the Federal Complex. Chicagoans complain that the barriers, put up to block explosive-bearing vehicles, choke off their access to vibrant farmers' markets and other gatherings.
The mayors, with corporate leaders and university presidents in a new alliance, ``CEOs for Cities,'' met in Boston last week to suggest that there is a bright, long-term prospect for cities, notwithstanding the flood of false alarms, bomb threats and anthrax scares of recent weeks.
Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist agreed there has been a short-term hit to cities' feeling of safety. ``But cities through history have been far more durable than states, empires and nations,'' he argued. ``Cities have survived natural cataclysms, fires, wars, barbarism.''
Before Sept. 11, Norquist added, U.S. cities were already proving they could recover ``from 50 years of bad planning and sprawl.'' The recovery trend, he assets, ``will resume and be very strong.''
New England economist James Howell told the CEOs for Cities gathering it is true that terrorism has dealt a ``devastating'' short-term hit to the travel and tourism business that cities depend on so heavily. But long-term urban economic prospects are the brightest in generations, he said, noting the big city presence of the institutions and businesses central to today's scientific-knowledge economy: universities, medical science, biotechnology, financial services, telecommunications and software.
Still, the cities' immediate concerns are immense. A National League of Cities survey, taken in October, showed that officials in 45 percent of large cities (100,000-plus population) polled fear terrorist attacks. Many more cities--almost 60 percent--see themselves at clear risk of rising business shutdowns and joblessness.
The mayors are extraordinarily concerned they'll be stranded at the bottom of the fiscal food chain--confronted with declining revenues and major new antiterrorism expenditures even while federal economic stimulus funds get handed out in ways that do cities little good.
The larger cities--key to U.S. success in the new global economy--are under especially strong pressure to step up security at government buildings and water reservoirs, to re-train fire and police to deal with new threats like chemical and biological terrorism, and to purchase new protective equipment.
Yet the mayors complain they're receiving scant new fiscal aid even while federal agencies, the FBI in particular, fail to share information or work efficiently with local governments on the domestic front line of the country's war on terrorism.
Security--achieving it, coordinating it, paying for it--may be the key to the future of our cities well into this century.
Check back through history and security has always been key for cities, urban commentators Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel wrote last week for the Los Angeles Times. Rome, Alexandria and other great cities of antiquity flourished when they no longer needed walls for protection. Barbarian invasions later shattered Rome's power and ushered in the bleak Middle Ages.
Great modern cities have relied on secure systems of finance and infrastructure. Yet when the urban riots of the 1960s and rising fear of street crime hit U.S. cities, many suffered precipitous decline. Serious revival didn't start until the 1990s, when those crime rates began a deep fall.
Can cities assure security in an age of global terrorism? Will ballooning urban security costs prompt corporations to disperse? One shudders to think of corporate and personal reactions if even one more serious city-focused terrorist attack hits an American city in the next weeks or months.
But it is also true that America's creativity and competitiveness are generated most spontaneously in cities. Count up universities and colleges, which often provide the incubation for what become cutting-edge industries, and one finds that 1,900--more than half the national total--are in urban cores. And another 914 are on the urban fringe, according to a report prepared by CEOs for Cities by Harvard economist Michael Porter's Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
The bottom line is clear: a successful 21st century America needs successful cities. A strong federal-city partnership, built on consultation and mutual respect, is critical--if, in the end, we expect to win the terrorism war that has been thrust upon us.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
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