Regional Revitalization - Why?

Why a regional approach? One of the major problems facing economic development planners, natural resource managers, etc. is fragmented governance, whereby most power lies in the hands of municipalities, with states and counties having minimal influence.  This style of governance (often referred to as "local controls" or "home rule" in the U.S.) has undeniable benefits, such as local decision-making by people who are intimately familiar with the situation, rather than centralized control from afar. But it also has at least two major flaws.

One of these flaws is that the local politicians/managers often lack the sophistication or legal expertise it takes to resist powerful regional or national developers whose plans are not in the best interest of the community. The well-publicized political steamrollering of small communities by certain big-box retailers is a classic case in point. We address this flaw in a bit more detail on the page that discusses Revitalization Institute's relationship with the real estate development industry.

The other major weakness of fragmented governance is the difficulty of doing regional planning. many states have both weak counties and minimal state power over a large number of small municipalities. For instance, Pennsylvania has 2565 municipal governments, and New Jersey has 566 municipal governments (with an average size of just 13.1 square miles). This makes it almost impossible to execute (or even discuss) environmental planning, smart growth strategies, public transit, and other issues that require a regional approach. The result is often a pernicious, counterintuitive combination of slow economic growth with fast sprawl.

What's needed is an approach that retains the best qualities of home rule, while delivering the benefits of regionalism.  While the quality of execution will determine success or failure in the long run, the most important first step lies in defining the goal and region...in other words, selecting the right activity and the right geography.  Either one can work quite well on its own, but can be tremendously powerful when combined.  The activity we're going to suggest (no surprise here) is restorative development.  Restoration is unsurpassed in its ability to bring together and motivate diverse stakeholders.

The integrating focus that often works best is water (although transportation and catastrophe can also be excellent integrators).  It might be an estuary, a watershed, a river, an urban waterfront, an urban stream, a large lake, an aquifer, a reef, or an ocean, but water has unsurpassed ability to unite people.  Combine a restorative model with a focus on water, and you've got a sound foundation for a regional initiative.  Once you've got the region united around water, you can start talking about regional approaches to transportation, power, or...?

The power of water as a focus for regionalism isn't a new insight.  John Wesley Powell published an 1890 essay entitled “Institutions for the Arid Lands,” which recommended that the ideal unit of governance for the American West would be  commonwealths defined by watersheds. He said “there is a body of interdependent and unified interests and values, all collected in [a] hydrographic basin, and all segregated by well-defined boundary lines from the rest of the world. The people in such a district have common interests, common rights, and common duties, and must necessarily work together for common purposes”. For more on the Powell and on applications of his thinking, read Working Across Boundaries: A Framework for Regional Collaboration from the July 2004 issue of Land Lines, the excellent newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

To enroll or obtain further information: Call Storm Cunningham at 703-348-7878, or email him at storm@revitalization.org