Aaron M. Renn

All Things Aaron

What Is a Global City?

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This post originally ran on August 19, 2012. We hear a lot of talk these days about so-called "global cities." But what is a global city? Saskia Sassen literally wrote the book on global cities back in 2001 (though her global cities work dates back well over a decade prior to that book). She gave a definition that has long struck with me. In short form, in the age of globalization, the activities of production are scattered on a global basis. These complex, globalized production networks require new forms of financial and producer … [Read more...]

What Detroit’s Bankruptcy Teaches America

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As has long been expected, the city of Detroit has officially filed for bankruptcy.  While many will point to the sui generis nature of the city as a one-industry town with extreme racial polarization and other unique problems, Detroit’s bankruptcy in fact offers several lessons for other states and municipalities across America. The Day of Reckoning Can Take Much Longer Than We Think to Come What’s most surprising about Detroit’s bankruptcy is not that it happened, but how long it took to get there.   In authorizing the bankruptcy filing … [Read more...]

The End of the Road for Eds and Meds

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This post originally appeared in New Geography on September 12, 2012. In the last few decades, as suburbanization and deindustrialization devastated so many cities, they turned to two sectors that seemed not only immune to decline, but were actually growing: universities and hospitals. The so-called “eds and meds” sectors, often related through university affiliated hospitals, became a great stabilizer for many places. For example, the fabled Cleveland Clinic cushioned the blow of manufacturing decline in that city. Après steel, a city like … [Read more...]

If You Can Repeatedly Close a Freeway For Months At a Time, Do You Really Need It At All?

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Ten years ago state highway officials closed I-65/I-70 in downtown Indianapolis for three months for a rehab project called "Hyperfix." This was expected to cause a "carmageddon," but as we've grown used to many times by now, the expected traffic disaster never materialized: As the start date approached, INDOT and its partners implemented other precautions to ensure smooth traffic flow but soon discovered the additional efforts were unnecessary. For example, the State budgeted $100,000 in overtime for police, mainly to direct traffic downtown. … [Read more...]

The Metropolitan Revolution

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The Metropolitan Revolution by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley Brookings Institution Press, June 2013 By far the most important thing that the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program has done is educate and advocate for the reality of the metro-centricity of the United States. This might seem obvious from their name, but from the behavior of all too many, this new metro reality is apparently not obvious to most. Lost in the statistics of world urbanization is the fact that the United States is already almost entirely … [Read more...]

Cities Need a “Deaccessioning Policy” for Public Assets

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One of the major controversies following the appointment of Kevyn Orr as emergency financial manager for the city of Detroit has been the exploration of whether or not the art at the city-owned Detroit Institute of the Arts can or should be sold to satisfy creditors in the event of a bankruptcy filing. This obviously sent shock waves of indignation through the community. Following on from that, the Detroit Free Press took a look at what other assets could be on the auction block. In addition to extremely valuable masterpieces by the likes of … [Read more...]

Will Las Vegas’ Downtown Project Succeed?

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This is the second installment in my look at the Las Vegas Downtown Project. In part one I gave an overview of the project and some of the positives and success indicators. On Thursday I looked at some of the commonalities between Vegas and other small cities as a bridge to this installment. And finally today I want to look at some of the challenges I see with the Downtown Project and ask, will it succeed? As for the answer to that question, some of it is a matter of how you define success. At a base level, there's already been success. … [Read more...]

The Inevitability of Community in Small Cities

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This is both a standalone piece and a bit of a bridge between the first installment in my Las Vegas Downtown Project overview and the second one. One thing I consistently heard from the people in Vegas was their pride about the sense of community they had downtown. Tony Hsieh says it is the most community oriented place he's lived. One of the Downtown Project official goals is to make Las Vegas the most community-oriented downtown in the world. There's certainly a big sense of community in downtown Las Vegas. I don't want to diminish that … [Read more...]

Tony Hsieh and the Las Vegas Downtown Project

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The Downtown Project in Las Vegas, an attempt to completely reinvent downtown Las Vegas spearheaded by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, is one of the better known downtown revitalization initiatives in America. I've been planning to write on it since I saw Tony speak about it in Providence last fall. I was kicked in the pants to finally do so by a trip I took to Vegas last week to check the Downtown Project out. Before going any further, I should disclose that I stayed there for free in one of the project's "crash pad" apartments (more on those … [Read more...]

Milwaukee’s Future as Part of Greater Chicagoland

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Last summer I was invited to speak at a conference called "Milwaukee's Future in the Chicago Megacity" put on by the Marquette University School of Law and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was an interesting day of conversation about mega-regional integration between the two metros. In follow-up, Marquette Lawyer magazine asked me to write a piece for them about it. I'm including the full text of that article below. However, the current issue of the magazine has a couple of other major articles on the same topic. These are "Thinking and … [Read more...]