The folks at Brookings released a report Monday on the importance of exports to the economies of Great Lakes cities.
Among the findings:
- Exports support 1.95 million jobs in Great Lakes metros
- Cities in this region have some of the highest volumes (dollar-wise) of exports and the greatest reliance on exports. Out of the nation’s top 100 metro areas, Chicago ranks third and Detroit ranks ninth in total dollar volumes of exports. Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Indianapolis all rank in the top 20, the study states.
How does your city compare?
“Now …

The Atlantic magazine has a special section on ‘The Future of the City.’
There’s  lot of really interesting stuff here, from local currencies to Robert Moses.
-KG

I know. I know. We said these things were stupid. I’m not going to retract that statement.

However, for the sake of discussion, Portfolio has cataloged the “Top 100 Fun Cities” and there’s a few interesting items.

In their list, Chicago scores second, Minneapolis 10th, Detroit 14th, Syracuse and Rochester 15th and 16th, Cleveland comes in at 23 (just before Portland?!), Milwaukee is 25, Youngstown’s 28 and Buffalo’s 29.

So, as we’ve discussed, these things are all relative and Portfolio doesn’t provide a ton of information about their rating system.

I have recently returned to Cleveland after several years in the “Capitol of the Midwest,” Chicago. Chicago is filled with Midwesterners from all corners, and those who have committed to living there have a mixture of disdain, pity, and guilty longing for the places they left behind. The opinion they expressed was that leaving Chicago for a smaller Midwestern city would stifle career ambitions and deprive one of big city amenities. All they saw outside Chicagoland was corn fields and closed factories. In a discussion of urban development, one economist (originally from upstate NY) asserted, “Detroit and Cleveland no longer have an economic reason for being.” When I told people in Chicago that I planned to return to Cleveland, most looked dejected and some said, “I’m sorry.”

Carol Coletta has an awesome post up at GOOD. I’ve been skeptical of the concept of ‘regionalism’ for quite a while. For all the hype, all I’ve seen around me in Cleveland is suburban development at the expensive of the central city, Coletta provides some much needed clarity

Regionalism can be relatively easy to impose in regions with big, dominant core cities, such as New York and Chicago. In those regions, everyone knows what’s powering the economic engine, and no one can risk killing it off. The dominant city is favored, as it should be, in regional decisions because it’s in everyone’s clear interest to do so…

But in those regions with cities of equal size

Angie and Kate have posted about the Great Lakes Urban Exchange’s “I Will Stay If …” campaign a few times here; and as I was leafing through some of their photos recently, I noticed a number of references to bicycle unfriendliness of some of the Rust Belt cities.

With the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey data now available, I took a look at what the numbers look like throughout the Rust Belt. I should note that I used only core-city geography data, so the comparisons are not completely fair, given the arbitrary nature of political boundaries, but I think they are reasonable enough for this sake of this comparison.

David Frum of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has written an interesting (albeit pessimistic) account of what went wrong in Detroit (everyone’s favorite topic).

In his National Post article “What Killed Detroit,” Frum argues that poisonous race relations and an insufficient commitment to arts and culture sealed the city’s fate long before the auto giants crumbled.

“The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer?,” he wonders. “The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?”

After spending a few days in Chicago and Milwaukee recently, I noticed how great a job both these cities do of utilizing their lakefront.
In both Chi-town and Milwaukee (pictured above) people have tons of direct access to Lake Michigan: miles of beautiful lakefront parks and trails for biking, walking, or just general enjoyment of the water.
It especially made me notice how poor a job Cleveland does at utilizing a similar space.
What’s on Cleveland’s lakefront? There is the beautiful Edgewater Park, but there’s also a power plant, highway, the shipping port, …

How freakin’ cool this is?

You are looking at the new observation deck on the 103rd floor of Chicago’s Sears Tower, which recently underwent renovations.
This is the view:

The balconies, more than 1,300 feet in the air, open to the public today.
More here.

The Wall Street Journal is carrying a story about growth in many big cities since the last census.
The paper reports the recession is having a chilling effect on suburban sprawl. Researchers also predict migration to the Sun Belt is cooling.
Philadelphia, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio are among the big winners.

Detroit and Cleveland, not so much.
“Cities are showing a continued vitality as hubs of activity even as some suburban and exurban areas go through tough times,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It emphasizes the …