My trip to Barcelona, Part II
As I mentioned earlier I got to tag along to Barcelona, Spain with my wife to attend a conference on regional planning. The Brookings Institute hosted a delegation who examined how the Catalans do it as well as hear from a number of distinguished and informative speakers. While I didn't go on the tours during the day when they visited entrepreneurial incubators, I still learned a lot. I got to do the tourist thang during the day.
Here are the problems that all US metropolitan areas, including my own Minneapolis/St. Paul, face:
- The US is no longer a small-town or rural country -- we're an urban country where the vast majority of people live in metropolitan areas.
- We suck at planning
- We suck at maintaining our infrastructure - we have the infrastructure of a 3rd world country.
- We don't make the transformative investments to prepare us for the future.
- Washington, DC is completely dysfunctional and is no longer capable of helping.
- The state of Minnesota is rapidly becoming dysfunctional and is no longer able to play a role.
We need to answer the following questions:
- How do we manage the growth of our metro area?
- How do we make our metro attractive to businesses and people?
- What transformative investments will foster entrepreneurialism?
We do not need better transit planning or urban planning or to educate our kids better, we need to do this all at once.
We need a workforce trained with the skills that the businesses and entrepreneurs need. We've been underfunding our education for a decade (at least) and fewer and fewer of our youth are graduating with the skills necessary for our economy.
The primary role of ciites (and now metro areas) is to make the economy and government services more efficient. Highway gridlock, a poorly educated workforce, fewer government services, lack of support for entrepreneurs are a few of the factors that make our metro area less attractive.
I got to hang out with some of the people from the Brookings Institute and other great thinkers who are trying to address the problems our metro areas face and help foster the kind of changes needed to thrive in the 21st century.
Next up: the latest thinking on how to transform not only the discussion but our actual metro area.