Cities: No longer the problem, now the solution

IMAGINE IT'S a century ago, and automobiles - once rare sights on the roads - are becoming commonplace.

Communities are facing the challenge of creating new policies governing traffic and licensing of cars. They have to work together to do it and there is no road map to follow. Just as quickly, businesses are starting up to provide gasoline, which itself must be transported. The need for repairs spawns a need for mechanics, and training. And so on.

Now, in what may be the twilight of the American car industry, we face a similarly critical moment, says Mark Alan Hughes, Philadelphia's first-ever sustainability director. This time, the catalyst for new government policies and innovative new businesses is energy: the drive to decrease the use of traditional sources while finding new, cheaper ways to produce renewable fuel.

The coming changes present the same nearly blank drawing board to cities as the car once did - with huge opportunities, but few instructions about how to proceed.

And that makes this the Philadelphia region's moment. If we can seize it.

As reported in today's special "Rethinking Philadelphia" supplement, an alignment of economic and environmental forces, plus a new president, has turned what used to be considered liabilities for the Philadelphia region into potential assets:

Existing infrastructure makes us an obvious place to invest in public transportation. Existing mixed-use zoning, and the potential for more, allows residents to live, work and play without having to use their cars. In a delicious paradox, existing housing stock wastes so much energy, it provides a lucrative opportunity to realize substantial energy savings - and tradeable carbon credits - with relatively inexpensive improvements.

And the increased value of clean energy can provide the impetus for us to finally realize the promise of regionalism - to finally take it beyond nice-sounding intentions to collaborative decision-making on sound strategies.

If this feels like a sudden shift in fortunes, that's because it is. Less than a year ago, as prices at the pump approached their $4-a-gallon peak, many members of Congress still were resisting expenditures on Amtrak, and one of the political parties adopted as its slogan, "Drill, baby, drill." Many locations still saw low taxes and cheap labor as the major ways to attract business. Which left the Philadelphia region holding a losing hand.

By electing Barack Obama, Americans elected the nation's first urban president in a century. They voted for his vision that saving the environment not only didn't kill jobs, but it could create them. But even before Obama's focus on urban policy, local and state leaders had been looking forward.

Six years ago, the Keystone Research Center found that Pennsylvania's economic-development subsidies were adding to "job sprawl," which was in turn weakening the region. In an updated study, soon to be released, KRC found that the Rendell administration's "Keystone Principles," adopted in 2005, are providing a coherent strategy for targeting state funds to green, sustainable development.

In Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter's leadership has highlighted smart, environmentally sound planning, efforts that have largely been subsumed in the day-to-day (if necessary) haggling over budgets and taxes.

Reducing the cost of doing business remains important, but it's our legacy of housing and infrastructure - plus the vision to promote them as assets - that makes the Philadelphia region the place to be right now. *