Books - Autonomy and Its Limits- The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley

Should cities do more than they do already?

by Stephen Eide (*) 

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley (Brookings Institution Press, 300 pp., $29.95)

The political scientist and Chicago alderman Charles Merriam (1874–1953) once proposed that American metropolitan regions secede from rural areas to form their own states. In The Metropolitan Revolution, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley don’t go quite that far, but they do champion metros as “the new sovereign.” Katz and Bradley believe that localities are capable of doing much more than they currently do and that expanding their policy portfolios would pay off for them and the country.

The authors point out that many of the country’s most serious policy challenges are already being addressed at the local level. For instance, Neighborhood Centers, a Houston-based, Texas-sized nonprofit, has developed a compelling model for immigrant assimilation on a massive scale. Portland, Oregon’s emergence as an international trade hub demonstrates the promise of American exports. A manufacturing revival may be under way in northeast Ohio, of all places, thanks to the efforts of private-sector networks led by local foundations. Katz and Bradley contend that these and other examples demonstrate that domestic policymaking in America is more effective when it’s locally directed. They have almost nothing good to say about federal and state governments, whose distance from conditions on the ground and emphasis on process over outcomes render them incapable of good policymaking. Worse, their rules and regulations stifle metros’ inventiveness.

To complete the metropolitan revolution, the authors believe, we must rethink federalism as a policymaking framework.

............

(*) Stephen Eide s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the report Defeating Fiscal Distress: A State Responsibility.

Read more: www.city-journal.org