Untitled Document

Luncheon Keynote Address before the 6th Annual Cities of the Future Conference

By The Honorable William H. Hudnut III, Sacramento Convention Center Sacramento, California, Wednesday, December 8, 1999

Biography
William H. Hudnut III, senior resident fellow, holds the Urban Land Foundation/Joseph C. Canizaro Chair for Public Policy at the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to providing responsible leadership in the use of land. A former congressman and four-term mayor of Indianapolis, Hudnut established a national reputation for revitalizing his city and spearheaded the formation of a public/private sector partnership that led to Indianapolis's emergence during the 1980s as an entrepreneurial American City. Hudnut is past president of the National League of Cities and the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns. He is the recipient of many awards, including 11 honorary degrees; Princeton University's highest alumni honor, the Woodrow Wilson Award for public service; the Rosa Parks Award from the American Association for Affirmative Action; the Gibson Award from the Indiana American Institute of Architects; and the Distinguished Public Service Award from the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns. In 1988, Hudnut was named the "Nation's Best Mayor" by City and State magazine.

The Speech

(Introduction)
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. The answer to the question about "honorable?" I don't really know. I would imagine it's sort of like the tail on a pig, it doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the ham but it does improve the appearance. I spent 16 years as Mayor of the consolidated city of Indianapolis, which is what he is referring to. We call it Unigov, which is an acronym for Unified Government...and it is not true that the Mayor and the City Council work together as one homogeneous unit. As a matter of fact, I had difficulties. There were 29 members of the City Council. Just a little large as some of you know, I mean, Los Angeles only has 15. And I gave them all, back in the middle 1980's, a book by Peter Drucker called "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" in which he says that structuring this spirit of entrepreneurism into the public management system is probably the foremost political challenge of our assignment. I thought it was a good book, but I'll tell you the only thing they were interested in was how I paid for it. There is another speech in that subject. I paid for it with my own money out of some campaign contributions left over and I gave it to all of the 29 city councilmen, inscribed for each one of them. I think two of them read it. The other 27 had their mothers read it to them. They are a tough lot. When the boat came to America, I signed a telegram and asked if the Pope would come to Indianapolis and make all the members of the City Council cardinals, so I would only have to kiss their rings. Now I actually live in Washington, I escaped from there. Bill Grate gently glossed over the fact that I was only in Congress for two years. I discovered that so many people back home missed me that 51% of them voted for me to come back. I took that as quite a compliment. But as you are all aware, Washington is indeed the home of the largest adult daycare center in country. The only place where we can run 10 miles in a straight direction and still be at the scene of the crime. I hear that Will Rogers did the opposite in our country's Congress. Now enough of that.

You are here talking about technology and the future of cities and in this fast-moving, wired-up, linked-up, linked down, digitized, down-sized, decentralized, customized, post-industrial, post-suburban, electronically mediated, loosely knit borderless world of ours that has been created by the telecommunications and information technology revolution. All in the last 10 years pretty much. Seventy-two percent of our gross domestic product is attributable to new economy business. The Hudson Institute says that all that labor force growth from now until 2020 will be in this new economy area, taking retirements into account. Around the world the number of people serving an extra home win surge from 97 million this year to 240 million within four years. By 2001, all but 10% the work force will be telecommuters. The number of e-mail messages sent on an average day in the United States was 300 million in 1995 and it will hit 3.5 billion this year and 8 billion by the year 2002. E-commerce retail, which will total $18.2 billion this year, will rise to $108 billion by the year 2003. What does this mean for the cities? What are the implications of the information technology revolution for the cities, with the way in which we are moving so fast and prices in many respects are coming down and everything is being customized?

The Hudson Institute tells a story in their book on work force 2020. Let me just share it with you. From a near 65,000 in the late 1970's, chip density has reached 125 million transistors now. And soaring chip densities have been mirrored by cutting costs of data storage and computation. A 1975 model IBM mainframe computer could carry out 10 million instructions per second and cost about $10 million. By 1995, an ordinary desktop computer, employing a Pentium microprocessor, could compute nearly seven times that fast and cost only about $3000. In cost performance terms, the capital cost of performing one million instructions has dropped from one million dollars in 1975 to $45 in 1995, a decline of more than 99.99% in the span of just 20 years. Hudson's punch line is that the price of automobiles has dropped at a corresponding rate. A 1975, $100,000 Rolls Royce would have cost $4.50 in 1995. What do we make of this? What does all of this mean for this cities? What does the future hold for the city in a in a knowledge-based economy? What I would like to suggest in the time that we have at our disposal, mindful of Henry VIII and his comment to one of his six wives: 'Darling, I won't keep you too long, so don't worry."

I would like to suggest six things. Or put it this way: smart communities of the future will do six things. (1) Virus technology. (2) They will flatten out or democratize. (3) They will create a sense of place. (4) They will discover new neighbors. (5) They will govern better, and, (6) They will grow smart. Let's take each one of these in turn that we can.

Well, first of all I think that the successful city of the future will welcome third-age new technology and welcome the development initiatives that cater to that particular way. Now I don't want to minimize the traditional manufacturing backbone of our economy, but the times are changing. Witness that 72% figure I have already quoted you. I don't know how many of you have seen it but there is a wonderful commercial put out by some computer hardware company in Pittsburgh which begins by showing the old Pittsburgh with the belching flames and fire and smoke and all the rest of it coming out in the blast furnaces and the announcer says: "In the old Pittsburgh we made things that were strong and solid and durable." Then they switch to this company's high-tech product (a computer hardware-type operation) and he said "And in the new Pittsburgh we are making things strong and solid and durable and all this has been made possible by the transition to the new economy." The punch line of the commercial is that "Hey we are from Pittsburgh. That's how we make things here. In the industrial age and in the post-industrial age."

Listen to Business Week where a recent article suggests that a fortuitous conglomeration of resources will benefit the cities. It says the new economy needs talent and wiring, and a metropolis has both. Let me just take a minute and read to you a paragraph from this article because I think it states the case pretty well. "Written off as economic dinosaurs only recently, cities have rediscovered in the information age, many of the attributes that gave them a competitive advantage for centuries, at least as far back as the golden city states of Northern Italy during the Renaissance. Today big cities are developing into idea factories. They are integrating to generate the information, the conversations and the spontaneous innovations that are the life the knowledge-based economy. Knowledge-based industries such as the mass entertainment, communications and healthcare are increasingly moving to the cities. They depend on the advanced capital intents of information technologies located in geographically concentrated markets. They need access to the skilled workers, the customers, the partners, and the investors as well as universities and cultural institutions that are found in urban areas.

"Cities are about information and skills, so it should not be a surprise that cities are getting more valuable," says Edward Glazer, the economist at Harvard. And the Harvard Business School professor, whom we have all I think probably heard of, Michael Porter, adds "Cities are on line with the nature of modern competition with its emphasis on limiting information flow and innovation." In other words, it is quite conceivable to me that the new age in which we find ourselves is going to create a stunning opportunity for revival of the cities, which for a long time seemed to be languishing with more and more talk. Everything else went to the suburbs. We have to ask the question: Is it possible that the information age economy can breathe new life into our cities, despite the decentralization and de-urbanization resulting from that same economy?

The smart community of the future will play host to the knowledge-based industries. They will maximize opportunities for employment in that sector. That is where their economic development initiative is offbeat. There is no point in teaching people to do welding if all the welding could be done by robots. So where is the action going to be? It will be in services, such as finance, software consulting, training, education, medical and communications and information-driven transportation and manufacturing. That's where the action is going to be. And some cities will miss the boat. Not all will make this transition. But the wise ones will do there best to do it because as a reviewing professor in Georgia wrote in a recent article for The American Climbing Association, "the economic winners are cities that have made the transition from industrial economies to advanced service economies or have piggy-backed on high-tech industrial growth within their region, like this firm."

Point number two. Paralleling this agglomeration, and paradoxically, it seems to me, at the same time the cities seem to be benefiting from a convergence of their resources and the input from the new economy, they are going to he flattening out. They are experiencing de-urbanization. de-concentration, de-centralization. I think there are three implications to this. The first is that as a result of technology we do not have as much need to travel like we used to, so you are going to have the rise of telecommuters. I happen to think that the office is still important and I happen to think that I can not do my job as well from home as I can at the office where I have a good give-and-take with others and am surrounded by talented people who know a heck of a lot more about various things than I do. But you talk lots about those lone eagles...way up there, those entrepreneurs, those mobile entrepreneurs out on a mountaintop, doing all this stuff, all alone out in the woods.

A Chicago businessman said to me a couple of years ago that he was afraid that with his ability to telecommute he would become reluctant to come downtown to the office and a lot of people are going to be that way and pretty soon Chicago's business district, the CBD, is going to become the CSD. I asked him what's that and he said the Central Social District. It's where people come together for art and culture and entertainment and all the rest of it. But they are doing their business farther out. Well that might be. Orange County, California illustrates the flattening out effect that technology is having on urban America. It's become a multi-racial mini-world trade center. The jobs are right there in post-suburbia: biomedical, pharmaceutical, genetic engineering and chips for fax machines, all kinds of software, multimedia. That's what it is all about in Orange County: twenty-eight separate municipalities not really bound together by anything except maybe a county line that goes around them all. A flattened urban class may be the way of the future and the unfortunate result of that could be the erosion of communal commitment, leading to a feeling of place-lessness.

The second implication of the flattening out of the cities is that high-tech may be the salvation for America's smaller towns if they play it smart. Not just the big cities. Take Calloway, Nebraska. Anybody here ever heard of Calloway, Nebraska? I never had, and apparently not many of you have, maybe one or two, until I read a book by Robert Kaplan called "The Empire Wilderness," which is a good book. He writes for the Atlantic Monthly and I recommend the book to you. But in there he talks about the forward mirror of Calloway, Nebraska. Brian Gardner, who says and I quote, "We are using the Web to attract city people with progressive views to move here and telecommute. We are not the only small town doing that. Communities will fight for desirable immigrants via the Internet. The information superhighway is not a clich�.

"For towns like ours across American its salvation and the key" says Brian Gardner, "is to combine the appeal of rural life with the economic possibilities of urban areas." When I was up in Chicago, I had to be well informed that the smart communities, or whatever you called them back in October, I came across a statement by John Manning. The Minister of Industry in Canada, who gave a speech there. He talked about Grand Prairie, some little bitty town, 1750 miles as the crow flies away from Chicago, attracting potential developers and investors and new businesses and jobs in the global knowledge based economy because the thinking location had suddenly become less important than it used to be. He talked about Newfoundland: 250 centers, some of them remote outposts and outports being connected via the Memorial University's town medicine and educational network called Tetra, in operation since 1976. He said "Tetra is now one of the most sophisticated medical networks in North America", using state-of-the-art satellite technology, in Newfoundland. And he concludes, its not surprising that these communities and others across Canada and around the world are taking action; no matter whether the community is cosmopolitan or rural it can benefit enormously from technology to become smart.

The third implication of the flattening out of the cities is that, as Bill mentioned, and as you have already discussed some, a digital divide is being created and the challenge for public policy is to overcome it. This is the other side of the coin; the gap that has widened between the haves and the have-nots. It is the racial and the social and the political tensions that result from some people benefiting from the new economy and others remaining stuck in the old one. Kaplan suggests in the book that I mentioned, that the communications revolution is weakening America's national cohesion as post-urbanizers develop overseas relationships while loosening their bonds to poor people who live close by. And he talks about Kansas City, Kansas. He says that out there, like many other American metropolises, it's separating out in the economic and racial enclaves that have little in common with each other. The new economy types in Johnson County, Kansas, which is Kansas City, Kansas, just went to the old city in Missouri, that new place where the predominantly white high income and highly technology literate, relate more easily to kindred spirits around the globe than they do to their neighbors in the heart of the old Kansas City. He writes, "In a computer driven, knowledge-based world economy, educated Americans may have more in common with and ultimately more loyalty to their highly educated friends and counterparts in Europe, Latin America and Asia than they do with less-educated fellow Americans just a few miles away." Something to think about. You don't have to go all around the world to see this. You don't have to go to Kansas City, Kansas. I found it in my home state of Indiana. In the Ninth Congressional District of Indiana there is a high school with more computers inside its walls than IBM has in its headquarters. That's great, but in that same congressional district there is also a small town high school that doesn't have one computer in it. In the new economy of today, wages are robust, corporate profits seem to he incredibly healthy, investments are burgeoning and people are high with lots of wealth and commerce. But in the old economy, it's not that way. Their wages are stagnant, profits are weak, investment is flat and people are discouraged.

There is a new book out, maybe some of you have seen it, called Etopia," written by the Dean of the school of architecture and planning at MIT, William J Mitchel. In this book he warns of the peril, and I'm quoting, "that we might congeal further into introverted, affluent gated communities interspersed with black holes of disinvestment, neglect and poverty. The challenge we face is to close the gap." The challenge we face is to open the magic of digital literacy to every class of people and every income group. The smart city will become inclusive, New technology can increase grass roots democracy or it can invade our privacy. The smart city will allow itself to be democratized by the abundance of information that is becoming available through the technology that we all know about. Believing this can become a source of empowerment. In the recent past, spending a ton of money to package a political candidate like a beer ad on TV has been the mode, but the information revolution will serve as a great leveler. Cities will flatten out. The power structure's grip on information will be weakened. The old top command-and-obey managerial structures will break up. American voters, instead of being passive recipients of news and advertising from TV and national publications, will receive information from hundreds of competing sources like email lists, websites, chat rooms and all the rest of it. The power of the party, the political party is going to wane dramatically as we move towards more participatory democracy. Interactive media will let people talk back. The public will become more involved. Candidates will canvas voters in their homes. Electronic town hall meetings will be held. Citizens will question politicians in public forums. Neighborhoods will come back instantly to public safety and trash pick-up mid snow plowing departments when they are not happy. Voters will be casting their ballots on the Internet. Single-issue groups will he mobilizing their troops very fast. Direct democracy as in the communitarianism of the old America of the nineteenth century will reappear. So it's back to the future if you want to put it that way. The danger of course, is that the center will not hold. That public life will become fractionalized and splintered and the resulting loss of cohesion will have serious political and social consequences and we will lose hold of our ideals in our country of E Pluribus Unum (one out of many).

Now my guess is the smart community will be collaborative and inclusive. It will find in diversity a core of strength. It will practice the art of partnership and civic participation of the community-building process. It will utilize this new model of leadership that is emerging, the new model being one that brings people together, a facilitator, a communicator, a collaborator, a teacher, rather than the boss from the top down. I have got to move on.

(Point #3)
The smart city of the future will also focus on creating livable, beckoning, sustainable places: neighborhood cities for everyone. As a way to bridge this digital divide, it will become more inclusive by making more places, as Hustler said in one of his books, "creating more places that are worthy of our affections." One of the tragedies is that even though we may be moving together closer electronically, we can become, if we are not more careful, isolated socially. But smart communities of the future will create a strong, meaningful, attractive sense of place. There are two phenomena here that we have to deal with. First, the closet paradigm, and second, the problem of suburbanization.

The smart city will create a kind of high quality of life favorable with incentives, which you can read as low taxes if you want to. The high bandwidth access to the Internet will make its location attractive to the electronic companies that can operate from anywhere, from the their closets per say. These businesses don't need physical space. This is the new paradigm, the closet paradigm, we are beginning to hear about. They don't need physical space because they connect people electronically. They create economic activity and wealth from their closet as it were. Wherever that might be. I heard a rhetorical question asked in Syracuse, New York the other day when I was up there, "Why couldn't Amazon.com be founded in Syracuse?" And their answer was "Because we don't have low taxes. We don't have that capacity, that bandwidth capacity and we don't have the kind of quality of life that is becoming the main motivator of these decisions in the new economy. Quality of place becomes the paramount concern when both companies and workers can shop around for new locales. Nowadays people have far more choices. Sometimes we will use networks to avoid going places, but sometimes, still we will go places to network.

Another phenomenon, besides the closet paradigm that I think we have to struggle with, is the phenomenon of sprawl, of unlimited, persuasive, low-density housing farther and farther out to the point we are gobbling up 45.6 acres an hour of undeveloped land for development purposes. Suburbanization that is, if you want to put it that way. As the new century approaches, many Americans seem to be disturbed by the fruits of this relentless expansion of the suburban frontier. A year ago in November at the ballot box, there were over 240 initiatives to preserve open space or otherwise reshape and guide development, and two-thirds of them passed. Listen to Dr. Dalton W, Young, a psychologist specializing in adolescents. He works out of his office in Seattle and he has written, "what provides young people with strength and resilience against destructive influences is personal connections with family members, neighbors, teachers and other stable adults. Yet everything about the way our suburban towns are built discourages cohesion among families, neighbors and communities. The typical configurations of these towns, undermines the kind of connection that helped protect young people from risk. These suburbs have been built, not by design to meet the human needs of children and families, but by default to accommodate the demands for economic growth and more jobs and greater population and the allure of expanding tax spaces." And he suggests that the answer lies in providing the traditional American town with feelings of coherence and a sense of place, a town center with a public open space, local businesses and a place to gather. That's why the James Howard Kunstlers of this world are so important. And that's why the New Urbanites are so important and the Neo-Traditionalists are so important, because they are talking about reintegrating. housing and workplace, and shopping and recreation and forming compact, pedestrian friendly mixed-use neighborhoods linked by greenways and sidewalks and transit. And that's why there is a resurgence of Main St. And that's why down in Kindle, a South Florida suburb, a tiny little city, is now the hot spot of office buildings and malls, with parking lots, auto dealerships and a dingy canal. They are developing a 40-year plan to develop a European-flavored town center with romantic canals, sidewalk ways, tree-lined boulevards, trolleys, sidewalks and stylish condominiums and apartments, because they want to set some place as the center.

The center for urban policy research at Rutgers University says, "With the retirement of the baby boomers, we will see a demand for central places, the likes of which we have never seen before. We are going to get rid of our suburban housing and move into a village where urban life is setting." In other words, as Carol Brown of the EPA says, "People want a different future. They are not happy with what they have. They had this idea that the best way to keep people from spreading out all over the landscape is to give them a good reason for working and playing and shopping and living closer together." It's being done, it's being done in Portland, Oregon, It's being done in Silicon Valley. It's being done around the world. Stockholm is a great, beautiful European town of islands and winding streets and it's one of many cities in Europe that are Mecca for walkers and paragons. Now the fact of the matter is that compact development is hard to achieve politically because people are scared to death of density. But even though the new technology allows for a limitless decentralization unheard of in the infrastructure of the industrial age, workers in the economy thrive on proximity. On rubbing shoulders. On meeting and sharing. Read some of the literature these days and you will see how much attention is being paid to human resources, because that is their capital. Human capital is what they need more than anything else. This suggests a new role for urban neighborhoods and central cities because there is this trend beginning to develop back downtown. People are fed up with traffic congestion. They are fed up with the long commute and they are coming back downtown. The smart city of the future will hold the court because it understands that you can't be a seller of nothing. So I hope it is we go out in the 21st Century we will experience urban revitalization. Lewis Mumford said, "There were four great migrations in our history; Finding yourself, Development of farms and cities, Migration of parks to the urban areas, Decentralization in suburbia." Then you've got to add a fifth now which is beginning to form the return of the central city.

And who is leading it? Three groups of people. I like to call them the singles, the mingles and the jingles. The singles: the young entrepreneurs. These no-collar workers in their blue jeans and their T-shirts, with their laptops who can go anywhere and walk to downtown because that is where the action is, that's where the ballgame is played, that's where the arts and culture is, that's where the entertainment is; the restaurants, the bars and all the rest of them. The mingles: couples, basically childless couples, people living together either with or without benefit of clergy. Gay and lesbian couples want to be downtown and don't want to fight the commute and the traffic everyday. Then the jingles: they are the happy empty nesters, whose last kid has graduated from college and their dog has died and they can come hack downtown.

So, we have talked about the importance of smart cities creating a sense of place in this technological era in which we live in. And I've got to scoot along here.

The fourth point I want to make is that smart communities of the future will discover new neighbors. The information technology revolution has brought us all closer together. At the global level, we are living in a time of borderless trade. We are experiencing the death of distance. We are understanding that air cargo is very important. And then at the regional level, you see there is this new paradigm. It is not federal, state and local so much as it is global, regional and neighborhood. Information technology is obliterating 19th Century political jurisdictional lines. Making them obsolete, even though people want to hang on to them because they like their turf. And because most people in politics and most bureaucrats in government are self-protecting institutionalists who don't want to do what the mayor of Wichita, Kansas did and stand up and say "I'm willing to step aside in my job if you want to make the county executive the chief executive officer of the city and the county here so that we can have unified government like they have in Indianapolis." He was willing to do that. But that is the exception. There are so many crosscutting issues. There is land use planning, transportation planning, crime, drugs, environmental pollution and all of the rest of it. They cry out for cooperation across jurisdictional lines. The smart cities are recognizing the importance of collaboration. Not necessarily consolidation, but collaboration as it moves out into the 21st Century.

(Point #5)
I want to talk about harvesting high-tech, flattening out and creating a sense of place, discovering new neighbors and then again governing better. Cities are going to have to use the new technology and a lot of times it takes them awhile to catch up to this. But the Smart city will utilize the technologies to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. Electronic city halls with the motto of "online not inline" will be developed to make it easier for citizens to transact business with government. The Internet means that convenience has become king. That which is faster and easier and cheaper is better. Mail is an inconvenient function. Email is a very convenient function. Why stand in line at City Hall if you could arrange for a marriage license or a dog license or pay a parking ticket from a kiosk in a shopping mall? Or if you could process building permit application from your office PC. Or if Joe-Q citizen can engage in conversation with city officials about issues that you are worried about, like smart growth. Take a look at Rochester, New York's web page. Nice opportunity there for a 20-minute walk through Rochester's smart growth problems. Smart cities will be user friendly. They will know that you have got to innovate or you will vegetate.

And then one other thing about governing better. Cities with the help of states and feds are going to have to face up the fact that they are in danger of losing a lot of their tax base as a result of the information technology revolution, and they are going to have to collaborate with each other and with cities and states around the country to figure out how to solve this problem. The fact of the matter, my friends, is like it or not, tax base is being eroded in many, many cities by E-commerce because they are losing sales tax revenues. The National League of Cities estimates that municipal sales tax revenues sacrificed from non-taxation of Internet purchases will climb by the year the 2003 to an astounding $1.25 billion. What's the city going to do if local retailers aren't protected from unfair competition? What's the city going to do? What's the implication for its local revenue tax structure if you can buy two books on Amazon.com without paying a sales tax instead of at the local Barnes and Noble, brick-and-mortar bookstore where the sales tax would be collected? This is a problem that has to be dealt with. It's a very controversial problem presenting a heck of a challenge to everyone. But the national policy issue here, which has yet to be resolved, is to develop a new revenue structure that ensures that all transactions are subject to the same taxes regardless of how the transaction occurs. Not everybody agrees with that. Some people say don't tax the Internet. Others say do tax the Internet. I'm suggesting we have got to figure out what's fair and what's right and then hope we move in that direction.

(Point #6)
And then finally governing better and last grow smarter. How can we do things better? How can we do things smarter? It should prompt the question. If you know we are worried about how we can shop smarter and gain information smarter and trade securities smarter and exchange messages smarter and process work smarter and make travel arrangements smarter, how can we grow smarter? Our organization, the Urban Land Institute, is very interested in smart growth issues. It recognizes a problem because land use is growing a lot faster than the population. The populations of Chicago and Philadelphia increased five percent in 20 years while their developed land area increased by more than thirty percent. The Metropolitan Washington, DC area is consuming twenty acres every day. In Phoenix they are urbanizing at the rate of one acre per hour. The result is that over the course of the year, if you multiply out that 45.6 acres that I was talking about a few minutes ago, you are talking about 400,000 acres of farm land per year being consumed by development in the United States alone.

And there is more traffic congestion. Today twenty percent of household spending is for transportation and the average American spends 443 hours a year behind the wheel. This is the equivalent of 55, 8-hour working days--an almost unbelievable figure. Single working mothers drive most of all, averaging 75 minutes per day. Smart communities will learn to grow smarter. Smart growth is a way of mediating evils of air pollution, traffic congestion, visual blight and all the rest of them. We need a new paradigm for the development profession that maximizes value by creating qualitatively better communities rather than quantitatively larger or more numerous suburbs. There are lots of principles in smart growth and I don't have time to go into them in detail. But you have got to have a mix of land here. You've got to take advantage of compact building design. You've got to create housing opportunities and choices for a range of household types and family sizes and income levels. You've got to create pedestrian friendly neighborhoods. You've got to offer distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place. You've got to preserve open space and green space.

There's an architect in Philadelphia named Susan Maximum who says we have to learn to tread lightly upon the earth. There's an old Native American adage that says we do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." Smart growth will preserve open space. It will rebuild the old before it builds new. It will provide a variety of transportation choices. It will make development decisions predictable and cost effective and fair and encourage stakeholder participation. There's a town out near Tucson, have any of you heard of this town, Sivano, Arizona. It's a master-planned community using the principles of smart growth to achieve quality of life, environment and economic objectives. This design reflects the changing interests arid lifestyles of many home-buying consumers. There are 1125 acres and 2600 residential homes and apartments. There is one million square feet of commercial retail and light industrial space. Over half the population here and two-thirds of the jobs will be within a five- minute walk to the town center. Sivano has committed to setting aside over 30% of the development in permanently protected natural desert open space. It's completed a neighborhood center and a global solar facility. People like it. They are coming there in droves in buy those houses. Housing prices are skyrocketing. On opening day, they had 16,000 visitors and contracted an average of one home sale per day.

(Conclusion)
So we are going to have to learn to grow smarter. We are going to have to learn to govern better. We are going to have to learn to discover new neighbors and create a strong sense of place and democratize the operation and flatten out the city. That's what the smart cities are going to do. You know, right here we are standing in at the beginning of the 21st century in the new millennium. This ought to be a time for all of us to have hope and confidence and anticipation as we look far out into the future's broadening way and see what we can do to embrace the future as our friend. It may change our plans because we are in a time of tremendous transformation. This is a time true to the American spirit that talked about freedom from fear across the various different generations: freedom from fear of the future. Look at our great leaders, FDR and Churchill, people like that. They lacked a nervous fear that the way might prove too big or violent to navigate. We have got to be able to look forward with that type of confidence. Says Walter Lippmann, "We are at the beginning of an early struggle which will last for generations, a struggle to remake our civilization. It's not a good time for politicians and bureaucrats, but it is a time for dreamers, explorers and those willing to plant trees for their children to sit under."

Thank you very much.