Detail, Daniel Chester French’s 1904 Bronze, “Labor Reading” - Pittsburgh (cc) Jim KuhnAaron Renn over on The Urbanophile has a good post on Cleveland. He explains the motivation behind publically-subsidized real estate development as the preferred economic development strategy.

In short, it’s good for the politicians; it’s good for the “transactional” business sectors that have survived and taken civic leadership - the lawyers, architects, advertisers, etc. The city leaders are no longer the newspaper magnates, nor the downtown department store owners, nor the local bank because of mergers and acquisitions. More money sustains more transactions sustains more of this sector.

Both the Columbus and Zanesville dailies I found on the way to Pittsburgh picked up the AP article on Cleveland’s waterfront planning. I found this a bit much:

“This is potentially one of the great waterfronts in the world,” said Stanton Eckstut, EE&K’s [Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut & Kuhn Architects of New York City] senior principal.

I’m dying for some context on this statement. At face value, it looks like client bait. That is, it justifies a great(er) expense on the planning, design, and even the public subsidy on the real estate development itself. Who would leave such “potential” behind?

Jane Jacobs might do so. Last week, I mentioned a bit about cataclysmic versus gradual money in a post about Robert McNamara. Aaron Renn hits a similar point near the end of his post:

With the current financial crisis, bigness, as a strategy, is out of favor for the moment. Also, the gimmicky financial transactions that underlie much of the crisis are calling the entire transactional model into question. There’s an increasing alarm at the precipitous decline of manufacturing, particularly the auto sector. And people are questioning whether we as a country can survive simply through services, or whether we need to revitalize the concept of the operational business and actually making things. Plus, real estate deals are tougher to get done because of tight credit, and it seems unlikely that the go-go days of recent years are coming back soon.

Money has its limitations. It cannot buy inherent success for cities where the conditions for inherent success are lacking and where the use of the money fails to supply them. Furthermore, money can only do harm where it destroys the conditions needed for inherent success. On the other hand, by helping to supply the requirements needed, money can help build inherent success in cities. Indeed, it is indispensable. “Gradual money and cataclysmic money,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p292)

You might try substituting the word “cities” with “developing countries.” It’s a stretch, but having my head in Death and Life while at the same time reading about the death of Robert McNamara, I couldn’t help but think about Jane Jacobs’ chapter on gradual and cataclysmic money as applied to his tenure at the World Bank.

Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing drastic changes. As an obverse of this behavior, cataclysmic money sends relatively few trickles into localities not treated to cataclysm. “Gradual money and cataclysmic money,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p293)

Google leads me to find little overlap between McNamara and Jacobs. They were contemporaries, both born in 1916. Still, I have no idea what one thought of the other, if there’s anything written at all. However, I know what Jacobs wrote about cataclysmic money in decrying the policies of urban renewal and slum clearance - decrying the destructive and diversionary power of mass money. It doesn’t take much work to see how this chapter might apply to the thousands of projects and billions of dollars loaned from the World Bank under McNamara.

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Yesterday, Forbes rolled out some archive articles on McNamara’s legacy, including an article published near the end of his tenure at the World Bank. The article told me about McNamara’s insatiable appetite for data, but also how difficult it became to benchmark non-traditional projects, such as population projects, that began during his tenure. I was rewarded at the end of this article with a quotation from one of McNamara’s World Bank associates:

The word ‘development’ affords almost unlimited scope for the broadening of activities. It can be defined to involve every facet of life, and that’s marvelous for empire-building. But we do need to set some pretty clear limits.

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Whether it’s the banking involved in mortgage lending that Jacobs writes about directly, or the World Bank, it is not the profit motive alone that directs the path of this money. There’s an expansive ideological framework, seen in the scope of the word “development” or the judgments made in the word “slum.” These abstract ideas behind how cities and developing nations work, with little understanding of operations on the ground, can lead these sums of money on a cataclysmic and destructive path.

Gradual money enjoys no such ideological vacuum - the subject of thousands of individual and independent decisions by actors often intimately involved in the consequences of their decisions. That is, development predates banking. Bartering and hoarding was necessary in the absence of credit.

Perhaps we’re near that point again: to be wise with potentially cataclysmic stimulus while finding opportunities for gradual money and the diverse and complex systems that can develop.

In response to recent moves to complete a part of Burnham’s 1909 Plan for Chicago, a Chicagoan called for smaller plans, which I posted about earlier this week.

Capital Crossroads Special Improvement District, right smack dab in the heart of downtown Columbus has commissioned a series of small plans. A local design firm has put together some great proposals. You can also read more in The Columbus Dispatch.

Together, the proposals could cost $5 million. That’s not bad, considering the cost of many infrastructure projects. However, some projects could cost as little as $4000. There’s no need to do them all at once. They can go gradual.

You can debate the merits of aesthetics-focused projects, but the approach is quite Jane Jacobs where she talks about “gradual” versus “cataclysmic” amounts of money. (I’ll cover that chapter once or twice this year.) It’s something to keep in mind as we await a not so gradual federal stimulus.

Do such little plans lack the ability to stir souls, as Daniel Burnham claimed? I’ve got proof of the opposite in the commentary on Columbus Underground. There’s quite a bit of enthusiasm for public art and bicycle parking. There are also some concerns:

It Looks better, but I don’t see this … attract more people Downtown after hours. For real change the city needs adopt new policies to discourage surface lots and empty buildings whose owners are sitting on them and not bothering to fix them up. ~”Columbusite”

Some of these small, gradual plans might not be the fixes needed in the long run, but they can’t damage downtown Columbus in the same way that cataclysmic amounts of urban renewal did. The land economics down there are still caught in the echo of that action.