William Fulton - Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate

BY RICK COLE

Ages ago, Saint Augustine juxtaposed the City of God and the City of Man. For the past forty years, Bill Fulton has been striving to reconcile the two.

The heavenly city exists only as an ideal. The patron saint of contemporary urbanism, Jane Jacobs, described the earthly city as organized complexity. Real cities are vibrant, gritty, and dynamic. In a series of widely influential books and articles, Fulton has evaluated city planning theories by analyzing how they actually work in practice. This new collection of essays and case studies lays bare the convergence of place and prosperityand the divergence between popular nostrums of economic development and the way real people inhabit real places.

As we now understand, starting in the middle of the twentieth century, Americas most powerful city makers tried to impose a rigid overlay on cities all across the United States. Their formula was diagrammatic, sterile, and static. They nearly killed cities with their barbaric urban renewal. Their plans and policies relegated racial minorities to increasingly impoverished ghettoes and replaced human scale with automobile domination. Their misguided schemes coincided with a tectonic shiftof capital investment to the suburbs and the hollowing out of Americas industrial base.

Fulton stepped into this bleak landscape with the fresh lens of a young journalist raised in an old-school industrial town. He spent the next four decades analyzing what went wrong in our cities and reporting on the increasingly robust stirrings of an authentic urban renaissance. This book is both Fultons Bildungsromantracing the arc of his intellectual developmentand the chronicle of the great urban comeback of Americas cities.

Starting as a fiercely independent cub reporter, Fulton is the only urban thinker of our time who combines the sharp eye of a journalist, the objective rigor of an academic, and the practical experience of a leader. As he notes, his writing has always been anchored by the complementary poles of place and prosperity.

It is possible for poor places to have beauty and prosperous places to be ugly, but as Fulton repeatedly observes, enduring prosperity is rooted in attractive places. Businessesno matter how successfuland industriesno matter how dominantrise and fall. As Herbert Steins Law of Economics bluntly puts it: Things that cant go on forever, dont. If cities are to be sustained beyond the life cycle of their current economic drivers, they cannot neglect a strategic focus on the always emerging future. As he notes in his introduction, The most relevant economic development question is not What business are you attracting? but rather What do you have left the day after the business leaves?

Thats taking the long view and the high road. It reflects the foundations of Fultons worldview, which might best be described as visionary pragmatism. The essence of Fultonism emerged not only from his reporting and academic work, but also from his long years in public service. He served as a planning commissioner for the newly incorporated City of West Hollywood when the municipality was finding its economic footing as a creative center of film, music, entertainment, and design ingreater Los Angeles. When he relocated to Ventura on the coast north of Los Angeles, he chaired the citizen panel that produced the Ventura Vision, a strategic guide for the city to move beyond a declining oil-based economy. He was persuaded to runsuccessfullyfor the city council and then went on to serve as mayor. Later, he would be tapped as San Diegos planning director. These leadership responsibilities taught him the stark limitations of armchair critics and their textbook theories.

No es lo mismo hablar de toros que estar en el redondel, goes the Mexican folk wisdom: talking about the bulls is not the same as being in the arena. Fultons time in the arena of public service sharpened his insights into how cities actually work.

As mayor of Ventura, he saw firsthand how free parking distorted the laws of supply and demand in the citys historic downtown. He had embraced the policy recommendations of his former professor at UCLA, Donald Shoup, who wrote the unlikely best seller The High Cost of Free Parking. Patiently, Mayor Fulton explained to downtown merchants and customers that installing parking meters on Main Street would eliminate the perceived parking shortage by shifting cost-conscious customers to the empty parking lots behind the storefronts. But academic theories failed to dissuade dissident local merchants and customers from pursuing a divisive recall effort to oust Fulton from office. Ultimately, the parking meters worked exactly as Fulton predicted, and the recall fizzlednot, however, without marking his mayorship with the dust and sweat and blood of