The Inner City Economic Summit: Identification of Assets and Burgeoning Opportunities

Earlier this month, ICIC convened a group of high-level corporate, nonprofit and civic leaders from across the U.S. to address challenges facing our inner city economies.  Yet as ICIC’s research has shown, our inner cities are also flush with assets. From a readily available workforce, to anchor institutions, to (in some cases) an abundance of land – unique assets in inner cities offer significant opportunities for job growth and prosperity. At the Inner City Economic Summit, we explored these opportunities.  

Through presentations and individual conversations, we were not only able to share ICIC’s own research, but we also learned from the 250+ attendees at the conference. Here are a few of the themes that seemed to boil to the top and really stuck with us:

• The debate about cluster-based economic development is over; it works.  This is where the key assets to economic development are, including our public services, universities, large firms and clusters (or groups of interrelated businesses). During a presentation by Harvard Business School professor and ICIC founder, Dr. Michael Porter explained that cluster-based economic development is a model that has proven successful in growing economies.  It’s time move on to the implementation phase, or the “how-to’s” of cluster-based economic development.  (For more information, watch Dr. Porter’s presentation here.)
   
• “Jobs anywhere” is not enough. Regional growth plans adopted by many of our metros often fail to include strategies for inner city economic development. Dr. Porter explains:
  
  Inner cities have a different rhythm. They have different drivers. Yes, if the regional economy grows, that’s a good thing. But there’s a very weak correlation between regional economic growth and inner city economic growth in terms of jobs…What this says is we have to have a regional strategy, and that’s critical, but if we care about equity, if we care about really tackling poverty in economically disadvantaged areas, we actually have to add an additional set of dimensions.
  
  In other words, regional growth doesn’t automatically lead to inner city growth and strategies developed to leverage regional assets and opportunities can overlook unique and valuable opportunities for inner city growth. By including inner city strategies throughout the regional planning process, regions can achieve economic growth and equity objectives. 
   
• Stagnation can arise from the supply side or the demand side; identifying existing roadblocks is critical for developing strategy.  For some cities and some clusters, economic development challenges arise from supply side conditions; in other cases, challenges can be traced to demand conditions.  Take urban manufacturing, for example.   In Detroit and the surrounding region, tens of thousands of highly-skilled manufacturing workers are currently unemployed.  To address this, the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation and dozens of other groups in and around Detroit are working to identify new markets for existing firms and workers.  The exact opposite is true in Chicago, where the demand for skilled manufacturing workers outpaces the supply. To address this, local organizations like the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Councilare are developing programs to train interested high school students for careers in manufacturing.
   
• Land-rich and land-constrained cities both offer promise for various economic development strategies. Land-rich cities tend to have lower population and income densities but also more and better quality available land. For a long time practitioners saw low density and excess land as a weakness. But as recent work by ICIC and its partners highlights, these features can be used to a city’s advantage.In a case study between Boston and Detroit’s food cluster, panelists were quick to point out that opportunities for jobs and entrepreneurship are very specific to locale. Boston, for instance, is a land-constrained city but remains a growth market in which the food cluster’s wholesale production, aggregation, distribution, retail and restaurants are strong. The institutional opportunities (think: Boston’s universities and hospitals) alone are enormous. Meanwhile, Detroit’s shrinking population has left it with an abundance of available land and buildings both of which can be used to leverage the growing food cluster (think, urban agriculture, food processing). As John Aram of Next Street Financial explained, “What’s exciting, about food in particular, is that both cities have tremendous assets…assets that can form the foundation of distinct, but also complementary cluster strategies moving forward.” 

Certainly, these are just a few of the many themes that resonated with us over the two day event. We were incredibly excited to hear the on-the-ground, practical examples of these themes being implemented in our cities. From land-rich Detroit’s use of available buildings for large-scale processing in clusters like food, to the city of Fort Wayne’s collaboration with private corporations to build six high-tech schools to train today’s students for the transformed manufacturing industry – there were a plethora of practical examples presented at the conference, leaving leaders with case studies to bring home to their home districts.

Were you at the conference? What were some of the main themes that you heard? Was there a particular case study that you found interesting?

For those who were unable to join us: do you have examples of the above themes to share with us? We’d love to hear about these models in action in your city.

BY Amanda Maher on October 19th, 2011

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