In the year since President Barack Obama's election, the revitalization of the nation's cities and economy have emerged as key areas for federal action. Wednesday afternoon's panel called "President Obama and America's Cities" focused on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for urban America, as a group of four professors and local officials discussed job creation in the recession and Obama's approach to urban revitalization in front of a small audience at Brown/RISD Hillel.
"What we are trying to achieve in the city is jobs," said panelist Thomas Deller, director of Providence's Department of Planning and Development. The economic stimulus package passed this year by Congress primarily provided money for jobs, he said, adding that a bill currently in Congress could bring more people into the workforce through job creation.
Much still remains to be done to create employment opportunities in urban areas, said panelist Scott Lang, mayor of New Bedford, Mass. Unemployment is currently on the rise, he said, because the economic stimulus money "went through a filter." Consequently, cities worked to maintain jobs instead of gaining them, "not putting a dent in unemployment numbers," he said.
The bill currently in Congress "has to be directly correlated with how many people are put to work," Lang said. Job creation is central to improving the economy, and in turn, "the economy will dictate how much we get done in urban areas," he said.
Panelists also addressed the long-term policies Obama has laid out for urban growth and revitalization beyond the current recession. Obama is proposing improvement through collaboration between cities and their suburbs in a system of metropolitan partnership that does not currently exist, Deller said.
Such collaboration could result in a decrease in the "cost of local government," he said, but added that it "takes away from the attention that cities need."
But there is limited incentive for regions to work together as the plan outlines, said panelist Wilbur Rich, professor of political science at Wellesley College.
Rich emphasized that all urban policy decisions — especially plans to support job creation — must be examined in the context of "fast capitalism," a "global hyper-competition for production jobs."
The New Deal and the Great Society were "relevant for slow capitalism, not fast capitalism," he said. The Obama administration stresses "an uplift discourse for minority communities" in cities, a plan that is not adapted to the constraints of fast capitalism, he said. Policymakers must move away from plans meant for a system based on slow capitalism, he added, to deal effectively with urban problems.
Sam Wolfson '10 said he particularly enjoyed hearing Lang's point of view. "He was practical and to the point, and it was interesting to get on-the-ground perspective."
