(First posted in Dec. 2009)
Every morning I take a long bus ride west. I watch as the cityscape transforms outside my window: clean, vibrant streets with shops and cafes give way to a colorful immigrant neighborhoods where beautiful murals compensate for increasing grittiness. Shops become smaller, buildings less well-kept. A grand park unfolds, where statues and gardens hint of a former glory, even as last night’s bullet holes can be glimpsed on a bus stop that morning. Crossing the park, a border of dignified grey stones stands as the final frontier, a dividing line between a struggling but functioning community and a world where blight and crime overwhelms. From this line it is another twenty minutes before I reach my destination. Where I debark, at the border of Austin and West Garfield Park, is one of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods. It is a world where problems and obstacles threaten to overwhelm any proposed solutions.
The scope of need is so great that available resources seem comparably miniscule. The need for education, for formal economy and employment, for stability and safety, and for physical and psychological health is immense. Unfortunately, the pool of individuals and institutions willing to invest their human, fiscal, and logistical resources is thin. How can any institution, any government even, begin to unwind a massive and tangled ball of social problems? A few years ago I would have answered with reasonable certainty- this is the role of government, no other institution has the resources or the moral imperative to correct failing markets and aid broken communities. Many of these problems can, after all, be traced to misguided public policy and systemic inequality that government has instituted and only government can correct.
Recently, my view has become a bit more nuanced. I have always regarded advocates of decentralization rather skeptically. To me, calls for decentralization and “small government” have always registered as thinly veiled desire for deregulation, reduced taxes and social spending, and individual autonomy over societal responsibility. However, I am beginning to think there may be something to decentralization of a certain kind, and in certain circumstances.
The vibrancy of American civil society is truly astounding, and for better or worse, this sector has largely arisen to fill a void left by the federal government. While civil society lacks the resources and clout of the federal government, it also possesses a fine-grained understanding of the communities in which it operates. Its leaders are “from the block,” they understand community dynamics, and they see forces at work that may be invisible to a competent but distant legislator. This specialized knowledge, and the street credit claimed by indigenous organizations, is absolutely essential in solving deep social problems of crime, poverty, drugs, and reactionary culture. It is more than a battle for funding and resources- it is a battle for local hearts and minds.
I still believe in national leadership- I believe the federal government must set policy agendas, provide essential resources, and hold local actors accountable for progress and results. It is the only entity that can. However, it must step back and allow local actors and organizations to take the lead in devising and implementing solutions. A centralized approach to urban revitalization gave us the urban clearance and ghettoized projects of the 1950s and 60s- disasters from which many American cities are still recovering. The failure of past centralized policy approaches is not justification for an absentee federal government, but it does suggest the need for a more flexible one- one that can set the goals, demand outcomes, and hold the purse strings to ensure delivery.
President Obama’s renewed strategy for Afghanistan* is a departure from nation-building (or stabilizing) efforts of the past. It circumvents centralized power structures and instead empowers local actors. It calls upon Afghans to rebuild their own villages and lives with local leaders, rather than place their faith in a corrupt national regime. And if results don’t appear, neither do the funds. When I read the strategy I couldn’t help but smile, and wonder: during countless strategy sessions, security briefings, and intelligence reviews how often did our president reflect back on his time organizing Chicago’s South Side? As diverse as the world’s problems are, they can be astoundingly transferable. I can only hope that the same holds true for solutions.
An American City 