Is this the time to rebuild New Orleans as a "city of the future" replete with broadband information highways, or perhaps a totally wireless, broadband infrastructure with community-wide portals for shopping, travel and tourism, and arts and culture? If so, then let our IT wants, needs, wishes and dreams be expansive and uninhibited.
Becoming a city of the future, however, requires acknowledgement of two critical but often overlooked, principles. First, deployment and use of IT is vital as a tool to transform everything about the way we live and work and play, and thus to ensure our personal and economic success in this new age. Second, and perhaps most importantly, little can or will be accomplished if agreement isn't reached upfront -- widespread citizen involvement and participation is essential.
Achieving broad-based ownership of any new idea is everyone's responsibility and to do so effectively and consistently requires creation of a new decision-making mechanism for the digital age. We simply cannot do the people's business any more by voting every four years or passing some referendum as it is put before us. We need somehow to change the democratic process or that democratic ideal of "the city" -- and the communality it engenders -- will atrophy and die.
Sandy Goodkin -- an old friend who for half a century has advised major developers and governments on how best to create walkable, livable, so-called planned communities that maximize citizen engagement and enjoyment while minimizing all the bad things that development usually entails -- was quite taken by the concept of the "city of the future," a high-tech Mecca first articulated by former San Diego mayor Susan Golding more than a decade ago.
Similar to Mayor Nagin with his call for widespread "collaboration," Golding formed a committee with community-wide representation including business, government and non-profit sectors, as well as average citizens, to help create a new model for our age. As her press release put it, San Diego would be the "first fiber-optic wired city." Not that fiber optics was necessarily the answer. It happened to be the technology du jour.
The committee examined in earnest the role such a wired infrastructure would mean to the city and concluded "that while cities of the past were built along railroads, waterways and interstate highways, cities of the future would definitely be built along broadband wired and wireless infrastructures connecting every home, office and school to every other throughout the region." Importantly, the committee in its own crude way began exploring what life, work and play might look like in a time when networked telecommunications systems -- remember this was before the Internet was commercialized -- would affect every sector of our economy and society.
Goodkin was skeptical however. He had observed and worked in local government for perhaps too long. While intrigued, he was well versed in the politics of city government, and said such a futuristic and laudable concept could only occur if it was "built on the moon," a place where nothing essentially exists and the politics would allow for the kind of change that for most cities -- then and now -- seems insurmountable.
New Orleans, however, is now such a place -- a wasteland where almost everything has been destroyed except the human will to rebuild and recreate a great, historic and cultural landmark. Fortunately, its future is also clearly the focus of our nation's most altruistic thinking.
Solving some of the city's most basic housing, water and transportation needs is critical as is finding a solution to the levees and the region's feeble eco-structure. So, too, is the plan for its economic future-as with all our cities in the wake of the globalization of the economy.
Key to the success of this effort is collaboration. Mayor Nagin is off to a noble start, but as with so many commissions and government committees, his too could end up as just so much "window-dressing." New Orleans must organize a "collaboratory" to create a bold new vision, a well-funded plan of action and a new decision-making mechanism to lead the effort and fight the bureaucratic tendency to shortcut this new-found democratic effort. At the heart of the "collaboratory" is recognition of the importance of cooperation, collaboration and consensus decision-making.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a wealthy French author and historian, first visited a very young America at the turn of the 18th Century. His 1835 treatise "Democracy In America," while not particularly well known in our popular culture, has become a bible for almost every American politician, for de Tocqueville helped explain America to the Old World of European aristocracy in decline. In the process, he helped America understand itself. What fascinated de Tocqueville was the absence of a class system. He wrote about a "general sense of equality" among people, and a freedom to think and act and speak as if "sovereignty" -- that elusive concept often attributed to nation-states -- indeed belonged not to the state, but to the people.
In The Jihad vs. McWorld, author Benjamin Barber describes the Jihad as "the bloody search for bloodlines" and McWorld as "the bloodless search for markets." What is missing, Barber argues, is the call for "the commonweal" -- the public good, the common goal at the heart of every free democratic society. "Our world and our lives," he said, "are caught between what William Butler Yeats called 'two eternities of race and soul, that of race reflecting our tribal past, that of soul anticipating the cosmopolitan future.'"
As we go about the business of reinventing our communities for the creative age, we must do so fully cognizant that one of the basic and unique things about our system, is that it is our freedoms, expressly provided by the Constitution, that enable us to enjoy such a robust information economy. It is also our tolerance for dissent and respect for the individual rights of the minority that have spawned generations of entrepreneurs and, collectively, provided the creative force that produces more books, movies, music, technology and software of every kind and quality now permeating the 21st Century global economy.
The opportunity to do the people's business in New Orleans in a way that will renew our faith in government, rekindle citizen interest and ownership in their communities, and prepare a region for meeting the challenges of globalization and the age of the Internet, represents a turning point for another great American Century.
John M. Eger, Van Deerlin Professor of Communications and Public Policy at San Diego State University, was Chair of San Diego's City of the Future Committee.
