In our powerhouse days, cities like South Bend, Indiana, were unquestionably relevant, dynamic, and even fashionable. But now our city’s future — and that of the heartland around us — is uncertain. Once-proud neighborhoods are half-empty, and we recently found ourselves in an unwanted national spotlight when Newsweek included us on a list of ten “dying cities.” As the economy gravitates toward the coastal, the international, the speedy, the high-tech, and the cosmopolitan, it is clear that the major currency of our time is connectivity. So our fate may come down to this question: can a small city be global, too?
Hugging the banks of the St. Joseph River in Northern Indiana, this was a classically prosperous auto-making town in the interwar and World War II period. Now it looks like a classic case of struggle in the new global economy. More than 11,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1973. Massive, empty auto factories haunt the skyline, and the city has lost a quarter of its peak population. In the minds of most residents, this has everything to do with globalization. Walk into one of my favorite old neighborhood taverns on the industrial West Side, mention NAFTA, and watch the faces darken. Park a Toyota or Volkswagen at the United Auto Workers hall on South Michigan Street, and the union leadership will proudly have it towed. It’s the story of the rust belt: when the economy globalized, South Bend agonized.
The problem for a place like South Bend is that we can no more un-globalize the economy than we can un-ring a bell, which means that we must either find a way for working families in cities like ours to benefit from the accelerating forces of urbanism and modernity, or risk failure as a community. In a nation whose political tone is set largely by communities like ours, much depends on whether working families in small cities can play a more appealing role in the story of globalization than victimhood.
We can. My campaign to become mayor of South Bend stood on the premise that even a small Midwestern city like ours can thrive in a global economy, and indeed that we must begin to think of ourselves as a global city in order to regain the prosperity our streets and homes once knew. It will require new thinking, but we have no other choice.
There are more grounds for optimism than you might think. Recent research indicates small cities do have relevance in a shifting world economy and are poised to drive global economic growth. A McKinsey & Company study entitled “Urban World” estimates that cities between 150,000 and two million inhabitants will account for 19 percent of global GDP growth between 2007 and 2025 — nearly double the share attributable to “Megacities” of over 10 million. Moreover, the analysis suggests that a Midwestern location is no more of a disqualifier than size. Of the 13 global cities McKinsey expects to join the ranks of the Megacities by 2025 the only one located in the developed world is Chicago, 90 miles west of here. Today, Chicago ranks 6th on the “2010 Global Cities” index published in Foreign Policy, above the likes of Singapore, Zurich, and Dubai. This did not happen by accident. Chicago aggressively pursued a global economic strategy, making the most of O’Hare airport and international corporate relationships.
But what would it look like for a much smaller city to develop such a global agenda? We might begin by recognizing that our past tradition — that pre-1970s era that now rusts in the memories of the old-timers at my favorite diners and dive bars — is more global than we think. The “Global Cities” rankings take account of five criteria: business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and policy engagement. By many of these measures, the character of Middle American small cities like South Bend was global before global was cool.
Take cultural experience: originally founded by French fur traders whose countrymen would create the University of Notre Dame just up the hill, the city boomed as a center for auto manufacturing powered by the hands of immigrants. Downtown, two large Catholic churches still stand less than one block apart from each other — St. Patrick’s and St. Hedwig’s — because the 19th century population had enough Irish and Polish immigrants in one neighborhood that each group needed a full-scale parish to serve the community in its native language. It is not extraordinary for members of my father’s generation of South Bend residents to know Italian as a first language, and in my grandfather’s lifetime it would have been no more unusual to find a Hungarian-speaking baker near a Belgian grocer here than it is now in London to find a Lebanese-run shisha café around the corner from a pan-Asian noodle shop.
Or, look at business activity: the Studebaker Car Company, which dominated our local economy for most of the 20th century, thrived on an international value chain. The company’s production system fed cars partly built in South Bend through assembly facilities in Canada so that its vehicles could be sold with reduced tariffs to the British market. One of its most distinctive models, a 1924 car called the Light Six, was marketed in China with custom finishing produced by a joint venture with the Shanghai Horse and Bazaar Company.
Nor are these global characteristics strictly a thing of the past. Today, once-vacant church pews on the West Side are again filled with Catholic immigrant working families, now speaking not Eastern European dialects but Spanish: Mexican immigration accounts for our fastest-growing segment of the population. Factories on our city’s South Side employ scores of skilled metalworkers from the former Yugoslavia. Northern Indiana’s openness to refugees has further enriched our cultural character. One woman, escaped from Darfur, told a New York Times reporter of how her path to this region began when a man in a refugee camp in Chad told her, “If you get to America, call my cousin and he will help you in the Indiana.”
And it’s going both ways: right here in “The Indiana,” advanced manufacturers are finding new markets abroad for our most sophisticated products. Our days of competitively producing cheap goods are over, but local firms making products intensive in intellectual property or advanced processes are barely able to keep up with demand, including exports. Operating from a nondescript building across from a barbeque joint in the middle of our toughest neighborhood, one low-key company creates enormous machines that apply a patented welding process, and ships them to Brazil, India, and China. Walking me through the shop floor of his waffle-iron factory near the airport, a CEO cites Turkey as one of his biggest growth markets. And a maker of circuitry operating out of a refitted 19th-century building near the river can — and does — send finished products around the world within hours of receiving an order. If a community like South Bend can cultivate this kind of business, we will be as prosperous as we ever were in the days of ten-thousand-man behemoths like Studebaker — and much more diversified.
By reactivating a prior international tradition, tapping the cultural richness of our immigrant families, and seeing the economic potential of international markets for our advanced manufactured goods, cities like South Bend can create a new global future. But a major challenge stands between us and the full potential of an export-capable advanced manufacturing economy: education.
One thing I have consistently noticed about our most successful manufacturing businesses is that their sophisticated processes demand flexibility and intellect from line workers as well as managers. Visit a factory here, and you are much more likely to see a worker operating a million-dollar piece of equipment than using manual tools on raw materials. To remain competitive, we must double down on these advanced processes, and on the advanced problem-solving skills required to handle them. Better preparing our future workers is the biggest local step we can take toward international significance.
Yet education has largely been a weak point for the Midwest. All but two Midwestern states fall in the bottom half for college attainment, and cities like ours suffer grievously from “brain drain.” Business leaders in our strongest manufacturing firms repeatedly tell me that their biggest obstacle to growth is not taxes, not a down economy, but the challenge of recruiting adequately skilled employees — an upsetting thing to hear amid high unemployment.
Paradoxically, higher education also accounts for some of our finest assets. The Midwest boasts several of the world’s great state universities, and South Bend alone has five four-year colleges. Linking them to our economy, to our pre-college education — and to each other — is key to our economic survival. They are already the most global institutions on our local soil; why not better use their international connections to help identify new export markets for our products, engage their global alumni to seek out international investors ready to support local growth, or enlist their expertise to help identify and teach export-relevant skills in our school systems? Harnessed properly, our universities can be the key to global relevance by helping to build a bridge to the international economy.
Small cities like South Bend already have an international past, and a present with more global upside than many realize. Whether our future makes the most of these elements depends on leadership. Both here and around the world, leaders must have a big enough imagination to see what it means for a small community to be a global city. Our survival depends on it.
At 29 years old Pete Buttigieg is America's youngest mayor of a city the size of South Bend or larger. Mayor Buttigieg holds degrees from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard College, where he was student president of the Institute of Politics and led the Institute's annual study of youth attitudes on politics. Pete was the Democratic nominee for Indiana State Treasurer in 2010 and is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
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Small Cities with a Global Past
January 15, 2012
In our powerhouse days, cities like South Bend, Indiana, were unquestionably relevant, dynamic, and even fashionable. But now our city’s future — and that of the heartland around us — is uncertain. Once-proud neighborhoods are half-empty, and we recently found ourselves in an unwanted national spotlight when Newsweek included us on a list of ten “dying cities.” As the economy gravitates toward the coastal, the international, the speedy, the high-tech, and the cosmopolitan, it is clear that the major currency of our time is connectivity. So our fate may come down to this question: can a small city be global, too?
Hugging the banks of the St. Joseph River in Northern Indiana, this was a classically prosperous auto-making town in the interwar and World War II period. Now it looks like a classic case of struggle in the new global economy. More than 11,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1973. Massive, empty auto factories haunt the skyline, and the city has lost a quarter of its peak population. In the minds of most residents, this has everything to do with globalization. Walk into one of my favorite old neighborhood taverns on the industrial West Side, mention NAFTA, and watch the faces darken. Park a Toyota or Volkswagen at the United Auto Workers hall on South Michigan Street, and the union leadership will proudly have it towed. It’s the story of the rust belt: when the economy globalized, South Bend agonized.
The problem for a place like South Bend is that we can no more un-globalize the economy than we can un-ring a bell, which means that we must either find a way for working families in cities like ours to benefit from the accelerating forces of urbanism and modernity, or risk failure as a community. In a nation whose political tone is set largely by communities like ours, much depends on whether working families in small cities can play a more appealing role in the story of globalization than victimhood.
We can. My campaign to become mayor of South Bend stood on the premise that even a small Midwestern city like ours can thrive in a global economy, and indeed that we must begin to think of ourselves as a global city in order to regain the prosperity our streets and homes once knew. It will require new thinking, but we have no other choice.
There are more grounds for optimism than you might think. Recent research indicates small cities do have relevance in a shifting world economy and are poised to drive global economic growth. A McKinsey & Company study entitled “Urban World” estimates that cities between 150,000 and two million inhabitants will account for 19 percent of global GDP growth between 2007 and 2025 — nearly double the share attributable to “Megacities” of over 10 million. Moreover, the analysis suggests that a Midwestern location is no more of a disqualifier than size. Of the 13 global cities McKinsey expects to join the ranks of the Megacities by 2025 the only one located in the developed world is Chicago, 90 miles west of here. Today, Chicago ranks 6th on the “2010 Global Cities” index published in Foreign Policy, above the likes of Singapore, Zurich, and Dubai. This did not happen by accident. Chicago aggressively pursued a global economic strategy, making the most of O’Hare airport and international corporate relationships.
But what would it look like for a much smaller city to develop such a global agenda? We might begin by recognizing that our past tradition — that pre-1970s era that now rusts in the memories of the old-timers at my favorite diners and dive bars — is more global than we think. The “Global Cities” rankings take account of five criteria: business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and policy engagement. By many of these measures, the character of Middle American small cities like South Bend was global before global was cool.
Take cultural experience: originally founded by French fur traders whose countrymen would create the University of Notre Dame just up the hill, the city boomed as a center for auto manufacturing powered by the hands of immigrants. Downtown, two large Catholic churches still stand less than one block apart from each other — St. Patrick’s and St. Hedwig’s — because the 19th century population had enough Irish and Polish immigrants in one neighborhood that each group needed a full-scale parish to serve the community in its native language. It is not extraordinary for members of my father’s generation of South Bend residents to know Italian as a first language, and in my grandfather’s lifetime it would have been no more unusual to find a Hungarian-speaking baker near a Belgian grocer here than it is now in London to find a Lebanese-run shisha café around the corner from a pan-Asian noodle shop.
Or, look at business activity: the Studebaker Car Company, which dominated our local economy for most of the 20th century, thrived on an international value chain. The company’s production system fed cars partly built in South Bend through assembly facilities in Canada so that its vehicles could be sold with reduced tariffs to the British market. One of its most distinctive models, a 1924 car called the Light Six, was marketed in China with custom finishing produced by a joint venture with the Shanghai Horse and Bazaar Company.
Nor are these global characteristics strictly a thing of the past. Today, once-vacant church pews on the West Side are again filled with Catholic immigrant working families, now speaking not Eastern European dialects but Spanish: Mexican immigration accounts for our fastest-growing segment of the population. Factories on our city’s South Side employ scores of skilled metalworkers from the former Yugoslavia. Northern Indiana’s openness to refugees has further enriched our cultural character. One woman, escaped from Darfur, told a New York Times reporter of how her path to this region began when a man in a refugee camp in Chad told her, “If you get to America, call my cousin and he will help you in the Indiana.”
And it’s going both ways: right here in “The Indiana,” advanced manufacturers are finding new markets abroad for our most sophisticated products. Our days of competitively producing cheap goods are over, but local firms making products intensive in intellectual property or advanced processes are barely able to keep up with demand, including exports. Operating from a nondescript building across from a barbeque joint in the middle of our toughest neighborhood, one low-key company creates enormous machines that apply a patented welding process, and ships them to Brazil, India, and China. Walking me through the shop floor of his waffle-iron factory near the airport, a CEO cites Turkey as one of his biggest growth markets. And a maker of circuitry operating out of a refitted 19th-century building near the river can — and does — send finished products around the world within hours of receiving an order. If a community like South Bend can cultivate this kind of business, we will be as prosperous as we ever were in the days of ten-thousand-man behemoths like Studebaker — and much more diversified.
By reactivating a prior international tradition, tapping the cultural richness of our immigrant families, and seeing the economic potential of international markets for our advanced manufactured goods, cities like South Bend can create a new global future. But a major challenge stands between us and the full potential of an export-capable advanced manufacturing economy: education.
One thing I have consistently noticed about our most successful manufacturing businesses is that their sophisticated processes demand flexibility and intellect from line workers as well as managers. Visit a factory here, and you are much more likely to see a worker operating a million-dollar piece of equipment than using manual tools on raw materials. To remain competitive, we must double down on these advanced processes, and on the advanced problem-solving skills required to handle them. Better preparing our future workers is the biggest local step we can take toward international significance.
Yet education has largely been a weak point for the Midwest. All but two Midwestern states fall in the bottom half for college attainment, and cities like ours suffer grievously from “brain drain.” Business leaders in our strongest manufacturing firms repeatedly tell me that their biggest obstacle to growth is not taxes, not a down economy, but the challenge of recruiting adequately skilled employees — an upsetting thing to hear amid high unemployment.
Paradoxically, higher education also accounts for some of our finest assets. The Midwest boasts several of the world’s great state universities, and South Bend alone has five four-year colleges. Linking them to our economy, to our pre-college education — and to each other — is key to our economic survival. They are already the most global institutions on our local soil; why not better use their international connections to help identify new export markets for our products, engage their global alumni to seek out international investors ready to support local growth, or enlist their expertise to help identify and teach export-relevant skills in our school systems? Harnessed properly, our universities can be the key to global relevance by helping to build a bridge to the international economy.
Small cities like South Bend already have an international past, and a present with more global upside than many realize. Whether our future makes the most of these elements depends on leadership. Both here and around the world, leaders must have a big enough imagination to see what it means for a small community to be a global city. Our survival depends on it.
At 29 years old Pete Buttigieg is America's youngest mayor of a city the size of South Bend or larger. Mayor Buttigieg holds degrees from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard College, where he was student president of the Institute of Politics and led the Institute's annual study of youth attitudes on politics. Pete was the Democratic nominee for Indiana State Treasurer in 2010 and is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
