Citistates: How Urban America Can Prosper in a Competitive World.

• Author: Levine, Ruth

Reviewed by Ruth Levine, vice president of Fitch Investors Service, Inc., and former GFOA Executive Board member.

Citistates is timely reading for officials engaged in "reinventing" their governments. In this book, the authors develop and illustrate the view that the futures of cities and suburbs are intertwined. Their thesis is that, with the decline of the nation-state in the post-Cold War era, metropolitan areas are increasingly in competition with each other across international boundaries. In this new competitive environment, the suburbs increasingly will become identified with their urban cores. For this perception to be positive, and in order to maintain world-class competitive status, metropolitan areas must address economic and social challenges in a unified, regional manner.

The authors first identify the chief barriers U.S. citistates must vault to be competitive in the international economy: the "deep socioeconomic gulf between poor cities and affluent suburbs," physical sprawl and the inability to create "effective systems of coordinated governance." Central to the book are the in-depth analyses the authors prepared from 1987 to 1991 for the leading metropolitan newspapers in six regions of the country: Phoenix, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; Baltimore, Maryland; Owensboro-Daviess County, Kentucky; Dallas, Texas; and St. Paul, Minnesota. Also included are updates listing the communities' reactions to these original reports. Finally, the authors identify guideposts for citistate cohesiveness to enable American metropolitan areas to compete internationally. These guideposts include 1) recognizing the interdependence of the center city and the suburbs, 2) improving education and workforce preparedness, 3) encouraging both grassroots community organizations to address social issues and regionwide citizens' organizations to identify and work for the common good, 4) acknowledging that citistates will have increasingly multicultural populations and working to alleviate destructive racial and social tension, 5) improving land-use planning and 6) establishing some type of regional governance.

Citistates addresses itself to civic leaders and would-be leaders in their broadest definition. Emphasis is placed on the need to be continually developing and broadening the civic leadership cadre. The book's introductory and concluding chapters place the commonalities from the six case studies in an academic/theoretical context. The studies, which...