With all the recent interest in metropolitan regions as a unit of economic competitiveness (most prominently in the White House’s Regional Clusters of Innovation Initiative, but also its intellectual antecedents at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and the Science Progress project of the Center for American Progress), some readers might find interesting a database on metropolitan geographies that I have built from U.S. Census data. I am making it available free of charge here.
The database includes no demographic variables: it is purely a way to gain familiarity with how Census classifies the U.S. geography into metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. I built it because I realized I would need something like it in order to refresh my tbed program database (a project I will take on later this year), and I could find no sufficiently comprehensive and easy-to-use tool on the Census website. This is basically a sandbox of taxonomies to play in, to gain some quick insight into the way metropolitan regions are put together in the U.S.
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If you’ve ever wondered why some city governments elaborate their own greenhouse-gas-reduction strategies – when it might seem odd to spend scarce resources fighting a global problem in exchange for such minor potential improvements in local environmental quality – then you may find much useful insight from Joan Fitzgerald’s Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development
An urban planner at Northeastern University, Fitzgerald traces the reasoning that leads cities to conclude that they can extract economic- and job-development benefits by positioning themselves as leaders in the new “green” industry sectors. These are the industries that draw their economic relevance from the reality of long-term trends in energy pricing and from the moral commitment of sufficiently well-off populations to lead more sustainable lives.
This book systematically explores the crossover between four aspects of sustainability – renewable energy, energy efficiency, waste management, and transportation – and three economic-development strategies that Fitzgerald calls “linking” (connecting populations to new employment opportunities based); “transformational” (taking hard-hit local manufacturing industries into new markets); and “leapfrogging” (building entirely new technology clusters).
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