tumber and marrero 1.jpg
'Small, Gritty and Green' author Catherine Tumber and Holyoke Economic Development Director Marcos Marrero.
(Mary Serreze Photo)
-- The author of "
" told a Holyoke audience Monday night that the "urban virtues" of America's small cities have been ignored by planners and policy-makers over the past fifty years.
Catherine Tumber painted a dire picture of cities such as Rochester, New York; Youngstown, Ohio; and Springfield and Holyoke, saying manufacturing has been shipped overseas, that urban planners have destroyed neighborhoods, and that food systems have been taken over by "the commodity system."
Tumber, a visiting scholar at Northeastern's School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, is an academic fellow with the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or
. Her book, published by the
Press, is about the advantages small cities possess in transitioning to a green, low-carbon economy.
Tumber spoke to a crowd of about 60 at the
as part of an urban planning lecture series sponsored by the Conway School of Landscape Design, a graduate program with campuses in Conway and
.
Small cities were disproportionately affected by "the factors leading to the urban crisis of the 1960s" such as "urban renewal, urban disinvestment, and massive subsidies for suburbanization and highways," she said.
As for solutions, Tumber warned against knowledge-based economic development: "The idea that innovation is something that can work in large cities, so smaller cities should do it too ... I think that kind of thinking is really detrimental, not only to small cities but to the way we think about the structure of our economy."
Instead of pursuing a knowledge-based economy, small struggling cities should deploy "product and process innovation" that comes straight from the factory floor, said Tumber.
The professor said Holyoke and other such cities have "lost their educational infrastructure for training" and can prosper by manufacturing windmill parts and solar panels, through introducing "artisanal manufacturing," and bringing back agriculture.
"Throughout the years, unbridled mega-sensibility -- which is everywhere evident throughout the culture -- has chafed against the fundamentally conservative environmentalist principals on which I cut my intellectual teeth in the late seventies," said Tumber. "And that, in a nutshell, is that the human condition imposes moral, physical, political, personal, economic, and metaphysical limits to growth."
Holyoke Planning and Economic Development Director Marcos Marrero, sitting in on a panel discussion with Tumber at the end of her presentation, painted a more complex picture.
Marrero said manufacturing is not dead in Holyoke, but an important part of the city's economy. "Walk one block in any direction and you run into manufacturing," said Marrero. "We have flames flying, people bending metal, everything."
Marrero defended his push for economic development that relies upon innovation, saying the knowledge economy works hand-in-glove with the manufacturing economy.
"The city life, the knowledge economy, and manufacturing are not contradictory," said Marrero. "In fact, what our strategy is, is to make them one and the same." Marrero said cities have been centers of knowledge and innovation for thousands of years, and that's not about to change.
Responding to Tumber's claim that small cities lack "training infrastructure," Marrero said regional efforts are underway to train a new generation of workers in the area of precision manufacturing.
Machinists and other skilled workers in their fifties and sixties are set to retire, said Marrero, opening opportunities for young people willing to learn. "The biggest threat to manufacturing in Western Massachusetts is the lack of talent," he said. "It keeps people awake at night."
A crowd of about 60, many of them students at the Conway School, attended the lecture.
In response to an audience question about how to prevent gentrification, Tumber said the answer to that "hundred-million-dollar question" might be creating "urban land trusts controlled by the people who live there."
Marrero said it's not so simple, and that he hasn't seen evidence that gentrification is a big problem in Holyoke. The city suffers from a different problem, he said, where people in unstable communities move out as soon as they improve their socioeconomic condition.
Marrero said he was not willing to sacrifice quality of life to oppose gentrification. "We can't say we can't have nice things," he said. "Like good sidewalks or a good public library."
It's "way too simplistic" to label rising land values as gentrification, said Marrero. "If land values are going up, that's because people value living there," he said.
Marrero pointed to the city's push to redevelop vacant buildings as workforce housing, and other public spending to make the city more attractive.
The recent renovation of Veteran's Park represented a $1.4 million investment, "and that wasn't to bring a bunch of hipsters from Boston," said Marrero. "The Senior Center wasn't built to bring in a bunch of rich people from Northampton."
The Monday night talk was the first of four events planned by the Conway School of Landscape Design in the coming months. On April 27, Northampton-based planning consultant Joel Russell will team up with Lee Pouliot, acting city planner for Chicopee, for a presentation entitled "Getting Cities Right: Creating a public realm that serves everyone."
The talks are free and open to the public. The public lecture series focuses on issues relevant to small, post-industrial cities, said Conway School Director Paul Cawood Hellmund.