The metropolitan moment

Obama is the first truly urban president in decades, maybe a century. When he goes on vacation, he doesn't clear brush or ride a mountain bike on remote trails. He plays basketball, the quintessential city game, and heads out to explore the restaurants, stores, schools and activities of his new home, Washington, D.C.

It's powerful symbolism, but it's backed with an actual metropolitan agenda, shaped in large part by Valerie Jarrett, one of the president's top advisers, a veteran of Chicago city government, and underscored by Vice President Joe Biden, once widely known as "the senator from Amtrak," so committed is he to taking and funding public transit. A new White House Office of Urban Affairs, led by a former Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrion, is charged with "connect[ing] the dots across the wide variety of issues that touch on metropolitan regions and their economics," as Governing Magazine put it.

And this metropolitan moment comes lubricated with lots of money. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the federal stimulus package) is already pouring $16 billion into Pennsylvania on projects that are "shovel-ready," physically and bureaucratically. The 2010 Obama budget includes hundreds of billions more in long-term investments in education, health and energy.

But there's a danger here. The point of a stimulus is to spend money fast, which means it must be administered through existing governmental infrastructure: different agencies - the slang term is "silos" - for roads, subways, housing, public parks and water supply, each with thousands of employees, thousands of eligibility requirements and thousands of regulations to follow, some that overlap and some that conflict. The "silo effect" means lots of wasted energy and resources and is as inadequate for solving 21st century problems as it was for dealing with those of the 20th.

The practice of "siloing" has significant effects locally, too. The region's government and business leaders have been gamely trying to champion the idea that the city and region must not be disconnected from each other but must solve problems collectively, and gain power by consolidating resources.

Now Mayor Michael Nutter, along with about a dozen suburban county commissioners, are renewing efforts to finally make it happen. With a new model for collaborative decision-making, the region will be poised to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities - and dollars - of this moment. Without it, Philadelphia will fall behind yet again, and may never catch up.

Whether we're ready or not, new government policies directed at reducing carbon emissions will radically change the way we do business. "Cap and trade" policies, granting credits for limiting emissions and creating a market for trading the credits, will be a powerful incentive for collaboration.

This section looks at some of these ideas - in transportation, energy, sustainability and planning - that people will be talking about and, we hope, acting on, in the coming months. This may be metropolitan Philadelphia's moment, but it's only a moment. It shouldn't be squandered. *