5 Big Ideas for Cleveland's Future
Election-Year Speculations on Re-making the City
CUDC Quarterly, 2:1 - Fall, 2001

At the turn of the 21st Century, it is very tempting to compare Cleveland with its alter-ego of a century ago. Then, the city was one of the nation’s major centers of industrial growth and technological innovation, and the city’s elite felt that Cleveland had "arrived". Their enormous confidence and their willingness to invest in big ideas gave the city many of its most treasured institutions and amenities.

The point of the comparison, of course, is not to suggest that we return to the civic culture of the nineteenth century capitalists. The downside of their heroic visions was often a wealth of pollution and human misery, and it took the efforts of numerous  social reformers and labor organizations (also people with big ideas) to begin to redress those problems. What is instructive about the first decades of the last century is that Cleveland’s leadership was able to seize so many of the opportunities presented by rapid change. The contrast with the last few decades is pretty striking. During another period of rapid economic change, Cleveland has responded with a marked absence of big ideas, an absence often masked by a vapid, defensive civic boosterism. Yes, the city is shrinking this time around (not growing as it was a hundred years ago), but that is all the more reason for thinking big now. After all, there’s plenty of room in Cleveland for major growth in population and commerce, for a radical reversal of the negative trends of the last four decades.

What constitutes a Big Idea for Cleveland at this juncture? Probably not a new University Circle or a new Group Plan, but those projects of the last century point to an important characteristic of a good Big Idea. They were civic projects in the sense that they helped form the image of the city. In particular, the institutions that eventually formed University Circle re-defined what Cleveland was in ways that still matter, turning a messy industrial town into a center of culture and education. This changed both the city’s reputation and the lives of its residents. The success of that initiative means that simply adding to the city’s stock of public facilities—a new convention center here, a new stadium there, a poorly sited auto museum on the lakefront—wouldn’t constitute a Big Idea now. Rearranging the city’s institutional furniture (or re-upholstering it) may be desirable, but it won’t really change what Cleveland means, or make it a place that’s poised to change for the better in the future.

The Big Ideas this time around have to be more systemic and less monumental. In the old economy, people went where money was being made, regardless of the surrounding squallor, and the surplus was spent on grand investments that would redeem it all. Now the name of the game is quality of life, creating an urban environment that attracts a growing base of residents with high potential for innovation and earning. Here, then, are five Big Ideas that would help attract those residents, the businesses that need them, and the wealth they would generate together.

BIG IDEA #1
The Cuyahoga Valley — This one should come as no surprise to regular readers of the Quarterly, but we could never overstate its importance. The UDC’s work in Cleveland’s neighborhoods re-emphasizes every day that making the Valley an accessible amenity for the city’s residential districts is just as critical as the connected issue of reclaiming the lakefront. Among the progressive big ideas of the last century was the creation of a perimeter of park lands (the Metroparks) in the river valleys to the east and west of the core. No one then could have imagined that the Cuyahoga Valley–grossly polluted and intensively used by industry–could one day become a component of that system, but we certainly can see the possibility now. That’s why a number of collaborative organizations–led by Ohio Canal Corridor–are working hard on this idea. The city’s recent committment to the concept of a Canal Basin Park is another encouraging sign. It’s time for a comprehensive approach to transforming the Valley. As Steven Litt noted in our last issue, nothing would do more to change Cleveland’s image as a rust-belt relic with a burning river.

BIG IDEA #2
World Class Parks — It goes without saying that the development of recreational and living spaces in the Valley has to be imaginative in working with the topography, historical artifacts and connections to uphill areas – all of which will require some world class design talent. These interventions, however, need to be developed in relation to improvements in existing neighborhood recreational and green spaces, as well as opportunities along the Lakefront. Here the design challenges are more conventional; the real problem is commitment. Northeast Ohio is nationally known for its regional park system, but the City of Cleveland itself is notably lacking in high quality neighborhood parks. The city needs to revamp its existing neighborhood parks and begin developing inventive "pocket parks", playgrounds and other green spaces that will catalyze new development. Serious dedication to refurbishment, maintenance, and improved community access would allow Cleveland’s greenspaces to perform two roles. First, they would become genuine amenities to surrounding communities and rallying points for them, rather than embarassing reminders of decline. Secondly, a serious committment to quality parks would be a highly visible statement of the city’s values, rather like the "quality of life" campaigns (cleaning up the subways et. al.) that helped turn around New York in the early years of the Giuliani administration.

BIG IDEA #3
Fostering the Arts — What do the arts have to do with urban design and development? Quite a bit, actually. The presence of a vibrant arts community is often one of the best early indicators of rebound in an urban neighborhood, and Cleveland has loads of the sort of cheap, flexible space that visual and performing artists look for. In addition, the region has a wealth of educational and cultural institutions that really ought to be complemented by a ferment of entrepeneurial, grassroots arts activities. That sort of activity attracts the kind of residents the city needs and creates new identities for neighborhoods within the city. (consider, for example, the role Cleveland Public Theater is playing in the area around the Detroit-West 65th intersection in the Detroit-Shoreway area.)

Although the recent live/work legislation was a step in the right direction, Cleveland is generally behind other cities in terms of arts policy. Much can be done by the non-profit sector, as in the role Cleveland Public Art has played in a number of projects mentioned elsewhere in this issue, and there is real potential for outreach activities from the region’s colleges and universities. But the City could play a bigger role to remove barriers to arts related uses and reward development initiatives that include a role for the arts.

BIG IDEA #4
Schools as Catalysts — There’s no way around it. The biggest barrier to growth in population and incomes in Cleveland is the state of the schools, and they will have to be the number one issue on the City’s agenda for years to come. This year, the voters took a major step toward saving the schools by approving what now looks to be a billion dollar capital investment in them. Simply providing safe, healthy, high quality schools is a huge challenge, but we have to ask for even more. An investment of this magnitude can and must have positive side effects for every Cleveland neighborhood. The schools,working with the city’s network of non-profits, can help provide local computing centers, lifelong and inter-generational learning opportunities, arts programming and neighborhood green spaces. (The Orchard Schoolyard project described on page 10 is an example of just this sort of collaboration.)

Achieving these things will require putting Cleveland on the cutting edge of school design and community engagement. While the trend in recent years has been to wall schools off from the community in the name of security, we’ll have to look at ways to achieve safety while opening schools to the community and achieving a sense of community ownership of them.

BIG IDEA #5
Radical Transit Oriented Development —Increased density around public transit routes, the basic principle of "transit oriented development," has been a planning mantra for so long that it’s tough to get very excited about it. However, Cleveland ought to get very excited about it, as it’s the best way to turn our problems to our advantage. We have an existing network of bus and rail lines that can’t sustain themselves because the city is so spread out and ridership is so low. We have generally very low property values and a shrinking population. Rather than scattering residential redevelopment in small pockets throughout this now over-sized geography, we need to focus redevelopment around key assets, like transit stations and neighborhood parks (see Big Idea #2). The good news is the land is cheap (particularly along the airport rapid line through the west side), and the city is so depopulated that large-scale, denser redevelopment wouldn’t disrupt things nearly as much as it might in another city. In addition, trends show that America’s elderly are ncreasingly interested in staying where they’ve spent their lives (instead of going to the sunbelt). A close-knit, walkable community with access to transit offers fantastic opportunities for this population.

Some experiments along these lines are currently underway. Transit-oriented development principles are key to the EcoVillage project of Detroit-Shoreway Community Development and EcoCity Cleveland, now being developed around the West 65th Street rapid stop. Early meetings have been held to discuss the UDC’s proposal for the area around the West Boulevard rapid stop in Cudell. But a real smart growth agenda for the city, a Big Idea agenda, would require bigger plans and a major government commitment to transit oriented development.

These are not new ideas, but they are truly BIG. Implementing them will be hard, slow and expensive, but they will make a greater difference to the quality of life in Cleveland than any number of flashy new "silver bullet" investments.

Illustrative sketch of the possibilities for transit-oriented development at the West 117th and Madison rapid station. In this case, as in many others, success will depend on collaboration between Cleveland and the inner-ring suburbs.