For Immediate Release: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Essays and Lessons From 30 Years in Politics and Government

Hi, and welcome to the Sun Shine Republic. I’m really glad you’re here.

This is “For Immediate Release,” my essays and stories of politics, government, and a little bit of life in between. They span 30 years, from Little Rock, Arkansas to Washington, D.C. to St. Petersburg, Florida. I’ll be sending it out to paid subscribers here on Substack over the coming days and weeks. I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription and check it out. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you very much. I couldn’t do this without you.

As always, thanks for reading.

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2014
St. Petersburg, Florida

“St. Petersburg will be a city of opportunity where the sun shines on all who come to live, work and play. We will be an innovative, creative and competitive community that honors our past while pursuing our future.”

There are those, like urban planner Alain Bertaud, who claim that it is a bad thing for a City to have a vision. Mr. Bertaud is a Fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management (the vision of which is to conduct “innovative applied research, working with cities to take on critical challenges in urban living.”¹). Previously, he served at the World Bank Group, “one of the world’s largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries” (and the vision of which is for “its five institutions [to] share a commitment to reducing poverty, increasing shared prosperity, and promoting sustainable development.”)²

In Mr. Bertaud’s book, “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities,” he says: 

“A mayor convinced of the necessity of having a vision to manage a city would feel less inclined to respond in a supportive way to the changes brought by the activities and innovations of the city’s population. A visionary mayor may feel compelled to impose her unique insights on the life of her Philistine citizens. A mayor with a vision needs to be followed, not questioned by people who lack one. Visionary leadership implies a top-down approach, in other words, but a city is mostly created from the bottom up.”³

This after he suggests the idea of mayors having a vision for their cities is Orwellian. 

It also comes after a line that stuck with me: “A city, after all, is entirely created by its citizens’ initiatives.”