Madison trip shows importance of attitudes
We learned a lot about Madison, but we also learned a lot about Lexington, each other and maybe ourselves.
About 260 Central Kentuckians spent three days last week on Commerce Lexington’s 70th annual Leadership Visit. Like many others I spoke with, I left Wisconsin’s capital city thinking the same thing I did last May when we left Austin, Texas.
Metro Lexington is a more beautiful place, with better year-round weather, than either of those cities. So why do they rank higher on national surveys of quality of life and economic vitality?
It’s not about the place so much as the attitudes of the people who live there.
Rebecca Ryan, a Madison-based consultant hired by Commerce Lexington to speak, succinctly described the challenge for any city that wants to succeed in the future: “How do we build a place that the next generation will be homesick for?”
Madison, like Austin, is a national magnet for next-generation talent. Lexington, by comparison, attracts less of it — and often has trouble keeping home-grown talent.
Lexington is a great place, and it is doing a lot of things right. As many people pointed out, it has made enormous progress, especially in the past few years.
But this is the real question: Are the cities Lexington competes with for talent making more progress?
Lexingtonians like to avoid controversy, and they can be polite to a fault. But those who went to Madison had some frank discussions about the civic traits that often can get in the way of progress in Lexington.
Like other Kentuckians, we are quick to criticize, find fault and run ourselves down. We often don’t recognize the good things about Lexington, or take personal responsibility for helping to solve problems. We like to talk and study but are slow to act. We don’t like change. We listen to outsiders, but ignore innovative people among us.
We don’t integrate our universities into the rest of the community as well as Madison and Austin do. We don’t value education — or educated people — as much as those cities do. We won’t embrace and celebrate our creative entrepreneurs as much as those cities do.
For example, while the Commerce Lexington group was in Madison, Alltech had 1,200 people from more than 70 countries in Lexington for a symposium on sustainable agriculture. Alltech is one of Kentucky’s most innovative companies, yet the only things most people here know about it are that it makes Kentucky Ale and is sponsoring the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.
Next year’s Commerce Lexington trip will be a first: a visit to Pittsburgh in conjunction with Greater Louisville Inc. The trip’s focus will be regional cooperation.
While everyone agreed that is a great idea, many also thought another approach is needed.
“It’s time to take a trip to Lexington to see all the things that we are doing,” said Urban County Councilman Jay McChord.
He also said different segments of the community should mix it up more: “We should create salad bowls, rather than salad bars where everything is kept separate.”
Some suggested retreats to regional assets such as Berea and Centre colleges, or a meeting in Lexington to follow up on ideas from past city visits and measure progress. Others suggested that Commerce Lexington promote local speaking opportunities for Lexington’s brightest minds in business and academia.
During the visit, Madison leaders spoke about their city’s environmental leadership and emerging technology companies. They talked about strong neighborhoods and citizen engagement. They discussed the value people there place on education and high-level academic research that will create the jobs of the future.
“This community is focused on solving problems,” said Police Chief Noble Wray.
One message came through loud and clear: It’s not about the place so much as the attitudes of the people who live there.
Lexington must do more to leverage its “social capital.” All of it.
Cities such as Madison and Austin are more open to people who are different. They value diversity and strive for inclusion. They are, the consultant Ryan said, places where “what’s your idea is more important than who’s your daddy.”
It was a point that had many of the Lexingtonians shaking their heads in agreement — especially the 20- and 30-somethings who kept saying, in so many words: Give us more reasons to stay in Lexington. Please.
Despite significant improvement in recent years, Lexington remains divided by race and class. Too many aspects of community life are as starkly black or white as the plank fences that surround our horse farms.
For example, many Lexingtonians do not welcome Latinos, even though the local economy would collapse without them. Gays and lesbians often feel shunned. Young people of all races complain they are not valued — or listened to.
How many white people attend the annual Roots & Heritage Festival? How many blacks and whites attend Festival Latino?
Dr. Michael Karpf, who came from Los Angeles in 2003 to become the University of Kentucky’s executive vice president for health affairs, said Lexington is more diverse than many people realize, but it doesn’t celebrate its diversity.
Karpf spends as much time as anyone trying to attract top talent to Lexington. He said the city must work harder to overcome stereotypes many outsiders have about Kentucky.
“We’ve got a bad history when it comes to diversity,” Mayor Jim Newberry said in his speech at the end of the trip. “It’s better. But I full well appreciate the fact we’ve got a lot of work that remains to be done.”
It is valuable to look to other successful cities for ideas and inspiration. But if Lexingtonians really want to compete for top talent, we also must look in the mirror.
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May 24th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Now that the there are no buildings on the “centre point” block, we have a clear view . . . of ideas that are not new.
In 1925, the Swiss/French architect/planner, “LeCorbusier’s” (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) proposal for
“ . . . 18 uniform 700-foot-high towers would have entailed the demolition of most of historic Paris north of the Seine save for a few monuments, some of which would be moved; the Place Vendome, which he liked as a symbol of order, would be kept. He was apparently quite unable to understand why the plan aroused such an outcry in the city council, where he was called a barbarian.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=zoDEf5__BM8C&pg=PA222&lpg=PA222&dq=lecorbusier+north+of+seine+barbarian&source=bl&ots=9W4FO7t9W_&sig=y7Nuiy8zNF4F6edld1BtD34Ymrg&hl=en&ei=yH0ZSoS_CInuMtCArZcP&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2
In the United States his ideas were taken up with fervor, decades later even here in Lexington, Kentucky, from the 1970’s, and continuing until today.
What we see, looking across the centre point site today, is our legacy.
We see, that Lexington once was a city with taste.
There remain buildings surrounding the block that were built with skill, and elegance.
Most of these though remain both underutilized and poorly maintained. Is this connected with our belief (do we have this belief?) that anything from the past is better neglected and swept away?
The other half of what we see is the other half of the actualization of this idea. The first is that we neglect and abandon; the second is that we destroy and then rebuild, but with over-sized replacements, devoid of anything that would make them noteworthy, other than their banality, which in turn reflects ours.
And because they are oversized, they reinforce again the first trend: the neglect and abandonment of the other buildings nearby that otherwise would have received continued periodic investment, habitation, and use.
Are there irreconcilable differences in Lexington?
Yes, I suppose I agree with you.
What we saw last year in Lexington was “one side” that asked that the high rise project be modified to include “some” of the existing buildings on the block (there were 3 or 4 that could easily have been justified).
This “side” advocated that the high rise tower project indeed move forward, but that it be designed to include on the same block a few of the buildings that were meaningful to Lexington.
The “other side” had no interest in that, took out its hammer, and destroyed everything in sight.
Yes, that is a clear difference.
One can hope that this brings to an end the application of such attitudes in Lexington.
The good news is, the 20th century is over; so we don’t need to be “modern” anymore (if modern means “Corbusien”).
Let us return to a more sensible, vibrant approach to development and the habitation of our city, with patience, and a desire to understand, and do no harm to, the complex web of intertwined and mutually formative components that make the city vital.