Last week I had the good fortune to travel to Washington D.C. to attend the Blueprint for American Prosperity, an event by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. The Blueprint was the culmination of significant research and several publications on how our metro areas are the economic engines of the American economy.

The timing of the event, or “Summit,” as it was called, was to advance an urban agenda for this year’s presidential election and the new congress and president in 2009. The core argument is our 100 largest metropolitan areas (cities and surrounding suburbs) contain 65 percent of our population, generate 75 percent of our GDP and consume just 12 percent of our land mass, so therefore we need policies that maximize the potential of metro areas. We are a metro nation, thus we need metro policy.

The Blueprint looks at four key areas: innovation, human capital, quality places and infrastructure. They recommend that the federal government be a partner in the process; cities cannot simply go it alone. Furthermore, the federal government must empower cities to innovate, utilize human capital, improve infrastructure and create quality places. And the federal government must measure results and maximize performance.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bruce Katz, who directs the Metropolitan Policy program at Brookings. He is bullish on the potential of this effort. He insists the federal government must be a good partner in empowering metro areas, but ultimately believes it is more of a bottoms up effort, and the metro areas with the best local, metro, public, private, corporate and non-profit leadership will benefit the most.

This is just the beginning. The Blueprint is a multiyear effort, and has the power to create legislatable change at the local, state and national level, supported by thorough research and all in the name of advancing American prosperity. I encourage you to go to the Brookings Metro Policy website and unearth some great information that may help you improve your metro area. Yes, it is all a bit wonky, but their work contains some fantastic maps, charts and statistics. There is a lot of work to do, and the work of the Brookings provides a solid foundation of research to affect change, especially in this important election year.

A recent tour of several public housing redevelopments in the city of Milwaukee opened my eyes to several lessons in good design, development and planning. The city of Milwaukee Department of City Development has made great strides in the past decade in terms of infill, good urban design and inner city redevelopment.

I was in Milwaukee mainly to focus on the Highland Gardens and Highland Homes project, a redevelopment of two aging and, in typical fashion of 1960s public housing, quite dreadful towers and rowhomes in to a new urbanism neighborhood of single-family homes and elderly/disabled public housing. A case study of this project can be found at the ULI Case Studies website.

Highland Homes and Highland Gardens are a HOPE VI project, and are great examples of the effectiveness of that program in terms of redeveloping housing and reinvigorating entire neighborhoods. Indeed, in a recent interview with Bruce Katz of the Brookings Metropolitan Program, he cited HOPE VI as one of the better federal programs for cities.

Highland Homes and Highland Gardens are also good examples of universal design. The Highland Gardens building is entirely accessible to residents in wheelchairs, with easily removable and interchangeable bath/showers and counters/cabinets to allow ease of use by residents.

Plus, Highland Gardens has one of the largest green roofs on a residential buidling in the midwest. Other redevelopments in the core are using other green features such as pervious pavers on streets. Chicago gets a lot of attention for HOPE VI and green initiatives, but keep your eye on their neighbor to the north, Milwaukee. Great things are happening.

It has been nearly one year since the 35W bridge collapse in my beloved Minneapolis, and in that time three major bridges across the Mississippi throughout Minnesota have been closed due to safety concerns. Luckily, those three bridge projects have been fast-tracked, and our state legislature has also bravely approved a gas and sales tax increase to put towards both maintenance of existing as well as new projects.

On a related note, a recent publication by the Urban Land Institute titled Infrastructure 2008 makes a compelling case that the United States needs to get its act together and improve its infrastructure overall. I couldn’t agree more. As I sit in a crowded Chicago O’Hare airport, it kind of hits home. Think of how many of these people could be on high speed rail headed to destinations of less than 500 miles? Me, for one.

I have written in the past about the really terrific Amtrak service between Chicago and Milwaukee (well, terrific by Amtrak standards - they could use hot coffee service). I should be on a high speed train home to Minneapolis now, rather than waiting for a bogged down airport to release me home. High speed rail throughout the Midwest, from Chicago to Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Detroit, St. Louis, etc., could alleviate a whole lot of pressure in air traffic, and actually have a nationwide impact.

And just last night I sat with friends in Chicago and learned that the high speed rail service from the new Block 37 development in the Loop to both O’Hare and Midway is underfunded and delayed, which only aggravates an already overloaded CTA. The CTA in general is quite a mess, around $6 billion in the hole just to restore tracks to good condition and eliminate slow zones. Ouch! The transit problems in Chicago are not unique to other American metro areas, either.

I rode Amtrak between Philadelphia and Washington DC last week. Acela service began a few years ago, and I considered taking it. But checking the timetable, I’d spend roughly twice the amount of money and wouldn’t get there much faster. That is because they bought the trains but never improved the trackage for the higher speed. That drives me nuts!

Yes we need to maintain our bridges, levees, dams, highways and airports. But we do need to find ways to fund better systems like high speed rail. I learned last week that the Maglev high-speed train was invented in America, but we have yet to use it anywhere in this country. I suspect funding and political will (they can be the same thing) are the culprits. We are clearly well-intended but need to find more ways to fund a better infrastructure to keep our cities and economy competitive. It is all linked together, just not very well, I’m afraid.

In May the Urban Land Institute published Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages. The book is a coffeetable-style journey through many of America’s recent suburban town centers. To browse the book, visit the ULI Bookstore here.

I am happy to say that I contributed two of the case studies that appear in the book. One is The Glen, in Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and the other is Crocker Park in Westlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.

Suburbs need town centers. They need places for people to gather, linger, live, work, and of course shop and dine. Ideally they are linked by transit to the rest of the metro area. The mixed use town centers featured in this ULI book, and numerous other town centers, are part of a trend across the country to provide new and exciting destinations as enclosed malls fall out of favor. The good news is these town centers are succeeding. They don’t necessarily have all the things I listed above, but they are attractive, well branded, well maintained and managed, and in many cases have become regional destinations.

A few things to remember about these new mixed-use town centers. They are very expensive to pull off, and often subsidized, which is not a bad thing. Often what they are replacing is a greyfield or brownfield, or simply an underutilized site. As well, despite being very walkable and well-designed within their borders, they are often hard to reach on foot, by bike or by transit.

Mixed-use town centers are typically retail driven, and are in prime suburban locations, often where a traditional regional mall could have been located. In other words, they can’t work everywhere. Indeed, that is what a development like Victoria Gardens (located in Rancho Cucamonga, California) is - a regional mall with department store anchors in a pleasant, walkable, village-like setting. (A mix of uses is planned, but wasn’t built when I visited.) Those like Excelsior and Grand in suburban Minneapolis have a much greater amount of housing as a component, but the retail had to be there to begin with in order to get premium pricing on the residential units. A lot of suburbs want a fancy town center like those featured by ULI, but do not have the resources nor the market demand to make them work out.

I was able to visit my two case studies, and I liked what I saw. Crocker Park is really nice, with apartments above retail, some good restaurants, a multiplex theater, very good events programming and an oversized chess set. I wish the Dick’s Sporting Goods store, being a terminating vista, was instead city hall or a library, but you can’t have everything, right?

The Glen is a former naval air station, and they even saved the old hangar and control tower building, which visually anchors and distinguishes the project. The Glen town center is surrounded by attractive residential infill as well as an adjacent park and lake, which complement the project well.

I would be remiss if I didn’t credit the municipalities for allowing these mixed-use projects to exist in the first place. Most of these mixed-use centers would previously have been illegal according to zoning in their respective cities, so kudos to enlightened planners and elected officials for allowing new zoning codes and changes, not to mention assisting with public financing for these projects.

My favorite urban and suburban places are typically older downtowns, town centers or village cores; those that have evolved over time. Naperville, Illinois, Claremont, California and of course Country Club Plaza in Kansas City are just three of numerous older suburban downtowns that come to mind. The new mixed-use town centers, especially those featured in the new ULI book including Crocker Park, The Glen, Excelsior and Grand and the East 29th Avenue in Denver are beautiful, well designed places. One hopes that they can evolve well in to villages for the ages that are known more for their gathering places than just their shopping options.

Check out a recent article of mine in the April issue of Urban Land, entitled Getting Around in the Heart of Texas. It discusses tollways, transit-oriented development, bridges, and even logistics hubs. There is a lot going on in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with regard to transportation. I hope you find it interesting.

In the course of researching this article, I stopped at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Las Colinas was started in the 1980s as a master planned mixed use area with office, hotels and residential. It is built on a lake and canal system, so it has this vague Venice/Japanese theme, weirldy cool. But the wild part of it is the people mover system, which is an elevated mini-monorail designed to link the major destinations at Las Colinas.

Granted I was there on a weekend, so it was already pretty quiet, but Las Colinas sure had this feel of a good idea gone awry. The thing is, if the monorail can be linked in to the light rail station planned nearby, suddenly the whole thing has new life and a multimodal link is formed. I hope it works!