In January of this year, I participated in an all day charrette as part of the Great City Design Team initiative, the brainchild of Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. The intention is to take a commercial corridor or node of the city that needs improving and design a solution.

We gathered a group of designers, architects, landscape architects, and other members of the development community, and just like the numerous other charrettes around the city, came up with some really cool streetscapes, open spaces and building massing for an area of Glenwood Avenue, just west of downtown.

Design is important and plans are critical, but I found myself staring at them, doing quick calculations on cost and gasping at the chasm between what was on the paper and chance of it getting built. I fear these sketches and drawings we and all the teams came up with are perhaps destined to rest for eternity in some architect’s file drawer and never see the light of day. The problem being there is no implementation plan or program for providing additional public effort to link these drawings to reality or a built end product.

If I learned anything about planning while working for my previous employer, DSU, it is that a plan is worthless without community buy-in and appropriate implementation. DSU marketed (and still does after being bought by another firm, Bonestroo) themselves as a company whose plans get built. That is important. DSU did some very good work in their day and I’ll be damned if they weren’t one of the better community planning firms in the Twin Cities at getting buy-in from elected officials and the general public for the plans they created. So often plans are simply pretty pictures with no results. I’m always asking “yes, this is a nice plan, but did it get built?”

The lesson here, for my mayor and other visionaries, is of course to get those pretty pictures drawn by leading designers in your community. Create the vision. Get the public excited about it as well. But provide political will and mechanisms for the follow-through. Make sure the necessary zoning changes can be made, and leave some budget for finding a development partner and even some elusive public dollars to offset gaps in the market, which of course is often the reason for the charrette in the first place.

Building great cities indeed takes good design teams, but the uncomfortable reality is the process often exceeds the term of most mayors. I guess you could say it takes a village to build a village.

I recently visited Philadelphia as part of a trip to Washington DC. I flew in to Philly and took Amtrak to DC, which saved quite a bit on airfare despite the train fare. The bonus was getting to explore Philadelphia some more, including their gorgeous 30th Street train station, Rittenhouse Square on a summer’s evening, the Reading Terminal Market, and the efforts to keep downtown tidy.

Center City Philadelphia is a business-led organization whose mission is to keep downtown Philadelphia clean, safe, beautiful and fun. They achieve this through a Business Improvement District (BID) that encompasses a 120-block area in the core. The BID provides cleaning, security and promotional services that enhance but don’t replace those already existing with the city.

I am impressed by the results. I liked the banners and landscaping, as well as the street cleaning machines that keep things looking well-tended. Most of all, I like the hired staff of personnel that roam the sidewalks at all hours, helping visitors find their way, reporting crime or vandalism, and generally being a happy face for the downtown. These “eyes on the street” help deter crime and improve the entire experience for locals and visitors alike, something Minneapolis and other cities could learn from. Kudos to Center City Philadelphia for making the streets of Philadelphia a better place.

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.