Cities like Seattle look abroad for prosperity at home

Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for "junketeering"?

Just possibly. "Gotcha" stories about foreign travels are still feared by mayors. But they're dangerous ana-chronisms. Our cities' economies and well-being actually require inventive foreign connections. Trade opportunities and enriching local economies still top the list. But new considerations are flooding in — for example, the well-advertised global competition for the footloose young professionals, looking for "live" local scenes and cultural diversity.

The hands-down American regional leader on learning from abroad has been Seattle with its array of export-oriented firms. For 17 years Seattle has sent sizable delegations (70 or more) of business, political and civic leaders to see firsthand how a major foreign city and region really "clicks." I've personally accompanied three of those visits — to Sydney, Hong Kong and Berlin — and discovered they're significant eye-openers.

Recently, Seattle delegations have visited such cities as Fukuoka and Abu Dhabi — hardly our grandparents' world city list.

In contrast to yesteryear's idea that we Americans "know it all" and don't need foreign input, there's growing awareness — appreciated by boardrooms and city halls, growing more slowly in popular awareness — that today's global standard for successful leadership is "go look."

Last year my colleague Tim Campbell, board chair of the Urban Age Institute, conducted a survey of 16 high-income world cities. Every one of them, it turned out, had sent out high-level delegations to metropolises in other countries. All the cities were engaged in at least nine visits a year, with some making as many as 30.

A top example — Chicago. In a special blue-ribbon report, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ranked global engagement along with continued infrastructure improvement and building human capital as the keys to securing and keeping position among the top ranks of competitive towns worldwide.

The report touted Chicago's success in global business services, corporate headquarters, worldwide transportation links, attracting the "creative class," and strong public-private partnerships. But it said the city had to keep hustling on such problem areas as public schools, traffic congestion and the region's fragmented governance (at least 1,200 separate units with taxing power). Reform moves were urged in all those areas — plus the emerging issue of climate change, regarding which outside experts rate Chicago's programs among the best in the world.

The panel also looked forward by calling for a Mayor's Office of International Affairs to receive visiting delegations and to set priorities for overseas travel by the mayor and other officials. And it also urged a distinct budget focused precisely on foreign travel by the mayor and other city officials.

Atlanta is another city gung-ho for international connections — a tradition begun by Andrew Young when he was mayor (1981-89). Then-Mayor Shirley Franklin, returning last year from a trip to Chile to take part in the Americas Competitiveness Forum — which Atlanta had hosted itself in 2007 and 2008 and will again in 2010 — boasted of her city's international outreach efforts:

"We've established a practice of successful partnering that other cities, even other countries, want to emulate." Franklin asserted that Atlanta has become "an important gateway to the Americas, and provides a perfect entry point for companies from Europe and Asia to enter the U.S."

But again, success means facing up to serious challenges. In Franklin's words: "We need to embrace foreign-language instruction, improving multicultural awareness and diversity, and increasing our focus on math and science."

An unsurprising set of the most globally connected cities — among them New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore and Chicago — emerged in a "Global Cities Index" developed by the journal Foreign Affairs, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

But you don't need to be "mega" in size to benefit substantially from foreign contacts, Campbell notes in a new report for the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. He cites Barcelona, Charlotte, Portland, Ore., and Turin as examples of cities that have used foreign travels to gather learning and ideas to help them register major gains over the past generation.

Campbell notes Barcelona's post-Franco flowering including the 1992 Summer Olympics, Portland's urban-growth boundary and building a street-friendly, transit-oriented setting, Charlotte's banking advances, and Turin's strategic-planning exercises and economic advances. This doesn't mean anything's guaranteed: Witness Charlotte's current crisis of banking shrinkage including the disappearance of Wachovia, one of its top anchors.

But a city that has "learned to learn" in this global age is far better positioned to recoup, adapt and move forward. And that face-to-face learning by its leaders isn't some luxury perk but in fact indispensable to that process.

Neal Peirce's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com