Help make Philly the Next Great City

Dec. 3, 2006
Chris Satullo
Inquirer Editorial Board Editor

Next year, Philadelphia will elect a new mayor and City Council.

Together, these men and women might do much to help Philadelphia achieve its potential as America's Next Great City.

Or they might botch the job utterly.

Those are the stakes.

So it would be nice if the civic conversation that leads to the ballot box proved worthy of the moment. The city and its region need to talk candidly about how to preserve and extend Philadelphia's strengths. How to admit and end its bad habits, too.

You can help make that happen.

In fact, without the energy, ideas and voice of people such as you, it won't happen.

If you'd like to contribute your voice to the needed dialogue, here's one way: Take part in Great Expectations: Citizen Voices on Philadelphia's Future.

Great Expectations is a joint effort by The Inquirer Editorial Board's Citizen Voices project and the University of Pennsylvania's Project on Civic Engagement. It is supported by a major grant from the Lenfest Foundation. At Penn, it is supported by the Fels Institute of Government, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Office of the Provost.

As a similar project did during the 1999 mayor's race, this effort will bring together ordinary folks, civic leaders and experts for dialogues to explore the region's issues. It will use the techniques of civic deliberation that Citizen Voices, working with Penn expert Harris Sokoloff, has been honing since 1994.

This project is founded on an unapologetic bias.

It is this: Philadelphia is almost great. The job of the next decade is to get all the way to great.

This arc of progress must be the work of the whole region, from grassroots to classrooms to corner offices to pulpits. It's not just the job of a clique of elected officials. The work can begin with talk - smart, purposeful, civil, but honest talk.

Together, the Citizens Voices will name and frame the chief challenges facing Philadelphia, identify possible solutions, and suggest which ones hold the most promise. Inquirer journalists - including columnist Tom Ferrick, who has volunteered to be lead writer on the project - will use the Citizen Voices as an "assigning desk." We'll investigate the issues the people say they want to see explored; we'll pose the questions the people most want answered.

The project will also experiment with forms of citizen journalism and interactive online polling.

Events will bring in innovators and experts from around the nation to share the good news about how the challenges Philly faces have been addressed effectively elswhere. The goal: to raise Great Expectations.

The project will culminate in the writing of an Agenda for the Next Great City. This will be a set of practical but ambitious steps that marry citizen values to expert advice. The agenda will be presented to the new mayor and Council as they take office in January 2008. Progress on the Agenda for the Next Great City will be monitored in coming years.

We'd love for you to take part. The first round of citizen dialogues begins in January. They'll be held in schools, churches, libraries and community centers around the city and inner-ring suburbs. A schedule is on this page. To sign up, fill out the form below, or fill out an online version at the Fels Web site: http://go.philly.com/registration

Why do all this?

Because our city's political culture has a bad habit. It avoids candid, forward-looking conversation like Brian Westbrook avoids tacklers. It prefers to look backward, to dwell on grievance and tribal self-interest. It settles for safe and familiar.

You know the type of campaign the city's political animals, left to their own devices, will give us. You've seen it too often.

Here's what it will be about, mostly: who raises the most money to buy the most eye-gouging ads on Channel 6; who promises whom what city contracts or jobs in return for support; who plays the race card most deftly; who lines up the most ward leaders; who puts the most money on the street on Election Day to cajole the apathetic, the undecided and the barely sentient to
the polls.

Some of the mayoral candidates are serious men. (Yep, they're all men.) They likely will make gestures toward a meaty dialogue about how Philadelphia might do the things it must to become the Next Great City.

But such talk could well be trampled beneath the fatal momentum of the usual suspects doing their usual stuff.

Unless we don't let that happen.

This project has held some early dialogues with civic leaders. When these leaders expressed their hopes for an election worthy of this city's people and promise, the energy in the room was palpable. But so was the dread that this hope is doomed to be crushed.

Here's what I think: If we all insist, with force and consistency, on having the needed conversations, the pols might just feel compelled to join in, out of fear that truancy might exact a price on Election Day.

Lesson One for the Next Great City: Stop waiting on a grimy political culture to do the necessary things. Start doing them yourself.

Something like that happened in 1999, the last time the city had an open mayor's seat. Everyone in town, it seemed, from foundations to newspapers to neighborhood groups, worked to raise the level of election talk. In response, the candidates raised their games.

In 2003, with the race haunted and distorted by The Bug, nothing remotely like that happened.

Let's do 1999 over again, only better. Many of the same foundations and nonprofits are stepping up. This time, we can all take advantage of the power of the Web. We can tap the energy of the many new residents who've fallen in love with Philadelphia without ingesting the Negadelphia outlook. And we can rally the swelling ranks of old-timers who are mad as hell about City Hall's corrupt ways.

We need your help, whether you're young, old or in between, whether you call city or suburb home. No matter what job you do, what political party you favor, or what faith you hold, no matter what nation your ancestors came from, we need your voice.

The goal is a great conversation about Great Expectations. That's how a great city and region should behave. Let's get it started.