Abstract
Disclosure: We consider Manuel Pastor a colleague and both John Powell and the work of the Kirwan Institute are mentioned in this book. The Kirwan Institute has also been involved in some of the work that is commended in this book, as well as some of the work that is critiqued.
In This Could be the Start …, Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka combine their collective decades of experience as activists, organizers, and academics to use the lens of regional equity not as simply a policy analysis tool, but rather as a way to describe an emerging social movement. As they note in the introduction, the original aim of the book was to put together a best–practice overview for community–based regionalist development efforts. Instead, they found that the most exciting “regionalist” efforts were not happening in the public policy and planning spheres per se, but in community organizing and movement building. As they note in a somewhat tongue–in–cheek way, they skip the obligatory “chapter about Portland's metro council” to instead focus on community organizing efforts. In their words, they are concerned with “social movement regionalism” and the use of metropolitan regions as an “arena for building a broad–based social movement for justice,” rather than “community development regionalism” or “policy reform regionalism.”
Overall, the book makes a strong case that it is not just academics and policy wonks that are using regionalism. Rather, they note that a regional lens can lend itself to a perspective that is both progressive and pragmatic, that values both “economic prosperity and social inclusion” (and sees each one as a necessary precondition for the other to flourish), and provides a framework for power analyses that can draw unlikely allies together. In this way, it provides the grounding for organizing that is transformative in intention and universalist in its aspirations. A vision of the future where “cities are strong, racial conflict is superseded, and millions more join the middle class,” where we recognize at both the interpersonal and institutional level that “we are all in this together.”
Most exciting from our point of view, the book makes explicit that regionalism and racial equity are tied together and that the region is the location, both spatially and philosophically, for understanding and rectifying racial disparities. We have been a part of the planning process for many of the organizations citied in the book, and have long argued that regionalism is a civil rights and racial justice issue. At multiple points in the book, the authors acknowledge that race “is an inescapable part of our region's histories” and that it “must be a clear part of conversation.” They also note that “social movement” regionalism seems to be the most vibrant in metropolitan areas that are not mostly white. (They also note that policy–based regional solutions—often touted as a success in both Minneapolis–St. Paul, MN, and Portland, OR—have not been nearly as successful in metropolitan areas with higher concentrations of people of color.)
However, they also leave open the question of to what extent and how specifically race needs to be part of that conversation—at one point seemingly praising both Antonio Villaraigosa and President Obama for their ability to be committed to racial equity although using universal and nonrace specific rhetoric to build appeal. We would push back on this a bit, not on the need for analyses and organizing strategies that recognize the linked fates of multiple racial groups across a metropolitan area—that is clearly a strength of regional equity movements—but on the ability to do that without bringing race into organizing in a very conscious and deliberate way. We think it is essential to distinguish between universal goals and targeted strategies. A nonracial language is not adequate for organizing. The question cannot be if we should talk about race, but how we talk about it.
The book itself is organized in a fairly straightforward manner and written in an accessible and conversational style. The first few chapters lay out an overview of the authors’ experiences and assertions, and the next few examine case studies in various cities: Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They explore initial impetuses for various organizations in taking up a regional framework, compare and contrast approaches taken in each area, talk about tensions that arose and how they were dealt with, and quote at length from interviews with key players in each city. Community organizers and activists especially will be happy to have easy to follow narratives of how various campaigns worked, what setbacks were encountered along the way, where leverage points for change were eventually found.
There are a few areas in which we wish this book was stronger. First, although we recognize that it isn't primarily a theoretical book, the authors introduce the idea toward the end of the book that the “region,” as both a physical and philosophical space, provides a fertile ground for the crafting of a new form of “deliberate democracy” and argue that it is precisely the lack of preexisting regional governance institutions that make this reimagining of the democratic process feasible. This is an intriguing hypothesis, and one that we hope gets explored more in the future. Second, there is a tendency in this book for the authors to freely jump back and forth from the descriptive to the predictive, and from pragmatic predictions of what might be to aspirational predictions of what could be (if only …). Although we recognize the importance of offering hopeful visions of the future, the loose intermingling of these two strands lends parts of the book to read overly optimistically, especially from the vantage point of late 2010 rather than in the run–up to the election of President Obama when this book was written. Finally, the final chapter of the book offers a few pages on what needs to happen for the regional equity movement to “revitalize progressive politics around the country.” Based on the wisdom of this book, and the grounding that the authors have in many movements for social change, we hope that they are already working on expanding these pages into whole chapters.