So the Quad Cities isn't a European capital London, Paris, or Madrid, but it also isn't a major US city like New York, Chicago, or DC. It's not a large city (or a combined large city). But that doesn't mean that we can't compare it helpfully to other cities that do urbanism differently--and, often, better.
Not that everything here is bad, of course. Have some Duck Creek to tide you over as we look at some similarly-sized international cities from which I think we could adopt some ideas.
Just for clarity: I'm working from this estimate of the Quad Cities as about 380,000 people spread over 170 square miles, with about 1/3 in Iowa and 2/3 in Illinois to find similar-ish sized places, primarily in population, for comparison.
1. Utrecht, Netherlands: Connections Are Power
Utrecht, in the Netherlands, has a population of just about 370,000. But while the Quad Cities has desultory, mostly-hourly bus service, Utretcht has three tram lines, and multiple frequent bus lines. It also has a highly developed cycling network, not to mention multiple heavy rail lines to the rest of the Netherlands.
All of these build on each other, and I'm certainly not claiming that the Quad Cities could develop any of these kinds of connections overnight. But they speak to the value of connecting place to place by something other than a car: at least partly because of these connections, Utrecht has a strong knowledge economy, including serving as a hub for university life, transportation, and even gaming. Obviously that is also a feedback loop: the more desirable things a city has, the more people will want to connect to it. But it's important to note that Utrecht hasn't had to become huge to have these things; it just has to move the same number of people around as we do in the Quad Cities.
2. Nice, France: Embrace Natural Advantages
Nice (pronounced like the counterpart of nephew, not the adjective) has about 350,000 people. It's also pretty well-connected, with four tram lines and a high-speed connection to Paris. But if I made all of these about who has trams and who doesn't, this would be boring--and besides, Nice is at the end of a lot of its connections, whereas Utrecht was in the center--you can decide for yourself which fits better to the Quad Cities.
Rather, I want to suggest that Nice has taken full advantage of its geographical position in a way that the Quad Cities have not. We have relatively little ecotourism, despite the mighty Mississippi flowing right through the middle of town, and our connections to other population centers that might fuel such activity are minimized rather than maximized. No, we are not a Mediterranean resort town (or towns), and I acknowledge that replicating the specifics of Nice are unlikely. But we could certainly be better-connected to the other cities around us, and try to focus on what nature has given us more than we do. Huge amounts of our riverfront, especially in Iowa, are taken up by industry or (worse) departed industry, and there is relatively little emphasis given to artistic and cultural engagement with the natural landscape. What there is works well--or at least I think it does--but it's not a major focus of civic engagement.
Nice has a lot of cultural, non-transportation and non-housing amenities that we cannot directly replicate, but that we might try to take inspiration from.
3. Cork, Ireland: Revel In Distance
Perhaps this is the opposite of my lesson from Utrecht, but Cork, Ireland (population: only 220,000, about the size of the Illinois side of the QC) takes advantage of the very distance from other places to embrace an outsize importance despite small size. Cork has multiple universities, a major arts scene, and several major industrial employers. It embraces the fact that the larger city that dominates international perceptions of the country (Dublin) is fairly far off--if we're not going to actually connect to Chicago, perhaps that's a better model.
In some ways, of course, you might say Cork is more like Iowa City than it is the Quad Cities, given the massive presence there of U of I. But to me that's just a covert way of saying that we don't have to look to international models to see some productive urbanism. We can and should be more like these European cities of a similar size--but we could and should also be more like some of our own neighbors, which have managed to produce more vibrant urbanism even under very similar conditions.
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