LBJ School News Brief

Gary Chapman on the State of the City
Balancing global technology and
local character
in Austin, Texas

LBJ School faculty member Gary Chapman delivered the following address at the Austin Area League of Women Voters “2005 State of the City Event,” held January 25, 2005.

Tonight the League of Women Voters has asked me to address the "State of the City," which I must admit is a rather intimidating and daunting assignment. For the past few weeks I've been asking fellow Austinites to help me with this task by telling me what they think I should say. One friend of mine said, "Tell them enough nice things about Austin to make them feel proud about living here, but not so many nice things that other people will want to move here." That's a pretty common sentiment around town, among people who are happy to be here but worried about crowding, traffic, the pace of life and the cost of living. Someone else said about Austin, "We're the weirdest city in the most notorious state in the biggest pariah country in the world right now, a 'three-fer.'" That was also reflective of Austin's somewhat strange dichotomy: we're the blue blot in a sea of red, on the political map, but a huge number of Austinites are out of town at the moment, running the world. When [my wife] Carol and I are traveling and we tell people we're from Texas, we often get a look of query and suspicion, and then we say, "But we live in Austin," and then there's a big sigh of "Ohhhhh. . . .OK." I was watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart recently and Dennis Quaid was on the show talking about how he met his new wife in Texas. Stewart said, "You like it down there in Texas." And Quaid said, "We like it in Austin, I think I'm going to move there." And Jon Stewart said, "That's a great town."

Gary Chapman photo

Gary Chapman

So, with just a little bit of pondering about the "State of the City," the answer I came up with was pretty easy—Austin is in great shape. We have an extraordinary reputation all around the world as a great place to live and as a center of creativity and coolness. We're consistently on all kinds of lists about the best places to live, or do business or find a mate or go to school. We have a local government that is among the best run of any city in the United States if not the world. We have a fairly robust local economy that is coming out of its recent slump and which is already starting to show expansion in commercial real estate, jobs and new companies. We have what my friend Richard Florida calls the "three T's": technology, talent and tolerance, the keys to success for the "creative class" that Richard has written about in his book with that title. Austin was one of his case studies. Smart young people want to live in places of diversity, with an identity, with good technological infrastructure and a social climate of tolerance and good living, and Austin has all of these things. That's why we continue to grow, to attract people, and of course we all know that growth is probably the main source of whatever problems we have. But few people would choose the alternative. If you look at the horrendous problems of cities in the Midwest, for example, or many in the Northeast that are shedding jobs and population, Austin is practically paradise by comparison. In short, we're in great shape.

Technological development and prosperity
In terms of staying at the leading edge of technological development and prosperity, Austin has all the key ingredients. At the top of the list is the University of Texas at Austin, recently selected as the 15th best university in the world by the Times of London, and the second-best public university, after the University of California at Berkeley. UT is both a magnet and a distributor, if you will, of talent and ideas. There really are no significant technology centers without a major, world-class university, so UT is the most important element of Austin's success. There are many ways that UT could be better, of course, and the university leadership has just heard a whole range of recommendations from the Committee of 125, many of whom are Austin civic and business leaders. But it would be difficult and probably impossible for Austin to have the economy it has without UT.

Today Austin has a critical mass in the technology business sector. Our anchor tenant, so to speak, is Dell, which is strengthening its position as the world's leading maker of computers. Dell is not adding new jobs or facilities in Central Texas, but it is still a major employer and an incredible source of wealth among people who live here. Our other major technology employer, Motorola, is not doing as well, as we know. The technology sector as a whole has been through a terrible downturn and Motorola has suffered more than most. But Austin was not hit as hard as Silicon Valley during the tech bust, and we still have a wide array of technology firms, large and small, that is showing encouraging signs of new growth. Samsung is adding to its big semiconductor plant. We have a range of new companies in the field of semiconductor design. Austin is home to a number of thriving new entertainment companies, especially in computer games. We're home to companies like Aspyr, Origin Systems, Steve Jackson Games, Ion Storm and Fizz Factor, among others. Austin, as everyone knows, is a growing center of filmmaking, and of course we have a world-famous music scene, recently supplemented by the wonderful Austin City Limits Music Festival. Finally, we have technology mainstays here in Austin such as Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Materials, IBM, 3M, Intel, and Computer Sciences Corporation, and we're home to the research and development center of SBC, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, with its headquarters nearby in San Antonio.

It's because of these assets and our global reputation as a leading technology center that Austin was chosen as the host city of the 2006 World Congress on Information Technology, one of the world's premier events in the field. In May of next year we will be hosting a weeklong convention of about 2,000 delegates from 100 countries, who will come to Austin to learn about where information technology is headed and how Texas is playing a key role in IT. The delegates will be senior government officials or company executives, so this opportunity to market Austin to an international congress of IT leaders is unprecedented. This is the first time that a World Congress will be organized by a private organization instead of by the government of the host city. A team of volunteers organized Austin's bid for this event, which is like bidding for the Olympics. From what I've seen so far, it promises to be one of the most ambitious events that Austin has ever seen.

The next big thing? Biotechnology, nanotechnology, digital convergence
We do have some challenges ahead of us in building on this exceptional base of assets. The entire world's economy is changing rapidly, of course, because of globalization. Manufacturing is leaving the United States and will probably never come back in a way that produces large numbers of jobs. Service jobs in computer programming and other fields are going to India and other countries. The kinds of jobs we're hoping to develop in the U.S. are extremely skill-intensive and require high degrees of education and training. The big economic rewards are going to go to innovators who invent things that lots of people want. Because of this, most of the attention of Central Texas business, government and academic leaders is on the "next big thing" in technology, which is a subject of constant debate. Some people think it's biotech, others nanotechnology, or robotics or something else we haven't thought of yet.

Austin will have a few successful biotechnology companies, but we are not likely to become a leading center of biotech because other areas are far ahead of us already and because we don't have a research and teaching hospital here. Building a new medical center is frequently on the minds of Central Texas leaders, but this won't happen anytime soon. And if and when we get a new medical center, it will take years for it to establish itself. So unless we have a surprising breakthrough, biotech is not likely to be a huge factor in Austin's economic future, in my opinion. That breakthrough could happen, of course, and we could see a local company change the landscape for Texas biotech firms.

Nanotechnology is the process of making things at the atomic level or somewhere near that size—in other words, machines and devices that are incredibly small. Austin has a few nanotech companies already, most notably a new company spun off from UT called Molecular Imprints, which does micro-image lithography of electronic circuits. This field looks promising for a whole lot of different products, but it's very early in the development of nanotechnology and we don't know yet what kind of impact it will have on the economy. The University of Texas is focused on nanotech because the dollars coming from the federal government are so huge—somewhere around $4 billion in research funding over the next five years are already pledged. UT has the goal of being awarded the contract as the nation's nanotechnology research center. If that happens, we could see an influx of new talent here and some more private sector spinoffs.

Something I think will be important to Austin's future is a range of businesses that fit into the term "digital convergence." This points to a blending of entertainment sectors, including movies, music, games, Web sites, and video, all coming to the home over very fast Internet connections or to mobile devices over wireless networks. Apple Computer announced that it is now selling a million songs a day over its music download store called iTunes. This is rapidly transforming the music business and even the way music is recorded and marketed. Broadband Internet subscriptions are growing at a much faster rate than any of us expected, at something like 30% to 40% per year. Soon we expect that people will be able to buy and download movies online, and watch them on their big screen TVs. Online gaming is booming, with people playing other gamers through the Internet. Within five years, I expect, there will be a fast Internet connection to your TV and you'll be able to watch video content from an almost limitless range of sources. One Austin startup company is developing the technology to bring cultural arts organizations to digital TV, including theater companies, operas, symphonies and even high school plays and concerts.

Staying on the cutting edge
There are some things that I think Austin needs to do, or at least pay attention to, to protect and perhaps strengthen its role as a leading technology center. I will mention a few just briefly, the kinds of things that I hope we can do in the next few years.

First, Austin is already the leading example in the country of free wireless Internet access. Because of the very interesting and tireless work of a volunteer group called the Austin Wireless City Project, led by Rich MacKinnon, businesses all around town have set up wireless access points that their customers can use for free. At last count, the Austin Wireless City Project had wired 85 of these free hotspots, including BookPeople, Alamo Drafthouse, Flipnotics and Republic Square, among other places. This has led other businesses to follow suit, so now Austin has hundreds of wireless access points, we think more per capita than any other city in the country. We are also home to the nation's leading company installing paid wireless access, Waypoint, which has provided wireless to many airports, including our own, and is now serving every single McDonald's restaurant in the U.S.

But the technology for wireless is changing rapidly, and other cities are proposing plans that will surpass Austin's wireless networks soon. The City of Philadelphia has launched a plan to cover the entire metropolitan area with free wireless access, due to start up in the summer of 2006. New York City has started discussions about a similar kind of plan. Smaller towns, like Hermosa Beach, California, are already offering ubiquitous free wireless. Perhaps the most ambitious plan is for wireless coverage over all of Paris, France.

A Texas law passed ten years go makes it illegal for the City of Austin to build its own wireless network and offer services to the public. So to compete with other cities we're going to have to work around this law, probably with a multitude of willing partners who can start linking their networks and covering dead spots. We hope, for example, that by the World Congress next year we will have complete wireless coverage and seamless networking throughout downtown Austin. Every delegate to the Congress will be given a wireless computer, and we want them to be able to use these wherever they are in central Austin.

The next technological challenge will be to vastly speed up the Internet connectivity available to Austin citizens. Right now the speed of the typical consumer connection from Time Warner's Road Runner or from SBC's DSL service runs at about a million bits per second, sometimes a little faster if you're lucky. You can pay more for faster service, but the prices are beyond what most people are willing to pay, such as $80 per month instead of $50 per month for very fast Road Runner service.

But customers in Keller, Texas, just outside Fort Worth, are now getting 15 million bits per second from Verizon for just under $35 per month. This fifteen-fold jump in speed makes a huge difference in experiencing the Internet and it opens up numerous opportunities for new media and new online features. At these rates of speed we can start to talk about online delivery of movies or other video content, multi-party videoconferencing in the home, new online educational programs and many other things. Imagine parents sharing home movies of their kids with far-away relatives instantaneously—just plug in the camera or the DVD and send the movie, in real time, over the Internet. You could even talk over the movie while it's showing.

The reason Verizon has started this in Keller instead of Austin has to do with regulatory issues more than anything else, and the City of Austin has little control over state or federal regulations for telecommunications. But we should have some kind of effort in Austin to move our local telecom companies to this level of service as quickly as possible, and at an affordable price. We should be exploring lots of options about how to keep Austin's use of the Internet at the very cutting edge of speed and features. This will be good for our citizens, and it will attract talented young people who have by now grown up with these technologies.

Striking a balancing between
local identity and globalization
Finally, I believe we need to continue to protect Austin's image and identity as an interesting and unique place to live. The "Keep Austin Weird" campaign has struck some Austinites as, well, just weird, but it's a value that needs to be embedded in nearly everything the City does to ensure its prosperity in the future.

Carol and I are lucky enough not only to live in Austin but to spend a fair amount of time in Italy. For the past twenty years there has been a social movement in Italy known as Slow Food, which was launched in part to counter the influence of American fast food chains on Italian eating habits. In 1999 a group of mayors in Italy extended the concept of Slow Food to a new urban reform movement known as Slow Cities, or Slow Cittá, which stresses local identity, regional cuisine, pedestrian zones, eco-tourism and other features of urban life meant to curb stress and uniformity.

There are some interesting ideas coming from the Slow Cities movement that are relevant to Austin. Let me read a passage, rather roughly translated, from the Slow Cities manifesto:

The development of local communities is based, among other things (sic), on their ability to share and acknowledge specific qualities, to create an identity of their own that is visible outside and profoundly felt inside.

The phenomenon of globalization offers, among other things, a great opportunity for exchange and diffusion, but it does tend to level out differences and conceal the peculiar characteristics of single realities. In short, it proposes median models which belong to no one and inevitably generate mediocrity.

Nonetheless, a burgeoning new demand exists for alternative solutions which tend to pursue and disseminate excellence, seen not necessarily as an elite phenomenon, but rather as a cultural, hence universal fact of life.

In many Italian cities and towns, including Florence, there has been a reconstitution of pedestrian zones in the centers of urban areas, especially around ancient or priceless buildings or monuments. This has been a hugely popular success, after a period of grumbling by local merchants and some citizens. This no-cars feature is now found in the French Quarter in New Orleans on certain days, and on the road that fronts the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sundays.

Austin lacks a major pedestrian zone like the RiverWalk in San Antonio or Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica or the Fanueil Hall area in Boston. These are so popular in these cities that they in many ways shape the identity of the cities they're in. They provide spaces for public events as well as commerce. They are often areas of public art. And increasingly they will be zones of technology such as wireless Internet access.

The point of the Slow Cities manifesto is that cities that embody a unique identity are usually places that foster and reward excellence, and that any city that carelessly or unconsciously becomes like everywhere else will be characterized by mediocrity and weak attractiveness. This is why it's important, in the age of talent, technology and tolerance, to be different instead of to be the same. This is why boldness of vision for a city's identity is not just being weird but being sensible about how to appeal to citizens and the rest of the world. People want to live in places that are beautiful, interesting, unique, lively and tolerant, and such places will therefore succeed as well as be more appealing places to live.

Technology can go either way in this regard—it can be used to provide vitality and capabilities to a region, or, if it is seen as an end in itself, it can supplant and sometimes suffocate the surrounding culture. Silicon Valley, for example, is mostly a culture-free zone, even though it is world-famous for its technology. I used to live in Palo Alto, which was once a wonderfully diverse and fun town. But now it looks like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It lost its spark and replaced it with sheer affluence. There is nothing in Silicon Valley that resembles the cultural vitality that Austin often takes for granted.

So Austin is one of the few places left where the balance between global technology and local identity isn't completely lost. It's what makes us a "cool town." We have the full range of options here, from what's left of the old hippie Austin, to the cultural diversity of East Austin, to the most advanced high-tech. What is worrisome is how much of this identity that everyone enjoys might be lost as we grow larger and possibly become more and more like everywhere else.

This is a familiar debate in Austin, especially because the city has changed so much in the past decade. Austin has become a lot richer but a lot more expensive. There are career opportunities now here that didn't exist some years ago, but there are fewer affordable neighborhoods. At the margins of Austin are a lot of areas that look like the suburbs of Houston or Dallas or anywhere else. We have a growing environmental problems, especially air pollution. More than a few Austinites wonder if we could have done without all the progress that brought us to where we are today. They long for a simpler time and a smaller and less frenetic city.

This debate in Austin is healthy, and it should not be considered simple nostalgia or anti-business sentiment. What will make Austin thrive in the future is if we remain a place where people can have a good life, what the Italians call "il buon vivere." This is more than just having great technology or lots of money. It's that indescribable feeling of the heart when you get off the plane and you're proud to be home. It's the desire to leave as much of that feeling as possible to future citizens of Austin. So that's where the true state of this wonderful city can be found: in our hearts and in our hopes.

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