Author and leading thinker in urban transformation, Bruce Katz, speaking Thursday in Birmingham

One of the nation’s leading voices in how cities are remaking themselves as centers for innovative policies, creative collaboration, innovation, and dynamic growth will be speaking in Birmingham this week, as well as meeting with local and regional leaders.

Author Bruce Katz
Bruce Katz is a vice president at the Brookings Institution and founding director of the institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. He is co-author, with Jennifer Bradley, of “The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy.”
A graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, Katz co-led the housing and urban issues transition team for the Obama administration and served as a senior advisor to new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan during the first 100 days of the administration. He continues to advise federal, state, regional and municipal leaders on policy reforms designed to advance the competitiveness of metropolitan areas.
According to Katz’s and Bradley’s book, the nation’s top 100 metropolitan regions occupy just 12 percent of the nation’s landmass, but they are now home to two thirds of the U.S. population. What’s more, those metropolitan areas generate 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
“Cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of economic prosperity and social transformation in the United States,” Katz and Bradley, the founding director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute,” state. They argue that while the federal and state governments are “present-oriented” and often hampered by the constraints of short-term issues and election cycles, many cities are thinking long-term, with detailed planning processes that are looking decades ahead in addressing issues ranging from education and health care, to infrastructure and creating jobs.
“The metropolitan revolution offers the United States its best chance to revive its national economy, reboot its national competitiveness, and restore purpose to our politics and civility to its commons,” Katz and Bradley state.
“The United States is on the verge of a historic re-sorting, in which responsibilities once reserved for higher levels of government are being fully shared with, even shifted to, cities, metropolitan areas, and the networks of leaders who govern them.”
Katz is scheduled to speak at 5 p.m. Thursday at an event in the new Forum Theater in the Uptown area of downtown Birmingham, adjacent to the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex. The event is hosted by Leadership Birmingham. Admission is $40 and includes a cocktail reception. To purchase tickets, go to www.leadershipbham.eventbrite.com or contact Susan Shields at Leadership Birmingham at susans@leadershipbirmingham.org.
Katz is also speaking Friday at noon at the 13th Annual Carole Samuelson Lecture in public health practice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The event takes place in Lecture Hall A in Volker Hall.
To learn more about Katz and Bradley’s book, visit The Metro Revolution.