I think that there are things that are very necessary for the health of an information economy: density of highly educated individuals, availability of venture capital, and connectedness among the two.
The plan for the University District seems pretty straightforward – meaning it isn’t particularly bold or risky, nor is it particularly conservative. The plan seems to lack a few things I think should be basics – strong links to the SCC campus, plans to increase the resident undergraduate enrollment in Spokane higher education campuses, and plans to increase the number of PhD awards given by the Spokane University campuses in Information Age disciplines.
I think that these omissions are natural considering that they are so far outside the control of any one agency.
So a few thoughts about how to radically address these things:
Links to SCC: It seems pretty obvious that we need a multi-tiered transit solution. The problem is two-fold; how to pay for it and how to get people to use it. Let’s talk about what that means.
Multi-tier: Tier-one: non-stop, high-speed commuter links between regional sites. Spokane – Valley mall – Liberty Lake – Post Falls – Coeur d’ alene to the East; Spokane – Cheney – Fairchild – Airport – Airway Heights to the West; Spokane – Pullman – Moscow to the South; Spokane – Whitworth – Mead – Mt. Spokane to the North.
Tier-two: local light-rail. The boldest idea would use small cars, coordinated to deliver you directly to your destination, like this. At any rate, a slower train or trolley with more stops to get you between centers of activity would be the gist. Being able to take this tier non-stop from Downtown to Northtown, for example, would be the point.
Tier-three: local curbside service. Busses that run on set routes according to schedules and well regulated taxis. In Spokane that really means smaller busses running more frequently over a greater area. It also means routes that go where people need to travel, without necessarily having to go Downtown to get from Indian Trail to Hillyard. (to be fair, i have no idea if that is what happens now, I just assume it is.)
Ideally, one stored-value transit card could pay for all of these, as well as taxis, metered parking, and parking lots. And the bus routes would be serviced by alternate fuel vehicles, so that when they are at the hubs, the air isn’t filled with diesel fumes and there would be an information service that broadcast the status of a bus – most importantly it’s proximity to your stop – to your cell phone or wireless device, so that if you have the choice between standing in the cold or the rain and being under shelter, you can choose shelter without risking missing your bus.
Obviously, that is significantly more than is required to link the University District with the SCC campus, but transit seems to be so broken that a big move is required to undo so many little moves in the past. (An even bolder maneuver would be to declare Spokane’s intention to become the Nation’s first gasoline free city and to initiate a plan to overhaul the gasoline distribution infrastructure, retrofit the automobiles, and mandate new vehicle sales be of non-gasoline engines. Corresponding development of a sustainable biofuel economy or a sustainable hydrogen economy would leap to the front of that particular market and $0.39 per gallon fuel costs would certainly lower the cost of living.)
UG enrollment: Start a new school. Gonzaga probably can’t maintain it’s academic excellence and quickly expand at the same time and EWU and WSU have no incentive to transition to a residential campus when they have perfectly good residential campuses already. So, to get residential undergrads, you need a residential campus – let’s make one.
How about an Institute of Digital Arts with a facility analogous to a teaching hospital, staffed and underwritten by professionals in the fields of digital effects, digital audio production, and visual effects – Pixar, WETA, and a digital record label affiliated with Apple would be examples. Such an institute would offer these high paced LA based firms a place where employees could take a sabbatical to teach or raise families, a facility for smaller projects, such as commercials and motion picture scores, and for overflow work when their primary facilities are at capacity. In return, Spokane gets one-of-a-kind higher education institution, offering a first-of-its-kind Bachelor of Digital Arts to about 1000 undergraduates, with the corresponding residual influx of talent. Additionally, a series of satellite academies could be established in the Community Centers and schools to ensure that local residents have the skills and portfolios needed to be competitive applicants to the institute.
Continuing the theme of unique higher education experiences, there could also be established a graduate institute offering small classes of 10 – 20 students each, taught in the seminar style from the original works, leading to MA’s in Strategy and in Information Theory. Such focused, topical studies would be attractive to business executives and the officers at Fairchild. It would also give Spokane another one-of-a-kind educational institute that could potentially draw students and their families from all over the country.
The PhD issue: Creating a think tank, modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton or the Santa Fe Institute, or the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), dedicated to post-doctoral research into the mysteries and challenges of the Information Age and the Network Revolution. Once again, the theme is small, focused, one-of-a-kind institution bringing attention, ideas, and talent to Spokane.
That doesn’t actually increase the number of PhD’s awarded in Spokane, which needs to be addressed as well. If there were to be a set – maybe four to ten – of degrees that were identified as desirable, then the City could create a formal request and public call for the State to authorized EWU Spokane and WSU Spokane to pursue the creation of those PhD programs. The list should be of disciplines germane to the strategic goals of the region’s economic plan, and be specifically oriented to the information/innovation economy.