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As the United States emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is becoming increasingly clear that the country is entering a period of deep economic uncertainty and adjustment. While the media has extensively covered the acceleration of remote work and the fragility of global supply chains since the beginning of the crisis, only recently has attention focused on the dramatic rise of investor purchases of single-family homes and what that and other forces might mean for homeownership generally and among Black- and Latino-owners in particular.

Two weeks ago, I traveled to Toronto to participate in the Good Roads Conference. My talk, Mastering the New Disorder: Cities, Infrastructure and the Post Pandemic Economy – The New Localism, focused on the role of cities and metropolitan areas in delivering the unprecedented federal infrastructure investments that are being made in the United States.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act represents a potential turning point for electric mobility in the U.S. as historic government investment takes aim at meeting climate, equity, and global competition goals. Commitments from automakers, electric vehicle sales targets, growing consumer interest, and emissions regulations essentially assure an increased transition to electrified transportation. Critically, sustaining this transition is reliant upon city and state planning and coordination to stitch electric vehicle charging infrastructure into a connected and reliable national network.

I traveled to Barcelona this week to participate in the Barcelona 2022 REACT Congress. The title of my talk was “Mastering the New Disorder: City Economies In the Next Decade.”

When we write about supplier diversity models that should be scaled, adopted, and adapted, our first inclination is usually to focus on state and local governments, or innovative private sector solutions. However, over the last year, the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Federal government have made some impressive progress in advancing equity in procurement, with a focus on Black-, Latino-, and other Minority-owned small businesses.

Following the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan a year ago almost to the day, the Nowak Lab and New Localism Associates created an “Investment Playbook” tool to help cities maximize the fragmented flow of federal funds by strategically selecting geographies of opportunity and identifying and costing out concrete rescue and recovery projects within those geographies. This tool follows the simple maxim that “failing to plan is planning to fail”; federal investments may now be ample but only localities can design specific projects that are fit to place and geared for success.

Over the past two months, the five of us have been part of a community of practice selected by the Economic Development Administration to coach the winners of the $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (“BBBRC”). Along with partners at America Achieves, the Federation of American Scientists, the National League of Cities, and others, we have spent a great deal of time reflecting on what the BBBRC means for American competitiveness in this moment.

For the past several years, we have consistently recognized the immense value commercial corridors play in both urban and rural geographies. Commercial corridors are economic engines for communities — they provide jobs that keep money circulating in the local economy, offer goods and services for residents, and power entrepreneurship and wealth building for whole communities. They also serve as valuable gathering places and sources of civic pride. Commercial corridors hold economic and symbolic value, and impact public perceptions of surrounding neighborhoods and the communities.

As federal investments roll out at scale, it has become eminently clear that effective deployment is dependent upon networks of public, private and civic institutions coming together to design, finance and deliver concrete initiatives and projects. It is, in other words, a networked governance moment.

As the euphoria of enacting the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act fades, the challenges facing implementation of this complex and sprawling legislation have come into sharp relief. First among them is the lack of sufficient capacity among many cities and counties to design and deliver projects that have the transformative impact that has been promised by bipartisan Congressional sponsors.