SAVING THE CITY

BY RON BLATMAN

With the pandemic, economic gyrations, and continued concerns about equity and climate change, how do we ensure a better future for our cities? Following decades of decline, most urban cores celebrated almost 20 years of improvement, a transformation now at risk. How did we get here, and what comes next? Saving the City is a unique documentary series asking and answering how we can make our cities better places for all.

Iam not a filmmaker who woke up one day and said, “Cities are a cool idea.”

I’m a finance and real estate guy. I also have a background in city government and a design background. I’ve been studying cities since I was a kid and thought that the best way to convey information about what different cities were doing, both good and bad, was to do something in the media.

America has always had a love-hate relationship with cities. Yet over 80% of us live in urban centers, a number expected to reach 90% by the year 2050. People are moving to cities to have a better chance for themselves and their kids, better education and health, and to connect and be together. In a city, there’s a sense of a public realm, public places, and we all own this together. We’re all in this together.

Saving the City is one of the most ambitious examinations of the urban experience ever undertaken, featuring a multi-part documentary film series along with a comprehensive educational curriculum; the objective of Saving the City is nothing less than the creation of an ongoing national dialogue about why cities are important, why we should care about their vitality, and how to make our cities into more desirable places.

For example, we filmed a comparative piece about why a large railyard development in San Francisco doesn’t have a public school. There were hundreds of kids that were living in the neighborhood of 10,000 people. They still haven’t built the school. When the kids turn 5, everybody leaves because there are no schools. In Vancouver, it’s just the opposite. Thousands of kids walk to school in downtown Vancouver every day, and it’s because they built schools. But it’s Canada. They build not only schools but also parks, recreation centers, and seniors centers. In Canada, they build communities. In the U.S., we build developments, and there’s a difference between the two. The idea is that by contrasting these different approaches through storytelling, there’s a takeaway for how to do things better and improve outcomes.

The other driving force is to motivate people to get more excited about getting involved in their community. We’re going to be telling a lot of stories about individuals or small groups. In today’s world, when federal and state governments are largely broken, local governments are getting things done.

One excellent example is in Oklahoma City, a Republican city in a red state; they have voted four times to tax themselves for capital projects. It shows you that if you put the right programs together with the right kind of leadership, it doesn’t matter what your political background is. And that’s what we’re about.

We’re also exploring technology and cities. There’s a Toronto story where Google wanted to build a huge development project, originally 190 acres along the Toronto waterfront in what was to be the ultimate smart city. It was through their Sidewalk Lab subsidiary, which they recently closed. They ran into a lot of political opposition, and those 190 acres were shrunk to 12, and that 12 acres eventually completely melted away because there were concerns that this was big tech trying to gobble up everybody’s data without their permission.

We also filmed a story in San Diego, where the city teamed up with General Electric in 2017 to install 14,000 new LED streetlights in the biggest Internet of Things contract ever done at the time. And of those 14,000 streetlights, 3,200 poles were fully equipped with sensors. And these sensors can tell you about the weather and traffic and have sound and video capabilities. A couple of years later, there was a highprofile murder on a downtown San Diego street. And after a while, somebody said, “Don’t we have cameras that could help us in the investigation?” So they went back to look at the tapes. Ironically, the San Diego Police Department was unaware that the public works department had cameras on the poles. And then, it became a big political issue, raising questions such as: What kind of surveillance is this? What is it used for? Who owns the data? How long is the data kept? Who has access to the data? What rules were put in place for this data?

Nobody opposed trying to solve the murder, but it opened a Pandora’s box of questions. As a result, the San Diego City Council has recently adopted several rules about what the police department can and can’t do.

They ran into the problem that most of the sensors wound up not working. They didn’t know what to do with most of the information they got because city departments weren’t prepared to handle it, and they could have bought more accurate and current information from a vendor.

That was the experience in San Diego. We had an interesting tour in Coral Gables, where

Ron Blatman Executive Producer, Saving the City San Francisco, California

they’re really on top of their work. But it was also a warning that technology doesn’t solve all problems. It still comes down to people and, sometimes, a little bit of common sense. We have interviewed over 90 people on camera to date and are now editing our opening episode and continuing to fundraise for the nonprofit series.

To learn more, including how to support this groundbreaking project, visit savingthecity.org.

Ron Blatman is executive producer for the Saving the City: Remaking the American Metropolis documentary series about making cities better places. He also created and produced the acclaimed Saving the Bay national PBS series, narrated by Robert Redford, about the history of San Francisco. The series won four regional Emmy Awards, including Best Documentary. Blatman previously worked in real estate development and finance in San Francisco and New York, as well as serving as director of business development in the San Francisco mayor’s office in the early 1990s. He earned an MBA in finance from Wharton and a concurrent Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a BA in architecture from UC Berkeley.