[wburg]

Originally Posted by ozone

I'm assuming that he was meaning a stand-alone 'global city'. It doesn't matter how integrated we are with the Bay Area, San Francisco will always be the City.

"Stand-alone global city" seems like a contradiction in terms--a city becomes "global" because of its interconnections with other cities, countries, continents. No city stands alone, and a city with "global" status only gets it because they develop those connections. Cut the connections, and the city dies! What would New York be without its ports, or Los Angeles without its media? (Or New York without its media and Los Angeles without its port, for that matter?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city

The idea isn't somehow outshining San Francisco or growing bigger than them--that misses the point altogether. The idea is viewing them as a trading partner, the other end of a supply chain or a business partnership, not to make Sacramento an extended suburb of the Bay Area.

But you make an important point. Is there a lack of regional cohesiveness here? Do people in Roseville really deny that they are part of Sacramento? If so why? Is it because these outer suburbs tend to be more racially divided and politically conservative than the City of Sacramento? Maybe it's because of our relatively weak core and it's poor reputation?

But the denial goes both ways. People here in Midtown and in the older closer-in suburbs look down at places like Roseville and Elk Grove -as cultural wastelands full of unsophisticated and very conventional people. They also resent the fact that Roseville should have the region's best shopping while downtown Sacramento struggles.

I don't think it has much to do with "the people" in terms of population--there are plenty of teabaggers in the East Bay who protest transit-oriented development because they think it's part of a United Nations "Agenda 21" conspiracy to force everyone out of the suburbs and into Soviet-style premade apartment blocks, and there are plenty of Orange County Republican suburbanites that pride themselves on never going to depraved, decaying, Democrat-filled downtown Los Angeles. I'm talking more about regional leadership, which generally means the real estate development community (it being the biggest business in the region outside of state government) and the leaders they elect. As long as leadership in cities like Roseville consider Sacramento a necessary evil rather than the core of the region (and refuse to economically participate with regional transit plans unless we pay for 100% of them), and supervisors of counties like El Dorado aren't even willing to participate in regional planning (preferring more centerless sprawl-burbs in El Dorado Hills, with public transit limited to a couple commuter buses) it's going to be tough to present the region as a whole to potential partners.

As to the shopping, that's a separate issue to our role as a global city--and the case in pretty much any American city with an old core and new suburbs. Shopping is better where the population sits, and in most western cities, that population is in the suburbs.

I think all this is part of the growing-up pains of a city that was not so long ago a smallish capital. In 1980 we only had 275,000 people. That's smaller than Stockton today!

We're no younger than any other city in California--and the main reason we can't grow "up" is because the counties to the east are so insist on growing "out" in the wrong direction. They're still stuck with the idea that cities are evil and the future is an endless procession of cul-de-sacs and shopping malls.