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Oklahoma City moves forward with economic development.
Oklahoma City is riding a national trend of urban areas pressing forward with economic development when state leadership-falters.
“More and more metropolitan areas are pulling the state instead of the state pulling the metropolitan areas,” said Roy Williams, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber.
Williams, who heads the city’s leading business organization, reported to the city council last week on prospects for re-imagining the medical and research center east of downtown as an innovation district.
The vision isof an active, thriving collection of businesses, educational institutions and research institutes intensely focused on collaboration and entrepreneurship, spinning off ideas and growing jobs.
State government often impedes innovation and economic growth, said Ward 2 Councilman Ed Shadid.
He said the Legislature “constantly steps on its foot and embarrasses us and creates these headwinds that you have to compete against in retaining and attracting companies here.”
“It’s a huge challenge,” Williams said. “Oklahoma City has kind of taken the track of not relying on the state so much for resources but taking initiatives on its own and doing things by itself.
“Which is more reflective of what’s going on nationally,” he said. “Selling the metro is a whole lot easier than selling the state.”
Shaping innovation
Key toan innovation district is creation of a “built environment” — transit and pedestrian-friendly streetscapes conducive to sidewalk cafes, buildings that mix office and retail — where people circulate and ideas germinate.
The Brookings Institution and the Project for Public Spaces spent 18 months studying ways to build an innovation district on the foundation of the Oklahoma Health Center in northeast Oklahoma City.
The concentration of energy, biosciences, aerospace and health-care industries in Oklahoma City forms a basis for collaboration around shared interests in the application of technology.
The Oklahoma City study brought together Brookings, the public policy research organization based in Washington, D.C., and the Project for Public Spaces, of New York, for the first time, Williams said.
The study team came up with four recommendations:
• Establish a Center for Energy and Health Collaboration as an “umbrella” for innovation and applied research in energy, health and other sectors.
• Implement a technology-based economic development and entrepreneurship effort to oversee business development, attract technology businesses, and connect businesses large and small.
• Form a committee on diversity and inclusion to oversee economic, social and physical connections between the innovation district and surrounding neighborhoods, focusing on such things as education, workforce development and entrepreneurship.
• Create a more active and better-connected mixed-use urban environment, and strengthen the district’s connections to downtown’s Automobile Alley, across Interstate 235 to the west.
Connectivity challenges
Williams said there was “a lot of discussion around the barrier that I-235 presents” to connecting the innovation district and downtown.
The Chamber’s 2017 “intercity” visit — an annual trip for business and civic leaders to gather and share ideas — will be to Columbus, Ohio, and will include a visit to the Cap at Union Station.
The Cap at Union Station is a retail complex flanking what appears to be a street, High Street, which actually is a bridge over Interstate 670.
Much the way I-235 cut off northeast Oklahoma City, the highway through Columbus cut off that city’s downtown from its Short North neighborhood, leading to a slide in Short North’s fortunes.
Completed in the early 2000s, the Cap reconnected the two sections of the city, earning an urban design award.
Today, the Short North Arts District has 71,000 Twitter followers.
It promotes itself as the “art and soul of Columbus” with more than 100 galleries and exhibition spaces and dozens of shops, pubs, clubs and restaurants.
‘New paradigm’
Reconfiguring the “built environment” for an innovation district will require consensus on a new model for the Oklahoma Health Center, isolated as it is from its surroundings.
“It was really built as a campus as opposed to being built as a community,” Williams said. “And the new paradigm is community.”
Bond and sales tax proposals going before voters in September will provide for amenities such as sidewalks, bicycle lanes, streetscapes, and affordable housing, said City Manager Jim Couch.
Recently adopted changes to the area’s taxincrement financing districts also “position us … to provide those tools as development occurs in the area,” he said.
Williams said Brookings saw possibilities in leveraging expertise already in Oklahoma City, in new ways that would have the air humming with shared ideas.
“We could be a global model on a collaboration between energy and biosciences, something that’s not being done anywhere,” he said.
“And the potential commercialization out of that and the ideas that might come out of that would be revolutionary.”