NOT TIME TO REST ON OUR LAURELS

For more than a century, San Diego has been pursuing big opportunities to gain attention from the nation and around the world, many of which failed. In a significant reversal of historic trends, San Diego in partnership with Tijuana just won an international competition to be designated the World Design City for 2024.

This win against Moscow, the other finalist, bespeaks a coming of age for a city which has chased and typically lost similar competitions — competitions from which we have fortunately come back stronger.

Geography has not been kind to San Diego. The weather makes it a paradise, but the region’s relative isolation and its lack of abundant natural resources (water, energy, forests) made this area no place for heavy industry.

It’s not like we didn’t try to overcome these obstacles. In the 1870s, San Diego failed to secure a railroad connection to the east. Los Angeles won that race.

We boasted of the biggest natural harbor south of San Francisco Bay. But L.A. built a manmade harbor at San Pedro starting in 1899, and today the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach dominate shipping, not only on the West Coast but across the United States.

In 1909, San Diego, like many cities, saw the potential of international trade with the construction of the Panama Canal. The Chamber of Commerce bid for a world’s fair to tout this as the first port of call for ships heading from the East. But San Francisco won that national nod for its PanamaPacific International Exposition in 1915.

In each case, San Diego bounced back and then some. It built its own alternate west-east rail line, the San Diego & Arizona, in 1919 and mapped out a freeway system ahead of growth. It mounted its own regional fair, the Panama-California Exposition, which put San Diego on the national map and gave us Balboa Park as we know it today.

Our fair didn’t attract industry or trade from the canal. But it did catch the eye of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the Navy. Coached by San Diego Rep. William Kettner, FDR directed naval investments our way, and, when he became president, his fondness for San Diego helped make this a manufacturing mecca ahead of World War II.

One appropriation led to another: North Island Naval Air Station, the “birthplace” of Navy aviation; contracts for Convair Liberator bombers, and wartime research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography that figured into the victory at D-Day.

The end of the war foreshadowed a drop-off in federal spending. To replace that income, voters approved bonds in 1945 to turn Mission Bay marshland into an aquatic wonderland. SeaWorld San Diego and tourist hotels generate millions in tourist taxes a year.

In the 1950s, civic leaders lobbied to create UC San Diego and the Salk Institute — key components in San Diego’s global reputation.

They also zoned the Torrey Pines Mesa for research and light industry to capitalize on the war’s scientific brainpower and its commercial spinoffs.

In the 1980s, San Diego mobilized to win the headquarters for the proposed “Microcomputer Consortium” of computer companies. But Austin won the sweepstakes through offers of hard-to-resist incentives. Three years later, a similar competition aimed at semiconductors, but Sematech went to Northern Virginia.

Nonetheless, San Diego leaders joined with the local research institutions through such catalytic organizations as Connect, Biocom and Cleantech to grow our own technology clusters.

Now, 40 years later, we rank in the top tier globally in life sciences, information and environmental technology, cybersecurity and computer software.

Now we come to the World Design Capital.

San Diego won because it partnered with Tijuana in the first binational bid among the six capitals selected so far by the Montreal-based World Design Organization.

We can strut our stuff over the next two years, but this is not the time to rest on our laurels.

We need to imaginatively and collaboratively work together to realize the opportunity this win represents for our entire binational region.

We need to up our game in architecture and urban design, unclog our transportation networks and conserve our natural resources.

We need to design our social and economic future on both sides of the border — a place to live and prosper where we prepare the next generation to take over and build on the achievements of the past.

This is a time of celebration. Clearly, we have a lot of work ahead that should not end in 2024 but continue well into the future.

But for the moment, we should all savor our success.