Gateway Cities come of age

It was 10 years ago that MassINC launched its Gateway Cities initiative with a report documenting the challenges -- and huge opportunities -- in the state’s once vibrant industrial cities. “Massachusetts’ proud, old manufacturing cities must be counted, on balance, as distressed,” it said. Yet, concluded the report, “For the first time in decades, these cities’ reconnection to prosperity seems at least imaginable.” A decade later, MassINC, the non-partisan public policy think tank that publishes CommonWealth, has continued to carry out research showing some of the pathways to renewed prosperity in Gateway Cities. It has also pushed initiatives to help them get there, such as a MassDevelopment project that has placed mid-career “fellows” with expertise in urban planning and development in Gateway Cities to help with strategic planning, site acquisition for redevelopment projects, and other initiatives. But none of that would be happening without the energy and initiative of residents in the 26 Massachusetts communities that have been dubbed Gateway Cities, says Maureen McInerney, public affairs associate at MassINC, in this week’s Codcast. “They say, yes, we are ready to take this and run with it,” she says of leaders in the communities. She says they are simply looking to MassINC as a “catalyst” to help them tap the energy and potential in their community. One new approach to that catalyst role at MassINC is the publication this month of a magazine spotlighting interesting people, initiatives, and ideas taking hold in Gateway Cities. Gateways is a glossy 80-page magazine that tells the tale of today’s Gateway Cities through stories rather than the research reports that are the bread and butter of MassINC’s Gateway Cities Innovation Institute.