Remembering Neal Peirce

If you’re interested in cities, then you probably spend a lot of time online reading content that discusses urban issues and the role of cities in fostering both prosperity and quality of life on sites such as CityLab, NextCity, Emily Badger’s contributions to The Upshot on The New York Times’ website, and countless other outlets, including the Kinder Institute’s own Urban Edge blog. But you may not have heard of Neal Peirce, the guy who started this conversation. Peirce, a longtime writer about cities and urban affairs, died in Washington on Dec. 27, at the age of 87.

Neal wrote the first — and so far, only — nationally syndicated newspaper column about cities and states. He wrote numerous books about them and took the lead in producing 25 reports in the 1980s and ‘90s on America’s metropolitan regions and how they could work better. He traveled around the country for decades, talking to mayors, governors and economic development experts about the latest trends in a very pragmatic what-works kind of way. His efforts set the stage not only for CityLab and NextCity but for nonprofit web-based journalism in general. He was also a mentor to me.