Public-Private Partnerships

In Our Towns, public-private partnerships are explicitly named as a common mechanism behind comeback towns. James and Deborah Fallows observe that despite “deep dissimilarities on most issues of national politics,” the leaders and voters of both Greenville (SC) and Burlington (VT) “relied steadily on public-private partnerships, in which state and city governments have taken active steering roles for corporate and philanthropic efforts.” The book folds this into its “traits of a town on the rise” — occupied storefronts, river walks, public-private partnerships — under the City Building heading. The Greenville case shows the texture: the local business community pushed the school district toward a STEAM curriculum to nurture a future workforce, an example of the private side steering a public institution.

David Pickeral is the corpus’s practitioner of the idea: an advisor focused on “New Mobility” whose core work is “developing institutional frameworks and partnerships around smart-city / transportation efforts” — public-private partnerships as the institutional scaffolding for transportation and smart cities. For the narrower, company-specific use of the term as a DigitalTown business model, see Public-Private Partnership.

Context: Public-private partnerships (PPPs / P3s) are cooperative arrangements in which government bodies and private firms (and often philanthropic actors) jointly fund, build, or steer projects — common in urban redevelopment, infrastructure, and smart-city efforts.

Where this appears

• Our Towns — Greenville and Burlington’s reliance on public-private partnerships with state/city governments “steering” corporate and philanthropic efforts; a named trait of a town on the rise.
• David Pickeral — advisor whose core work is building institutional frameworks / partnerships around smart-city and transportation efforts.