Recently, Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute sported a blog post about it’s Associate Director, Joseph Schilling and Alan Mallach of the Brookings Institution attendance at APA’s annual conference promoting their Cities in Transition Guide. You can read all about it on the MI’s blog here: “Cities in Transition: A Guide for Practicing Planners“
Detroit seems to be a place where sunflowers sprout through cracked pavement and forests reclaim long deserted city blocks, or at least that’s what Mayor Bing’s Detroit Works has planned for its neighborhoods. Vocabulary like “green residential” and strategies of using reforestation and experimental green fields to detoxify contaminated industrial land are being tossed around
-> Continue reading Sunflowers and Reforestation with Detroit Works
Yesterday NPR reported something that most people just a few years ago would scoff at, Cleveland is cool. It seems that Cleveland’s economic development strategy of “targeting stronger market neighborhoods” and around “areas with major assets” during the down years of population and economic declince it experienced, are paying off. Incremental in their approach, Cleveland seems to have wisely used it’s limited resources to leveage people, dollars and
-> Continue reading From Rusting to Bustling – Cleveland, OH
Urban spectators are taking notice of a recent economic development and incentive trend that is geared towards attracting more traditional Midwest industries to places such as Youngstown, OH and Detroit, MI. Potentially signaling a step backwards, instead of continuing to push forward and diversifying local, regional and state economies in the hopes of improving the quality of
-> Continue reading Miscalulation for Midwest Cities in Transition – Dependence or Diversify?
APA’s PAS Reports (Cities in Transition, PAS 568) (Sustaining Places, PAS 567) In a recent APA Sustaining Places blog by David Morely (“Is Growth a Prerequisite for Long-Term Community Health and Prosperity?”), the old assumptions of growth and decline of cities and communities in relationship to their health and prosperity are revisited. David discusses how the growth oriented planning
-> Continue reading Breaking free of the Growth Planning Paradigm