I have had the privilege for the past couple of years of writing a regular column for Planning Commissioner’s Journal, a publication geared toward citizen planners and the professionals who ...
The following blog post from www.businessinsider.com hit my inbox a couple of weeks ago during an intensely busy period. We talk a lot in the Wise Economy world about the necessity ...
As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I have an awesome friend named Bill Lutz who is the Development Program Manager for the city of Piqua, Ohio — a ...
When I give a presentation, my slides anymore usually have more words than pictures. That’s what the presentation experts say you should do, but it means that when you download ...
I am getting ready to speak at the American Planning Conference in Los Angeles about two of my favorite topics: downtown and retail district revitalization, and online tools for public ...
For those of you attending the Ohio City-County Manager’s association presentation today, here is a link to the presentation, in case you want to follow along. Gold star for you! ...
I’ve referenced a guy named Umair Hacque on here before, and if you haven’t taken the hint and started reading his stuff yet, you should. If anyone is thinking and ...
I wanted to draw your attention to a great blog post from Otis White… As I have grappled over the years with the question of how to help communities become ...
We have a plethora of wisdom available to us in this era. We have developed tools to allow us to access unprecedented volumes of information and ideas, and you would ...
For those of you who attended my session on public participation at the workshop, I promised to post the links to the various online public participation and planning tools that ...
For those of you that attended sessions with me at conferences in September or October, I am glad to say that I finally got the slides posted to Slideshare so ...
This article on innovation research captures a critical truth about public participation: if we don’t create a clear structure for people to think within, their thinking won’t be worth very much. Here’s ...
I am not sure what it says about me that my blog posts are more likely to quote either Shakespeare or Dr. Seuss than anyone else…. The story “An Old Horse ...
I put a post on my Google+ profile this morning calling attention to an article Richard Florida did for the Atlantic. Florida does a nice job here of summarizing ...
Q: What is this flower? A: An apple blossom. It’s also the state flower of Michigan. Q: What’s this second flower? A: A Hibiscus. It’s also the state flower ...
First, we need to change how we think about communities, businesses, organizations and governments. We need to understand that economic vitality depends on the health of a community, and that ...
Wise people and Wise communities make conscious choices, rather than letting circumstances make the choices for them. As people, we all allow some decisions to get made by default — ...
A wise person doesn’t only think ahead, he or she also anticipates and prepares to deal proactively with the unintended consequences of a decision. That sounds like an oxymoron – ...
A few months ago, I received a wonderful invitation from the publisher of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal to start writing a regular column. The first one appears in the Spring ...
One of the items that I have been struggling to define over the last few months is what I mean by a Wise Economy, and how that approach fundamentally differs ...
The lesson for today, girls and boys, is that you’re most likely to find the insights you’re looking for in the place where you aren’t looking. I have struggled for ...
Stop it. Just stop it. Are you trying to sound like children squabbling on the playground? I know you’re going to say the other side started it, it’s not my ...
Note: this blog post was original published in late 2009, shortly after Dave Bing took office in Detroit and when the issue of downsizing that city first began to be discussed ...
This post breaks all the Blogging 101 rules by actually having two purposes (ooh….don’t tell on me…). The first purpose is to encourage you to read this blog entry by ...
It’s that time of year when even the most laissez-faire of us get hit with the Set Goals bug. We all resolve (myself included) to lose more weight, eat better, ...
The article on retail incubators at the bottom of this blog entry is not new, but it’s in the file of “interesting stuff to write a blog about when it feels ...
This post is NOT mine…. I get no credit except maybe a little editing. My friend Bill Lutz, the Community Development Director for Piqua, Ohio, has a tendency to raise ...
My post last week about whether comprehensive plans are worth doing and what goes on with them generated a lot of very thoughtful feedback, both in the blog comments and ...
Last week, the Sacramento Bee took the city council to task for turning down a “more ambitious proposal with greater potential to transform downtown” in favor of a more modest proposal ...
I’ve said here many times that a wise economy requires building on your assets, finding and capitalizing on the things that make your community unique, and using the precious resources ...
Planning Commissioner’s Journal usually finds something interesting and relevant to say, and this 2006 article by Hannah Twadell that was recently reposted remains relevant: Corridors link communities. And sometimes the ...
Joe Borgstrom of Michigan Main Street Center is one of the people that I increasingly look to for insight into what makes communities economically successful. In this blog post, Joe ...
I took a couple of weeks off from the blog (and from work) to enjoy the family, spend a lot of time in the car and catch up on reading. ...
Sometimes the universe just seems to be on the same page for once. This post from the Michigan Main Street Center has been circulating the Twittersphere the last couple of ...
My biggest difficulty in Christmas shopping (other than trying to remember which Bakugon the 7-year old said was the really wonderful one, and which one was lame), is trying to ...
Agenda 360, the Cincinnati-area initiative to catalyze regional growth, has announced a goal of creating 200,000 net new jobs in the next 10 years. A description, and a link to ...
http://www.biztimes.com/news/2009/11/13/a-new-corporate-umbrella An interesting article out of Milwaukee. Not every community can have a sort of Daddy Warbucks like these three gentlemen, but what I think they have really done goes ...
Last week, in my Wise Economy Manifesto first draft, I wrote that a Wise Economy Looks constantly for new opportunities — and particularly seeks the unexpected ones. This idea probably comes from ...
Just found out that I’ll be speaking on sustainable economic development at the American Planning Association National Conference in New Orleans in April! Yahoo!!
This editorial from South Carolina’s News & Observer advocates an idea that isn’t new but is still radical: that financial incentives to recruit businesses aren’t worth it. The author, Dr. ...
My last blog post focused on one of several points made in an article at www.newgeography.com that discussed issues around Detroit’s post-industrial environment. In addition to an interesting insight into ...
This article from newgeography.com is more dense with information and ideas than I can cover in a blog post (especially a Friday night blog post!), but — and I say ...
Last year I chaired a work group focused on urban entrepreneurship for Agenda 360, a Cincinnati-region strategic planning effort. One of the issues we struggled with was, what urban communties ...
Regional government is a touchy subject at best in most places — and one likely to get you chased out of town with sharp implements in others. In Kentucky, however, ...
This link takes you to an abstract that summarizes (in nothing resembling clear language) a study that indicated a high correlation between a higher level of amenities and choice of ...
ICSC Latin America finds that commercial developments do better when they are “authentic.” But what does that mean?
Wow…. This article claims that more than 50% of businesses are home-based. Imagine how that changes the game for planning and economic development: How do you retain your businesses and ...
Another presentation today… this one in Indiana for APA (it’s been a very long fall!). Topic du jour was fiscal impact analysis as a tool for sustaining local communities. I ...
For my Ohio friends — a good training opportunity on one of the very valuable resources available to owners of historic buildings. One of the single best tools for conserving ...
This article from the Center for Rural America demonstrates a key challenge in small city redevelopment — and in any place, urban or rural, that is having trouble attracting redevelopment: ...
I started my professional life as a cultural resources consultant in northern Wisconsin (ok, that wasn’t quite the start, but it’s a long story…). During that time I had the ...
How can a place like this be fixed? That is the question that has driven my career. I grew up in a Cleveland suburb watching the rippling impacts of closing ...
