Wise Economy

Are they running a small business that sucks?

Urban planners and downtown revitalization or regeneration types have done a great job of embracing the value and potential of places that we might be tempted to overlook. The arcade-style ...

Concerned, Communicating, Connected, Commitment: Building Community-Local Government Relationships

My old – but-not-so-old friend Bill Lutz wrote to me recently about his perceptions of how local governments should pursue community engagement, and as usual he brought a perspective and ...

Economics or Public Engagement? Yes I am… no I’m not…Yes I am…no…

Hi. My name is Della, and apparently I look like this: About every other week I discover that I have totally confused someone with my business. Yesterday it was a ...

Using Data for Sustainable Economic Development with GEDI/ MIT CoLab

We finally have the second podcast up in our mini-series on Sustainable Economic Development, produced in partnership with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab). This series features 14 professionals who participated ...

Ooooh…pictures: Videocast with Urban Interactive Studio for PlannersWeb

I’m delighted to announce a new partnership with PlannersWeb (the new online incarnation of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal) to share interviews with people who are leading us into the future of public ...

Citizen Engagement and the Cranky Old Cranky Cranks

It might have something to do with me still being young enough to relate to the vibrant lifestyle of 20-somethings, but it has occurred to me that the field of ...

The Planner’s superpower: no straight edges required.

“This is not the planning profession John Nolen built. A century later, our great recession has sparked a full re-evaluation of what a city’s urban planning department should be ‘doing’ ...

No laurel-resting here: Dublin, Ohio plans for a changing future

People in Ohio tend to point to the Columbus suburb of Dublin as one of those places that has everything going for it: big houses, wealthy people, lots of high-paying ...

APA 2013 — Sessions, events, awesome people…and maybe some blues. Or something.

Just a quick note for you planning types that I’ll be doing two sessions (read: I am an idiot) at the American Planning Association’s annual conference next week in Chicago. ...

Change Your Culture of Public Participation

In a true display of democracy, a town hall meeting held at the New Bedford High School auditorium Monday gave the crowd of approximately 550 residents the opportunity to publicly ...

Incentives: No more yes-no-yes-no.

I wrote the following as a response to an ongoing debate on incentives that has been occurring on one of the LinkedIn groups that I follow. There’s been a strong ...

In the Workshop: What happens when an employer goes out?

I’ve got a new item in the Workshop that I’d like your feedback on. My friend and collaborator Pete Mallow took an initial stab at trying to identify the types ...

The Rust Belt Bird-Flip to Dying

Sometimes you have to force yourself to walk with your ghosts so that you know who they are. And who you are, too. I always say that I am ...

Business recruitment: Crap shoots and buying our own sales pitches

As we rethink how we do economic development, we need to give up the idea that the primary way to grow a local economy is through business recruitment. As much ...

Load up your dog sled and make Little Bets

Yesterday I wrapped up with an assertion that the speed of change in the world means that the kind of resistance to change that Aaron Renn noted in how economic ...

Why we don’t get economic development: we don’t really want it.

Ask any civic leader the number one thing they want for their town and “jobs,” economic development, is what they … http://pulse.me/s/jhGdU If you are not reading the Urbanophile, I ...

Old White Guys and Sales Paradigms

Matthew Tuerk (@matthewtuerk) tweeted at 10:15 PM on Wed, Mar 13, 2013: old, white guys http://t.co/8DpPe4nclQ #econdevREV #mansplaining Economic development as an industry has known about its “old white guy” ...

Annotated slides from Ohio Economic Development Association Strategic Planning, March 2013

This annotated presentation comes from a training I did for the Introduction to Economic Development course hosted by the Ohio Economic Development Association last week. I had the session on ...

Economic Impact Studies: The Number is not your friend

I’m excited today to introduce a new guest blogger, Peter Mallow. Pete’s a one of a kind. Really? Really. How many people do you know who have developed subdivisions, fought ...

Community poison: Dichotomies

I wanted to share with you a great essay from CEOs for Cities that gets at one of the issues that worries me the most: our tendency to oversimplify our ...

Terrible Public Engagement: the Three (or 7) D’s

Good LinkedIn discussions are like sitting in on a dinner with bright and insightful people from all over the world (without trying to decide how to split the check). ...

Useful framework for Public Engagement responses from the Victoria Department of Justice

One of the ongoing challenges for anyone involved in online public engagement is determining which comments on an online platform warrant a response, and which ones… well, don’t, for whatever ...

Big Deals and coordinated small events: Challenges of Doin’ it Big (from Carbonocracy.com)

I’m delighted to introduce you to a new blogger who will hopefully be submitting to the Wise Economy. Matthew Buccelli is a recent Georgetown grad who has impressed me with ...

The impossible got done: restoring the Fort Piqua Hotel

When you work in community revitalization, you find yourself telling a few stories over and over again, because they so beatifully sum up the possibilities that struggling communities can’t always ...

Podcast: Owning Your Economy with APA award-winning Clinton County

I’ve been looking forward to doing and sharing this interview since back before I started podcasting – and the timing couldn’t be better, because this community just won the American ...

Creating a Disruptive Model of Economic Development Innovation: New Community Paradigms at Work

This week’s posts are going to primarily reflect what I heard at last week’s IEDC Leadership Summit, which I think has the potential to turn out to be a sea ...

What does Winning Matter?

I promised a couple of folks that I would write some blog entries trying to capture what I am hearing at the IEDC Leadership Conference in Orlando. So what follows ...

Podcast: Kathleen Norris, Urban Retail and What You Don’t Know Will Probably Hurt You

This podcast features one of the speakers that I have most enjoyed lately — Kathleen Norris of the Cincinnati-based, world-oriented retail real estate consulting and brokerage firm Urban Fast Forward. ...

Registration open: Creative Financing (sponsored by OCMA), February 28

I’m delighted to invite you to my third training session with Mark Barbash and Jim Kinnett: Creative Financing to Help Create Economic Development. We hope you will join us for an ...

Rebooting Economic Development: Getting Past the Incentives Debate

OK. So we know that economic development incentives can have some benefit, but we also know that easily become too reliant on them. We have too often viewed economic development ...

Go Find Some Non-Experts. You Probably Need Them.

We have this deep-seated desire to believe that experts can hand us answers. We spend huge sums on consultants (the ones who claim to have 937 years of combined experience) ...

Economic Development Incentives: the deep, and deeper, and deepest challenge.

Oy. Trying to craft a cogent and fair assessment of the incentives issue and the responsibilities of those of us who care about communities is feeling like the Gorgon’s knot…you ...

Economic Development and incentives: a race to the bottom?

We’ve been picking up the ongoing debate over economic development incentives this week, starting with insights from Bill Lutz on analyzing the results of incentives and from Kathy Dodson on ...

Incentives: Seize the Opportunity to Do No Harm

As I noted earlier this week, the debate over the use of incentives in economic development has been hot and heavy for most of the past month – across publications, ...

Make better decisions: process matters

I have an longstanding obsession with understanding how decisions get made in complex environments, and how we can make better decisions in local government, non-profit and business settings. (Hey, I ...

Podcast: Urban Business Districts, Real Estate Realities and the Formula for Retail Death

In our first Wise Economy podcast of 2013, we’re sharing excerpts from a presentation by Ed Starkie of Urban Advisors. This presentatation was given at the Plan Build Live Neighborhood ...

Plan Build Live Public Engagement Wins Award!

We’re delighted to announce that our partners at Northlich, LLC won a Public Relations Society of America Blacksmith Award last week for our community engagement effort around Plan Build Live, ...

I need your help: does economic development make a difference?

The great fun of blogging is always the feedback. But when you have thoughtful critical thinkers for readers, the way I do here, sometimes their comments shine a bright and ...

Economic Development: Does your place matter?

My oftentime contributor Bill Lutz pointed out to me the other day, as part of a conversation about how traditional economic development methods often don’t seem to be working well, ...

Won’t Get Fooled Again: annotated slides from presentation

At long last, here are the annotated slides from the presentation that Peter Mallow and I did on deciphering an economic impact study and finding the key assumptions and trigger ...

Podcast: A CDC Becomes a Savvy Negotiator at the East Liberty Development Corp., Pittsburgh

Talk about fascinating… One of the most successful community development corporations in the country once has a balance sheet of zero. What do you do to help an organization like ...

Consultant as wizard: [expletive deleted]

It’s very hard to type and pace around fuming at the same time. I just left a session at a national conference that shall remain unnamed. I left because I ...

Growing a small business ecosystem: the 1099 economy

We have a big sleeper challenge when it comes to building small business ecosystems: for many of our communities’ most valuable workers, the very nature of being employed looks nothing ...

Podcast: Won’t Get Fooled Again – Making Sense of Economic Studies

Peter Mallow and I did this presentation last week at the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana regional conference of the American Planning Association — and I thought the audio might be useful for you. ...

Whassa matter with social media?

Nothing. I’m a diehard Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn user. I know some people have ambivalent relationships with this stuff. Not me. A day without checking my Twitter feed anymore feels like a visit ...

Wanna watch my presentation on Helping to Build a Small Business Ecosystem?

I am so grateful for the opportunity about aweek ago to speak on strategies for building a small business ecosystem to ICANny. I was speaking to small business owners in ...

Podcast: Interview with Rebecca Maclean of Salt Pig Chicken Something Fame

What a treat it was to interview Rebecca Maclean, mastermind behind the blog Food Me Once and editor of the Digging Deep Campaign. We had a great chat during my ...

What does a small business ecosystem look like? Part 1: Interdependence

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about our need to rethink how we do economic development in a world where small businesses play an increasingly pivotal role — in ...

Launching a new series for PlannersWeb

I have the honor of being asked to become a regular contributor to PlannersWeb, the updated and interactive successor to the popular Planning Commissioners Journal. While the column I wrote for ...

Podcast: Buy 25 Tuesdays with Walnut Hills Revitalization Fund

We’re getting ready to launch a new addition to the Wise Economy Workshop — a podcast series that includes both readings from blogs and interviews with people who are doing ...

We have animals more equal than others.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. -George Orwell, Animal Farm. That might be the most uncomfortable quote many people remember from high school English. ...

Where is the place for engineering-think?

Hi. My name is Della, and I work with engineers. I also married one. Anyone know of a good support group? Engineers have a unique handle on the world, ...

Tolerance in an unpredictable economic world

What is it about human character that makes it so easy for us to judge one another? It is so easy, dangerously easy sometimes, for us to assume that we ...

Cultivating the Small Business Ecosystem (part 2)

To continue where we left off last week, talking about small business ecosystems: When you grow a garden, you don’t build the plants out of rocks and plastic. You create ...

Growing a small business ecology, part 1

Writing has a funny way of not going where you planned on it to go. Yesterday I wrote about communities as human ecosystems, and the need to change how we ...

I see usability

I see usability. That was my dad’s favorite saying. Dad was a dedicated junk collector, a man with no hesitation about pulling things off the curb in front of the ...

Helping places make room for What We Will Be Next

Damn movie. There’s another one on the list. I learned a long time ago that I am way too good at buying into what theater people call the willing suspension ...

Crocuses in the land of Strong Towns

Crocuses…lovely little sentiment for a blog post. But come on… how does that relate to a community? How can we actually build places that have resiliency? I’m proud to count ...

Resilience

One of my favorite pictures in a plenary presentation I often give is a stock photo of a yellow crocus blooming through a melted patch in the snow. Growing ...

Evolution or revolution?

One of my clients found itself this week at one of those standing-on-the-precipice moment: In this project, are we creating an evolution, or a revolution? This community is well into ...

The Logic of Failure: Making better plans

Don’t loan me a book. At least, don’t loan me a book unless you’re willing to get it back with pencil scribbles all over it. Just ask my husband. In ...

The first steps toward the marathon

It’s a tough challenge that I keep laying out with this Wise Economy thing. If you share my belief that the realities of the world and communities around us require ...

The Wise Economy Manifesto, Version 2.0

Over two years ago I wrote down something that I called the Wise Economy Manifesto (first draft). The purpose of that statement was to try to capture the sea change ...

Do the Math: Economic Arguments for Historic Preservation and Downtown Revitalization Webinar

Last summer I did a webinar for Heritage Ohio on making economic arguments in favor of public policy decisions to support historic preservation and downtown revitalization. We focused primarily on ...

I wasn’t nice to the Little Napoleons, but I guess that’s OK.

When you’re a woman who writes and speaks her opinions about issues, there’s a certain voice in the back of your head that pushes back any time you’re inclined to ...

We all need to Turn Pro

The blog seems to be taking a turn toward the…I don’t know, motivational? Metaphysical? lately, with a lot of posts about making the choice to be a force for change ...

Economic development, big game trophies and missing workers

This post is edited from a musing written by my good friend Bill Lutz, who has show up in these pages before here and here. I was deeply impressed ...

Doing public participation right!

Just when you think maybe you’ve been shouting into the void, it’s always great to find out that someone else gets it. J.M Goldson wrote a lovely post on her ...

Structural Change, Cyclical Change, Institutional Change…coming to your hometown.

Readers of this blog know that I have a deep admiration of Umair Hacque, an economist and a great writer who has done one of the best jobs I have ...

Annotated presentation, Economic Development /Business Enhancement/Economic Restructuring 101, Heritage Ohio 2012 conference

The file at the link below is an annotated version of a presentation that Craig Gossman of MSI |KKG (newly re-branded as MKSK Studios) and I gave at the Heritage ...

Why community involvement requires a structured approach, even when we’re seeking new ideas

One of my ongoing frustrations within the public engagement practice of the Wise Economy Workshop is the assumption in some corners that good public engagement means letting people recommend or ...

Looking forward: thoughts for the next 20 years from the final edition of the Planning Commissioners’ Journal

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 ...

Designing a new initiative? Good rules of thumb for you

In the “Good Ideas Directly Lifted from Someone Else” Department:” Just came across these principles from the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service. The agency makes very clear that this is ...

Don’t forget what success looks like.

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 ...

View from the Trenches: Building Wise Economies in Midwestern Cities

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 ...

Annotated presentations from APA 2012

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 ...

APA 2012 Presentations on retail district revitalization and web-enabled public participation.

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 ...

OCMA National Trends in Economic Development presentation

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! ...

Anchoring future prosperity, and the barriers that keep us from doing it.

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 ...

Leadership lessons from obituaries

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 ...

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Jane Jacobs’ organized complexity, and why we keep failing to deal with it well.

Some of you (the planner types) may have already seen the article by Michael Mehaffy that ran in Planetizen about Jane Jacobs….or maybe you did like me, and said for ...

Simplistic R Us

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 ...

Links from Northeast Ohio American Planning Association workshop, November 18, 2011

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 ...