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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
As you might have figured out by now, one of my closet obsessions can be summed up as “Explain To Me Why We Do The Stupid Things We Do, Please.” ...
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 ...
This video has my voice and my slides, and thankfully not my face….I was three days out from a surgery when we did this podcast, and when I was done ...
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 ...
I taped this interview with the City of Cincinnati’s small business TV channel last spring, and it finally went on air this month. I think it gives a decent overview ...
Ah, July… I’d like to say that I haven’t blogged lately because I have been working so darn hard, but there’s too many pictures of me at a U2 concert ...
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 ...
I am getting excited about the prospect of meeting you all at the Michigan Small Town and Rural Development Conference at Crystal Mountain in Thompsonville April 18-20! As I said ...
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 ...
We all know that most of our local economies are in some form or another of mess. Draw the border around your town, your county, your region, your state, doesn’t ...
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 ...
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 ...
After my last post, I have been thinking a lot about how being a parent relates to planning and economic development and vice versa. For either amusement or edification (you ...
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 ...
After my last post about the OKI Fiscal Impact Model, I received several great comments. One of them reflected on past experience with a per capita fiscal impact model in ...
We all live in boxes. We all operate on the unspoken assumption that the options available to us are constrained, are limited by something or someone. And those constraints limit ...
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/11/clevelands_euclid_corridor_pro.html Truth in advertising: even after 20+ years out of the region, I am still a huge Cleveland fan (the city, I mean — I gave up on the Browns ...
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 ...
As I discussed in this post, I have spent most of my adult life thinking about how to deal with the impacts that economic change has on the health and ...
