November 19, 2024

Category: New Development Strategy

New Measure of Community Vitality: Neighborhoods That Blog

by Keith Schneider2

Outside.in is a Web site launched last year to gather the panoply of writers doing place-based blogging. The site is the brain child of Steven Johnson, a  prominent writer and blogger in New York who’s written five books and contributes to, among others, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Johnson was helped by John Geraci, a social media specialist, and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation and member of the board of Amazon and the MacArthur Foundation. …

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Gas Prices, Peak Oil, and the New American Backwater

by Keith Schneider5

It’s the nutty season here in the first weeks of spring. The purebred chicken scratch hill billy hound dog puppy that I picked up off the highway in southern Virginia almost 18 years ago decided she’d had enough and wandered off two days ago and vanished. It’s been snowing here in Michigan’s great white north for more than a week. Over the weekend I shoveled nine inches of snow off the deck and driveway and it’s colder than it was in January when …

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Thinking Big in Knoxville, Tulsa, Salt Lake City

by Keith Schneider0

KNOXVILLE — From his office on the fifth floor of the Knoxville City County building, Dave Hill looks across the Tennessee River to 350 acres and more than two miles of riverfront. None of it is enchanting. Yet all of it essential to this mid-size southern city’s plan to be a green, clean, energy efficient, and lovely statement about America’s capacity to build the century’s new world class urban centers. As my Manhattan mother might say: “Knoxville? Where’s  Knoxville?” …

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Smart Growth and Gentrification

by Keith Schneider0

For as long as I’ve been involved in understanding the dimensions of urban disinvestment, as well as the solutions, one more civic concern has always lurked in the shadows. That’s gentrification, the process by which wealthier people interested in moving back into a city use buying power and sway to push the poor out of their homes. As a journalist, public policy specialist, and citizen of America I’ve personally experienced almost every side of this …

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Pure Michigan

by Keith Schneider0

If you’ve followed what’s going on here in Michigan you know that we continue to lead the nation in too many categories that aren’t welcome — joblessness, rates of obesity and heart disease, income gap between wealthy and poor, racial segregation, home foreclosures. And we are at the bottom of the heap in categories that define well-being – income growth, business starts, educational achievement, the quality of our big cities, state fiscal health. There are many reasons why Michigan has slid …

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Cool Sites on Design, Cities, Environment

by Keith Schneider0

Metrophile is an interesting offering on Wired’s blog network. It covers trends and fashion and art, the urban snackage that makes living in the metropolitan space a more inviting existence for growing numbers of Americans, young and retired.  The International Herald Tribune launched its Business of Green blog last month, and it’s alreadys one of the savviest forums for global business and environmental trends on the Internet. The New York Times carries the blog on the page it’s hidden …

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Reason? at Reason Foundation

by Keith Schneider2

It’s essential to stay abreast of what opponents to a reasoned development strategy have to say about Smart Growth. And there’s no more unreasonable voice on these issues than the social theorists at the libertarian Reason Magazine. This week Sam Staley and Ted Balaker published their newest assessment of the value of public transit, why Americans won’t ride new trains and buses, and how to relieve congestion. They come to this conclusion: “The planning gurus who are supposed …

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Climbing Gas Prices, Slipping Dow: A Connection

by Keith Schneider4

This week the price of regular gasoline in my village at the top of Lake Michigan reached $2.60 a gallon, about 62 cents a gallon more than in January. Late last month, the Dow Jones experienced the steepest drop in years. Are the two connected? You bet. You might also ask how these two trends are linked to the American Mode Shift, the transformation of metropolitan regions into cleaner, greener, more energy-efficient, more prosperous places?  Here’s how. Oil is and will remain the …

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George Lakoff and the Mode Shift

by Keith Schneider2

A couple of months before it became clear in 2004 that John Kerry didn’t have a clue about how to frame his election bid — “Lt. Kerry reporting for duty,” is the memorably stupid way he started his nomination address – a University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor named George Lakoff (see pix) burst onto the national political scene to remind progressives that the message was everything in public policy and politics. His 2004 book, “Don’t Think of an …

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New Urbanism’s Mecca Is 25

by Keith Schneider0

In 2002, when he was still the governor of Maryland, Parris Glendening invited a handful of Smart Growth leaders from around the country to join him for a three-day talk fest at Seaside, the famous Florida Gulf Coast resort community that served as the weirdly perfect set of the 1998 Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show. I attended the weekend, serving as the message and media guy for a gathering that also included Andres Duany, the architect and co-founder …

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