New Development Strategy | ModeShift

China Joins Global Pivot Away From Carbon

by Keith SchneiderNovember 7, 2015November 19, 20150

SHENZHEN, China â€“ Although it is a distinctive way to view the world, to some extent the contemporary industrial age is a global narrative of substance abuse and recovery. Sixty years ago the basic elements at the center of political and ecological concern were uranium and plutonium. Reckless Soviet and American atomic bomb blasts put so much deadly radiation in the atmosphere that milk and water became contaminated. Nations heeded the warnings of scientists and …

Donghao Chung, Guangzhou’s Daylighted Refuge

by Keith SchneiderOctober 25, 2015November 11, 20152

GUANGZHOU, China — Can a polluted stormwater drain newly constructed as an urban park speak for a city? Can a place of refuge, where clear water slips past slick rocks and families gather near the sound and mist of fountains, be an extension of a nation? There’s always risk in heaping such rhapsody on a single example. Still, in the characteristically handsome Chinese design, and in the cooling embrace of its flowing water, the Donghao …

Slowly, With Earth Pushing Hard, A Confederacy Of Concern Develops

by Keith SchneiderAugust 28, 2015November 19, 20152

BENZONIA, MI — The role of a journalist isn’t hard to understand. We’re translators. We sort through the myriad details ofÂ complex subjects and choose the most salient to build a narrative that’s simpler for readers to understand. There couldn’t be a more important era to deploy that skill than now — the dismaying, dangerous, fabulous, primal decades of the 21st century. We’re now 15 years into the 21st century. Underlying so much of the …

Gabrielle Gray’s Last ROMP

by Keith SchneiderJuly 11, 2015June 23, 20214

OWENSBORO, KY. — Around noon on the last Saturday of Gabrielle Gray’s long run as the founder and director of ROMP, this Ohio River City’s signature bluegrass music festival, a moment of pure love and remembrance unfolded unexpectedly. Standing alone on the festival stage with her fiddle, Phoebe Hunt, one of the singularly great young artists that ROMP has featured in the last several years, prepared to open her set as a solo. A striking …

Earth Day 2015 Marks Convergence of Inspiring Trends

by Keith SchneiderApril 22, 2015November 19, 20151

Earth Day, first celebrated 45 years ago in the United States, is now a grown-up international convergence that joins a reckoning with ecological deterioration to the panorama of human activity devoted to improving the planet’s condition. What’s inspiring about Earth Day is that the same principles of responsibility, collective action, pollution prevention, and natural resource conservation that informed the first Earth Day in 1970 have proven to be the durable foundation of 1) ecological repairs …

Stanley Heckadon-Moreno is Panama’s Great Conservationist and Patriot

by Keith SchneiderMarch 5, 2015March 24, 20150

COLON, Panama â€“ Across the expanse of a half-century-long career as an ecologist, reformer, and skilled raconteur, Stanley Heckadon-Moreno saw his native Panama engulfed by one spasm of political transition after another. A weak democracy and resentment of American ownership of the Panama Canal in the 1960s begat the corrupt military dictatorship of the 1980s. A damaging American invasion in 1989 gave rise to a decade of hardship and confusion in the 1990s. Even the …

Along Ohio River, Big Data Lifts Cincinnati

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 24, 2015March 25, 20150

CINCINNATI â€“ This 226-year-old Ohio River city came unglued in early April 2001, when three nights of riots and a plunge in the number of residents and businesses followed the death of an unarmed black man shot by the police. Fourteen years later Cincinnati is climbing to the top of the heap of American midsize cities in real estate construction — a surge in investment and new buildings fostered not only by the hard work …

Panama’s Water-Rich Eden Confronts Snake’s Temptation

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 10, 2015March 24, 20155

PANAMA CITY, Panama â€“ Quebrada Ancha, a community that settled in Panama’s thick forest 50 years ago, lies at the northern end of Lago Alajuela, a freshwater lake built by the United States at the end of the Great Depression to control floods in the Panama Canal Zone. It takes 20 minutes in a fast 40-foot dugout boat to get there. In early morning’s luminous light and cooling breeze the trip is a passage across …

Worcester Redevelopment in the New York Times

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 7, 2015January 10, 20150

WORCESTER, Mass. — Though College of the Holy Cross was founded here in 1843, and eight other prominent institutions of higher learning followed, it’s taken most of the last two centuries for this sizable New England city to consider itself a college town. It does so now. From one end of the city’s 245-acre central core to the other, Worcesterâ€™s primary boulevards are steadily filling up with the civic equipment that is attracting new residents, …

Dream Big — Why Ohio River Valley Resurgence is Nationally and Globally Significant

by Keith SchneiderDecember 5, 2014June 23, 20211

OWENSBORO, KY — More than three years ago, while writing a study that suggested several new 21st century development ideas for this old river city, I discovered the mysteries of the Ohio River Valley. The region’s natural beauty is immediately striking. The recovering economies of cities and counties, once described as the Rust Belt, impress me. The unexpected governing approaches — cities passing new taxes as a development tool, and seeking consolidation with their surrounding …