Sometimes the Good Ideas file throws me a surprise. Today's Good Idea is a great follow-on to the challenge to magic -bullet thinking around vacant lots that dominated yesterday's post. According to this article, Louisville, Kentucky, is trying to figure out the vacant lot question themselves -- and they're doing it in a way that both …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Louisville’s Lots of Possibility
In this opinion piece from the Detroit Free Press, John Gallagher identifies the next challenge, and the unpleasant reality, of our current strategies for dealing with the massive numbers of vacant buildings we have in cities: The simplistic, ipso-facto hope that often rears its head: if we just clear it, "the market" will take care …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: You Tear Down the Blight, But then what?
Note: this is a random selection from The Local Economy Revolution: What's Changed and How You Can Help. Like what you see? Check out the book for print or e-reader. You'll be glad you did. We've been talking (or, well, not talking) about incentives in economic development in the US a lot lately. They work, …
OK, this is less a good idea than a good and useful analysis of why adapting any kind of transparency-based, fail-forward-fast, take risks, little bets approaches, of the type that are being advocated by new businesses and civic hackers and loudmouths like me, are so darn hard for governments of any stripe. If you cannot get …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Politicians are from Alpha, Geeks are from Beta
This is all kinds of awesome. Young people gaining skills and confidence, communities getting the kind of personal-scale improvements that change people's everyday relationships with their communities, breaking through suspicions and helplessness to re-knit people's relationship with their community and each other... your community probably needs this. So go do it! http://www.fastcoexist.com/3023330/how-the-tiny-wpa-is-transforming-neighborhoods-with-help-from-teenage-girls
I'm not sure this is a good idea...it's probably a devil-in-the-details situation... but it's certainly an interesting idea. This opinion piece from Matt Reed at Florida Today does a nice job of outlining the picking-favorites, what-about-me spiral that incentives programs fall into if they aren't backed by a very careful, very prudent strategy for clearly targeting incentives …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Why not incentivize every business?
One of the neat things about writing a book is that sometimes you discover that your message resonates with people that you didn't necessarily think would be all that excited about it. People in the online public engagement world are sometimes pretty tightly focused on technology, so it was a real delight to get this …
Continue reading More kind words about The Local Economy Revolution
What's that got to do with your local economy? Easy: people spend money in places they find fun. And they spend more time in places where they have fun. And, from the book, That Which Makes You Unique Makes You Valuable. Nuff said. This was the second of a great series of ideas. Of course, …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: 100 ways to make your town fun.
We're up to four reviews of The Local Economy Revolution... not quite up to the Three Wolf shirt (look it up -- you won't regret it...) but not too shabby. Here's the latest. Thanks, Brian! Most such attempts in creating a new future start on the far side of the chasm providing some vision of …
Continue reading A very kind Amazon review of The Local Economy Revolution
"Resilience" is a new and hot concept in planning and urbanism -- a term I didn't think would take off like that when I first wrote the section in the book about scrawny little February crocuses in Cleveland. Part of the growing interest in resilient places comes from our experiences of natural disasters, like Hurricane …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Networked communities handle disasters better
