One of the challenges in the back of my head most of the time is the questions of needing to find a better, more integrated and more holistic way to plan for the future of cities.  I don’t have a full answer yet, but I know that a big piece of it has to be more than drawing colored blobs on a map, noting how nice it would be to have a bunch of biotech businesses and “encouraging” people to do stuff.

So this blog post out of Detroit’s PublicPrivatePassion.com particularly caught my attention.  We all should be doing this, or something like it.  I especially like the combination of housing and commercial corridors into one strategy — they are so dependent on each other, and far too often we deal with them like they were on different planets.

The only thing I would add is that there should be cross-communication between the circles while they’re being developed.  A system of cross-advising and reporting would be a good help

Do read the post ( but don’t ask me what’s going on on Scandal — about 70% of their pop culture references go over my head. I live under a rock…)

The 5 Pillars of a Citywide Revitalization Strategy