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.
"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
I'm not sure if this really qualifies as a "Good Idea." But it's good words. Especially for you people, the ones I couldn't figure out what to call in this book. except for... the People who Give A Damn. I think it fits. You migh want to print this out and stick it in the …
Five Reasons The Government Needs to Start Acknowledging Freelancers | Elizabeth Tse http://t.co/nSnoL7c8yN In the book, I spent a whole section on the 1099, or freelancer economy, which has been getting a lot of press lately. But one of the biggest problems is that we are guessing, sometimes wildly, about what they are and what …
Continue reading From the Good Idea file: We need better 1099 data!
Could 'eds and meds' be a liability for some cities? Via @AtlanticCities: http://t.co/CUvb10i2Od For me, this was the particularly interesting part -- chalk it up to the risks of unintended consequences and counting on magic bullets to solve everthing for us: Eds and meds employment levels were uniformly negatively associated with nearly every single important …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: the unintended consequences of Eds and Meds
If we're depending more and more on a small business ecosystem, and we have to think of local economies less like machines and more like parkland, then one of the things that we have to start thinking about is how to facilitate the businesses that support a small business ecosystem, like this example from Detroit: …
Continue reading Good Ideas: Market support for emerging companies
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 