I love what Ellen Harpel at SmartIncentives.org has been doing to increase the awareness of rational and analytical approaches to economic development incentives, a topic that has been such a bee in my bonnet (and a few other bonnets, although who wears a bonnet anymore...) that a whole section of The Local Economy Revolution focused on it. …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: The Best Incentives Might Not Require Moola
I don't think of myself as a particular Anglophile, but the fact that the only general media article that I have ever seen that brings to light how crappy our public sector planning often is, came via a British newspaper...makes me wonder why no one ever calls that out in the US. That sentence isn't …
Finding this article might have been the high point of my day. I've harped a lot -- in the book, in the discussion about the book currently going on at PlannersWeb, in pretty much every talk I've ever given -- about how the ways that we have been doing public engagement... Don't work Flame out …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: 5 New Rules of Public Outreach that Works
One of the critical messages in the book is that we need to fundamentally rethink how we involved the general public in our planning, problem-solving and general management. And that goes for people who do economic development and urban design, too, not just community planners or city managers. Across the board, our public engagement often …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Citizen Roles in Civic Problem-Solving
When I queued this article by Susannah Vila to Engaging Cities a week or so ago, I knew it also needed to end up in the Good Ideas file. Even if you're not doing civic hacking in your community, anything that you're doing to pull in a broad cross-section of participation (the way you gotta …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas (and Work At It) File: Hackathon Learning from Latin America
I rail in the book a couple of different places about bad, dishonest or plain useless practices in local government consulting - my chosen line of work for more than 20 years. My biggest beef, whether talking about 1960s architects with big capes or snake oil salesmen handing out simplistic answers at national conferences, has …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas (or maybe the I-told-you-so) File: Consultants’ Disruption
I've seen an occasional conference session popping up here and there lately, but never a whole conference on how our great ideas, big projects and good intentions blew up all over us. So it looks to me like the Urban Research Network has done something pretty interesting here. This social-sciences-researchers-with-an-activist-bent network is looking for dignified …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: A Conference on What Went Wrong
This article on planning and design for ecological resilience in the face of the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events, echoes a strong thread in physical planning across the world. But in the book, I also talked about the need for economic resilience -- the ability of a community to bounce back from the shocks …
Every week, I crack open The Local Economy Revolution to a random location and copy that section here. Intrigued by what you read? Check out the full book here. You'll be glad you did. Really. It will take a while…so you might as well get started In a true display of democracy, a …
A side effect of the attention that I have been paying to the Downtown Project in Las Vegas lately is that I stumbled across this incredibly awesome little company called LocalMotors. Local Motors -- I'm not making this up -- enables you to design. build and sell your own vehicle. It's a crowdsourced co-creation platform …
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 