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 …
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Random Excerpt: Small Businesses Need Interdependence
Every week, I crack open The Local Economy Revolution: What's Changed and How You Can Help and randomly select a section to share with you. Like what you see? Check out the book for print or Kindle here. Much more goodness enclosed. Interdependence Small businesses most differ from larger businesses because of the repercussions of …
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From the Good Ideas File: 5 New Rules of Public Outreach that Works
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 …
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From the Good Ideas File: Citizen Roles in Civic Problem-Solving
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 …
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From the Good Ideas (or maybe the I-told-you-so) File: Consultants’ Disruption
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 …
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From the Good Ideas File: A Conference on What Went Wrong
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 …
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Random Excerpt: Changing Your Community Will Take a While — So you Might as Well Get Started.
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 …
From the Good Ideas File: Design and build your own car… or washing machine… or whatever
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 …
From the Good Ideas File: A Garage that does more than Green, it builds ecosystem
People who have been paying attention to the bottom-up indie revitalization that's been going on in Detroit might have heard of the Green Garage -- or maybe I just read a lot of obscure stuff. Hm. I'm gonna admit that when I first heard about the Green Garage, my reaction was, "nice good, needed, yes, …
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From the Good Ideas File: The Smart Chicago Collaborative – A New Model for Civic Innovation in Cities
As you might have noticed if you've read the book, the Local Economy Revolution doesn't propose any easy answers. The prevailing message of the book is probably that effective community economy revitalization takes hard, interconnected work at a whole range of factors, including both conventional "economic" issues and those that we too often haven't considered …
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 