From Atlantic Cities: American urban history is dotted with failed (and occasionally infamous) pedestrian malls. But there are success stories too, which offer lessons in designing walkable, mixed-use districts. The world’s first planned pedestrian mall was built in 1953 in Rotterdam. Six years later, Kalamazoo, Michigan, became the first American city adopt the concept. Austrian-born [...]

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From Economic Policy Institute: EPI had a tremendously productive week, releasing research on CEO pay and income inequality, the rough labor market 2012 graduates must navigate, the impact of state and local government job cuts on women and African Americans, and the challenges facing low-wage workers. CEOs made 231 times more than workers did in [...]

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Recently released population estimates show things are not looking up for Shelby County and the Memphis metro area in terms of growth. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates–for July 1, 2011–show that more people moved away from the entire eight-county Memphis metro area than moved in during the 15 months since the official 2010 Census was [...]

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From Salon: If you ask Whole Foods why it’s breaking ground on a store in Midtown Detroit this month, it’ll say it wants to be part of “an incredible community” and “make natural foods available to everyone.” And that may be. But it’s also true that the Austin, Texas-based retailer has made a science of [...]

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From citiwire.net: By Neal Peirce In terms of equity, it’s hard to argue with President Obama’s call to enact the “Buffett Rule” — setting an alternative minimum income tax of 30 percent for $1-million-plus earners. But it’s also true: in Washington’s multi-trillion dollar budget debates, imposing the rule proposed by financier Warren Buffett would yield [...]

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In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. This happened, as nearly everyone has noted, in the same state where John Scopes was tried in 1925 for exposing impressionable high-school students to the evils of evolutionary theory. The Volunteer State has now given [...]

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This outstanding column was written in this week’s Memphis Flyer by Councilman Shea Flinn: “The Grizzlies are in the playoffs, and we’ve come together as a community to cheer on the home team. During the playoffs, we’ll evaluate the players, break down their stat lines, and hope that Zach Randolph scores a lot of touch [...]

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4 0 4 From Sustainable Cities Collective: Speaking at a conference on ‘streetscapes’ last week, I issued a tongue-in-cheek manifesto: Just Say No to Benches and Bollards. My grouse wasn’t with street furniture in itself, but the thoughtless spending of public money on ill-considered public realm improvements as a substitute for thinking through what would [...]

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“Detroit is going to be on the cover of TIME magazine three, four, five, ten years from now as a miracle city.  It is all because of what we do.” – Dan Gilbert, Chairman, Quicken Loans Quicken Loans is branding itself and completely repositioning Detroit’s image.  The company is doing it without insulting anyone else, [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: When we think about borders, we tend to think of administrative boundaries. Those demarcating lines, often grown out of rivers and mountain ranges or diplomatic quirks, govern our daily lives, and that’s doubly so if we live near a neighboring country or state. We know that these boundaries are on some level [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: Which cities shape musical trends, exerting the biggest influence on the geographic flow of music across the United States and the world?  A new study by researchers at University College Dublin uses online data to quantify which cities have the biggest impact on our musical tastes. The researchers gathered data from the social media [...]

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I recently was privileged to be one of the Memphis attendees at a meeting for the Strong Cities, Strong Communities Initiative (SC2) at the White House.  The meeting featured representatives from all six of the cities engaged in the initiative, with a panel of mayors from those communities.  The meeting was positioned as an opportunity [...]

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From UrbanLand: Around the world, cities are seeking the recipe for economic success in a rapidly changing global marketplace. Indispensable assets in a post–industrial economy include: well–educated people, the ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into commercial realities, connectivity to global markets, and multi-modal transportation infrastructure. Another critical—but often forgotten—asset is [...]

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From Commercial Appeal and Washington Post: Memphis cited as example of deregulation leading to poor passenger air service By Bartholomew Sullivan, Commercial Appeal Tuesday, April 24, 2012 WASHINGTON — The American airline industry is failing shareholders, employees and passengers while regional hubs such as Memphis and Cincinnati are being starved of service and priced out [...]

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From Harvard Business Review: One of the best-kept secrets in economics is that there is no case for the invisible hand. After more than a century trying to prove the opposite, economic theorists investigating the matter finally concluded in the 1970s that there is no reason to believe markets are led, as if by an [...]

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[ Tory Gattis is a former McKinsey consultant who writes about urbanism for the Houston Chronicle, in his blog Houston Strategies, and elsewhere. He's an unabashed and articulate proponent of the "Houston model" of urbanism. In this post, he applies Jane Jacobs' views of the virtues of density to a car-based city like Houston. While [...]

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By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK n a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the [...]

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From NRDC Switchboard: About a year ago, NRDC Executive Director Peter Lehner asked me what one word, if I had to choose, would most closely describe a smart, sustainable community. Peter thought that the word might be density. But I chose walkability instead. It is important to have a certain (though not necessarily high) level of density [...]

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On April 12, 2012, after three months of deliberation, the Memphis and Shelby County Land Use Control Board (the “LUCB”) approved a series of amendments to the Unified Development Code (the “UDC”).  This was the first step in a rather complicated approval process that requires action by both the Memphis City Council and the Shelby [...]

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From The Big Fix: Until fairly recently, local editorial pages held something close to a monopoly on publicly stated opinion in metropolitan areas. “There weren’t a lot of other places where people were saying this is a good candidate, this is a bad candidate; this is good policy, this is bad policy,” says Joshua Benton, [...]

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From citiwire.net: By Neal Peirce In our age of acronyms, you’ll be excused if you can’t define SFPark, SFStartup, SmartSF, EngageSF. They’re all part of SFGov — or to be more precise, San Francisco city government’s leap into a world of far-ranging innovations. Jay Nath, appointed in January by Mayor Edwin Lee to serve as [...]

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