From Barry Chase, head of our local Planned Parenthood office: Attacks on Planned Parenthood patients in Tennessee have intensified.  I received notification on December 28 from the Director of the Tennessee Department of Health that although we had been informed that we would receive HIV prevention and Syphilis prevention funding to provide these services to [...]

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From Governing: During his five years at the helm of New Jersey’s largest city, Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s work could provide fodder for months of columns on energetic, innovative and responsive government. For starters, he has overseen a stunning reduction in violent crime. In March 2010, Newark had its first month in over 44 years [...]

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From Baltimore Sun: The vision for the “greening” of downtown Baltimore is taking shape after city leaders proposed ambitious steps to keep and attract businesses and residents by making public areas more inviting. An open-space plan unveiled last February by the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore calls for a network of spaces that link neighborhoods to [...]

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The ingredients for a successful startup and a successful city are remarkably similar. You need to build stuff that people want. You need to attract quality talent. You have to have enough capital to get your fledgling ideas to a point of sustainability. And you need to create a world-class culture that not only attracts [...]

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As with many industrial cities in America at the time, post-war St. Louis experienced a rapid decline of its inner city. Desperately seeking solutions before the decay could absorb downtown, local planners and politicians saw slum clearance as the best option. Decades later, the results are nothing to celebrate. An aggressive demolition policy failed to create a better neighborhood. [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: A month ago the Wire spotted an incredibly intricate rendering of American highways, drawn in the style of a subway map. The work was done by graphic designer Cameron Booth, a Sydney, Australia, native who moved to Portland in 2007. Booth says transit maps are “definitely a passion of mine.” In addition [...]

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From Rethinking Schools: “Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try – that’s my fate, too.” -11th-grade African American student, Berkeley, California This young man isn’t being cynical or melodramatic; he’s articulating a terrifying reality for many of the [...]

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From Sustainable Cities Collective: Washington, DC is finally getting a green waterfront development to be proud of.  A 42-acre redevelopment along the Anacostia River, The Yards will comprise some 1.8 million square feet of office space, 400,000 square feet of retail and cultural spaces, 2,700 rental and for‐sale homes, and a significant riverfront park and [...]

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From Arts Journal: With government support for the arts on the wane in most places, here’s a city singing a different tune: “…The mayor has a plan. That plan has been to reestablish municipal support for the arts through the cultural office, and to enhance and expand city efforts that support artists and their organizations. [...]

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From Hartford Business. We’ve written before of our respect for Kip Bergstrom, and his philosophy of connecting arts funding to vibrant placemaking is another example of his acumen. Private cultural and arts programs in Connecticut must play a greater role in revitalizing communities and attracting new businesses to receive state funding under a pilot program. [...]

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Mitt Romney said last week he’ll kick funding for the arts and public broadcasting to the curb if he gets to be president. “We’re not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird is going to have advertisements,” Romney said, while speaking at Homer’s Deli in Clinton, Iowa. Like virtually every other conservative candidate, Romney [...]

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From MPO: To ensure compliance with federal regulations concerning a public participation process that promotes continued public awareness and access to the decision-making process, the Memphis Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) presents the Direction 2040: Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP) for public review and comment. The official review period begins Tuesday, January 17, 2012 [...]

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By Neal Peirce, Citiwire.net: What can high technology do to help cities confront their thorniest problems — from police strategies to water systems, traffic control to waste disposal? A group of high technology firms, led by IBM and Cisco, are plunging into the city management business. In varied forms, they offer super-efficient new-generation computerized information [...]

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From PR Daily: My mother was from the East Coast, and she had a bevy of funny expressions. A short person was “two jam-pots high.” No one was ever just big; he or she was “great big huge.” But my favorite expression was, “Wouldn’t that just rot your socks?” It expressed good-humored annoyance with something [...]

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American Teacher When Rhena Jasey decided to become a public-school teacher, her friends were appalled: “You went to Harvard!” she recalls them saying. “You should be a doctor or a lawyer.” Jasey is one of four teachers profiled by director Vanessa Roth and coproducers Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari as they address the hottest question [...]

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From Urban Land Institute: We dwell in an age of political corrosion, of ideological coarseness and crudity. But for the balloon-puncturing by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart it would be downright dispiriting. This extremism in the country’s political culture and language kicked into high gear three decades ago at the national level, [...]

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                District 1 Councilman Bill Morrison – school teacher and former HR professional – takes over as chairman of Memphis City Council, and his record as a calm consensus builder, bridge builder, and conscientious leader was on display with his comments at his swearing in for a new [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: We’ve made such a mess of the suburbs we constructed in the last fifty or so years that one wonders whether they can ever be made into something more sustainable. Strip malls, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions, diminished nature, almost no sense of outdoor community. We all know the drill: there are nice [...]

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From Place Makers blog: Want to know where we go wrong solving single-mindedly for parking, affordability, sustainability, accessibility and all the other stuff on urban planning’s high-priority list? Consider the tomato.  More specifically the winter tomato, as designed and manufactured in Florida. In Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, food writer [...]

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  Ten years ago, as I looked forward to the new year, I was just beginning what has been the most rewarding, challenging and engaging phase of my career.  Just a few months before, I was an executive with International Paper and Pitt Hyde asked a very direct question. He simply asked if I wanted [...]

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By Neal Peirce, Citiwire: WASHINGTON — There’s no sane way to say that America’s criminal justice system is “OK.” It costs over $100 billion a year; it imprisons hundreds of thousands for minor drug possession or sale; overall it’s incarcerating 2.3 million men and woman — the most of any nation on earth. But that [...]

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