The Shelby County Board of Commissioners ramps up for another vote to bring more secrecy to public decision-making and our mayors are working again to close some public records. It all too much to understand, particularly considering that public confidence in government is at record lows and a [...]

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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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                When will the madness end? It’s a question we often ask ourselves when we read about planned highway construction by Tennessee Department of Transportation, aided and abetted by the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization. Here’s the latest: a $30 million cloverleaf on I-40 just over the Fayette County [...]

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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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From Governing: Back in February, an architecture conference focused on “concrete modernism” met in Houston. Included on the agenda: a tour of the famed Astrodome. The 65,000-seat domed stadium, the first of its kind when it opened in 1965, was the perfect destination for the group. But the visitors’ path through the venue had to [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: In the spring of 1968, Jane Jacobs walked into a high school auditorium in the Lower East Side and addressed a rowdy crowd opposed to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a 10-lane highway proposed by Robert Moses that would have blasted through what we now know as SoHo. The public hearing was a [...]

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Memphis is a mythic city. There are of course the mythic musicians and entrepreneurs who created our greatest exports to the world – from B.B. to Elvis to Chilton and from Kemmons Wilson to Pitt Hyde to Fred Smith. And yet, there are mythologies of a different kind. They limit Memphis’ options for progress, trap [...]

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It might be called the case of the Phantom Tax Increase: The City Council voted to add 18 cents to the city property tax rate on June 21. Then council members failed to add the 18 cents to the rate when they approved the tax ordinance. The city’s news media didn’t understand what happened and [...]

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From Atlanta Journal-Constitution: By Tad Leithead When metropolitan regions across the country — and even around the world — look at metro Atlanta, they have reason to take note. We are home to the world’s busiest airport, one of the nation’s most extensive interstate systems, a large freight and logistics network, and have proximity to [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: Christmas came early this year for retail giant Sears, which is weighing offers on whether to move from its suburban-Chicago headquarters. Ohio officials have put together a package of incentives worth a reported $400 million to convince Sears to move to Columbus, while Illinois lawmakers are offering at least $371 million for [...]

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From New York Observer: Michael Kimmelman returned to the public realm for this week’s column, where he all but declared what appears to be his raison d’etre going forward: “We’ve been so fixated on fancy new buildings that we’ve lost sight of the spaces they occupy and we share,” he wrote in the Sunday Times. [...]

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A study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has found that green spaces are linked to reduced crime rates A research team has found that distressed neighborhoods where vacant lots have been converted into small parks and community green spaces are associated with reduced crime when compared to neighborhoods with [...]

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From Brookings Institution: Drive through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for [...]

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So, what is the greater problem: the “war on Christmas” or the war on the Christmas spirit? It’s the time of the year when Fox News’ war on Christmas coverage is as evergreen as Christmas trees themselves. It’s so extreme that Fox News now treats “holiday” best wishes from a corporation as tantamount to an [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: This week, CQ Press released its annual City Crime Rankings, which purports to identify the most dangerous cities in America. Though the rankings received plenty of attention, especially in the cities that top the list—Flint, Michigan; Camden, New Jersey; and Detroit this year—they’re misleading, unfairly damaging and unworthy of any attention at [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: Completing a major transit project is never a quick and easy process, but if any place should be able to move one swiftly through to completion, it’s San Francisco. In 1973 the city adopted a “transit first” policy that gave planning priority to modes of transportation other than the automobile. As the [...]

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From Columbia Journalism Review: The future of nonprofit news organizations has hit an unexpected roadblock in the agency that determines their tax-exempt status: The Internal Revenue Service. Nonprofit news organizations applying for tax-exempt status are running into long delays as the IRS bundles them together as “precedential” and studies whether they qualify for the status [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: Earlier this week we looked at what a large city can do to increase the efficiency of its bus service in a high-density corridor. In Manhattan, bus stops are so crowded that transit officials must find ways for passengers to board more quickly. That’s a problem, of course, but in the grand [...]

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From Atlantic Cities: When it comes to the holy trinity of art, architecture, and religion, few buildings are more significant than the 1898 Methodist Church in Norwalk, Connecticut. Anchoring a main street, the Romanesque-style church features a stained-glass rose window designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. The founders of American Methodism preached there. Given its prominence [...]

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  From Terrain.org: What does America’s oldest city have in common with one of its youngest? The urge to define itself. St. Augustine, Florida, launched its initiative in 1715 by petitioning the King of Spain for a coat of arms. Upon his receipt, the King assumedly delegated the request to his creative services department who, [...]

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