by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | January 4th, 2012 2:00pm CST | No Comments
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 [...]
by Steve Bares (RSS) Uncategorized | December 28th, 2011 8:00pm CST | No Comments
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 28th, 2011 2:00pm CST | No Comments
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 27th, 2011 2:00pm CST | 3 Comments
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 23rd, 2011 1:52pm CST | No Comments
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 [...]
by Jimmie Covington (RSS) Uncategorized | December 20th, 2011 2:00pm CST | Comments Off
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 19th, 2011 2:01pm CST | Comments Off
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 16th, 2011 1:55pm CST | 1 Comment
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 15th, 2011 2:00pm CST | Comments Off
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. [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 14th, 2011 2:00pm CST | 7 Comments
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 13th, 2011 2:00pm CST | 9 Comments
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 12th, 2011 2:00pm CST | Comments Off
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 9th, 2011 2:00pm CST | 1 Comment
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 8th, 2011 2:01pm CST | Comments Off
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 7th, 2011 2:33pm CST | Comments Off
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 6th, 2011 2:20pm CST | 8 Comments
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 [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 5th, 2011 2:00pm CST | 1 Comment
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, [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 2nd, 2011 2:00pm CST | Comments Off
By Neal Peirce, Citiwire.net: DETROIT — “We stand with Occupy Wall Street. We’re inspired by the organizing we’ve seen… It catches the moment.” But the group PolicyLink, meeting here last week with 2,300 community organizers, policy advocates and foundation observers in attendance, had a major agenda ready to roll well before the first tents went [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | December 1st, 2011 2:08pm CST | Comments Off
From Governing: Fresh out of Boston University and working as an admissions officer there, I showed my boss applications from four students with nearly identical credentials. Why, I asked, were three of them rejected while the one applying to the School of Education was accepted? I had stumbled upon a central problem of American public [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | November 30th, 2011 2:04pm CST | Comments Off
This outstanding column was written by Marcus Pohlman and published last week in The Commercial Appeal: The average child in America will spend less than 10 percent of his or her life in school through the 12th grade. If we are serious about education reform, we need to understand what’s happening to our students the [...]
by John Lawrence (RSS) Uncategorized | November 28th, 2011 1:50pm CST | 7 Comments
Memphis is filled with fools… there, I said it! When we build let us think we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work that our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time [...]
by SCM (RSS) Uncategorized | November 23rd, 2011 2:00pm CST | Comments Off
From Off the Charts Blog: Note: With Thanksgiving right around the corner, the Center thought this was a good time to look at the latest figures on various indicators of hardship. This is the first in a series of posts on this subject that CBPP will do this week. Poverty rates rose in 2010 under a [...]
by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons. Cartoons Archive →
Photograph by Amie Vanderford
Memphian Amie Vanderford is a photographer for peace and justice. Her portfolio includes photographs from Peru, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Indian, and her hometown.
