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 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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                This annual holiday in honor of America’s great nonviolent prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is always a timely occasion to read the inspiring words of a minister who understood that his faith called for him to stand up for those traditionally frozen out of public decision-making [...]

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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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          We know we imagined it, but we thought we heard much of Memphis say “amen” when they read Church Health Center founder and executive director Scott Morris’ January 2 op-ed column in The Commercial Appeal. Dr. Morris urged Memphians to emulate University of Memphis basketball coach Josh Pastner in their [...]

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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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                    The folks at the Family Action Council of Tennessee suggest that they stand like a rock on their principles.  That shouldn’t be particularly hard for them since it’s a rock that they’ve climbed out from under. Even in an era where we have all become [...]

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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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              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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