Author: Smart City Memphis

Being an urban superintendent is a tough job on its best day, but a fundamental fact of life about the public sector makes it even more difficult: style can trump substance, attitude can overshadow achievements and people skills...

If the Sustainable Shelby project is looking for a symbol for its smart growth agenda, it can find in it in a most unexpected place – the Shelby County Division of Public Works.After all, conventional wisdom is that government...

Persistence is always a mandatory attitude when dealing with government, and that’s even the case when it’s a county commissioner dealing with state government officials.It’s taken Shelby County Commissioner Mike Ritz more than...

WWJD?Apparently, in the minds of many Memphians, He would scream, hurl epithets, demean and bully.In fact, if we’ve ever seen the antithesis of Christ-like behavior, it was in the reaction by too many Memphians following the...

Greg Fuson and Sandra Kulli are the people behind The Vine, an annual west coast gathering of creative architects, builders, thinkers and artists. Their topic at this year’s Vine Conference is the nature of...

Shelby County Commissioner Mike Carpenter continues his one-man campaign to spark a serious discussion about school funding. In fact, at a time when the fallout from Memphis City Council’s cut in school funding could conceivably...

In the end, there were just too many reasons to vote against Shelby County charter amendment 360. There was the sizable group of term-limit supporters who resented the fact that commissioners used the imperative to correct a...

Memphis City Council owes no apologies for taking the long view on tax equity when it withheld $66 million funding for Memphis City Schools.Some may trivialize their motives, others may vilify them as opportunists and a few may...

It’s encouraging that the University of Memphis has clearly adopted a new attitude toward the future of its adjacent neighborhoods, and hopefully, there will be a time when it shows up on the list of universities who are doing...

Smart City is talking with people who have discovered new ways of attracting and retaining a creative community.First we’ll speak with Helen Johnson and Josh McManus. They lead a group called CreateHere, which focuses on...