Author: Smart City Memphis

The chest thumping by the Tennessee Department of Education about cutting $423 million in state money for Memphis City Schools unless City Council restores city funding is in the end headline-grabbing but little more than an...

Today on Smart City we’re talking about communities. Real ones, and the virtual neighborhoods found online in such social networking sites as facebook and meetup.Phil Wood is the co-author of “The Intercultural City,...

We’re not sure of everything Agricenter International is trying to harvest on its prime 1,000 acres of public land, but much of it looks to us like just a bushel-full of embarrassment. Put simply, it just gets clearer and...

Surely, it’s about time to have a presidential campaign that’s about cities.So far, cities have been just short of pariahs in the endless debates that have regularly punctuated the party primaries. Candidates were asked all...

It is a perfect storm at Memphis City Schools, and that’s not necessarily all bad.There’s investigations, scandals, academic crisis, fumbling management and general lack of direction. Despite some predictions to the...

Memphis has always been a tale of two cities – black and white, wealth and need, downtown and Boxtown, golf scores and body counts. That last pairing comes from two disparate, and ultimately disturbing, reports this week. The...

Marty Sumner is the Chief of Staff of the High Point North Carolina Police Department. A decade ago, street-level drug dealing and criminal activity were rife on the streets on High Point North Carolina. The police force was...

Here’s hoping that the Memphis City Council isn’t too busy toasting its historic vote to cut school funding by $73 million to see that its work is only half-done.In the midst of the wall-to-wall media coverage of the vote on...

We were sent a copy of a letter addressed to us from Council member Wanda Halbert in the wake of our Tuesday blog post, so we’re sharing it here. As a point of clarification, the clause at the end of the second italicized...