Article 5 in a series on the Arlington, MA Master Planning process. Prepared by Barbara Thornton The Master Plan will have a distinct section focusing on housing and in Arlington there will be much to decide. Housing prices in Arlington are among the fastest rising in the region. According to a recent article… Read More
Arlington Master Plan Considers Economic Development
Article 4 in a series on the Arlington, MA Master Planning process. Prepared by Barbara Thornton Most of Arlington’s budget depends on the Town’s tax base. As the cost of services increases, the Town budget must increase. Massachusetts communities are limited in their ability to increase taxes on existing property. Many municipalities have developable… Read More
Traffic and Transportation Issues Shape Arlington Future
Article 3 in a series on the Arlington, MA Master Planning process. Prepared by Barbara Thornton A conversation about transportation issues extends well beyond rush hour car traffic congestion. As the Town contemplates its future 20 years from now, should it build wider streets, wider bike paths, wider sidewalks or none of the above? If… Read More
Arlington Choices for Future Land Use
Article 2 in a series on the Arlington, MA Master Planning process. Prepared by Barbara Thornton Arlington, relative to other communities in the region, is a densely developed residential suburb with some commercial centers and a variety of interesting, walkable neighborhoods spread over a topography of hills, streams, ponds and flat lands. The Town’s… Read More
What Is a Master Plan?
Article 1 in a series on the Arlington, MA master planning process. Prepared by Barbara Thornton Arlington, located about 15 miles north west of Boston, is now developing a master plan that will reflect the visions and expectations of the community and will provide enabling steps for the community to move toward this vision over… Read More
Uncovering State And Local Government: 15 Hidden Successes
October 2, 2014 reported by Stefaan Verhulst in GovLab Digest Emily Jarvis at GovLoop writes: “From garbage trucks to vacant lots, cities and states are often tasked with the thankless job of cleaning up a community’s mess. These are tasks that are often overlooked, but are critical to keeping a community vibrant. But even in… Read More
Build A City IT Master Plan
Cities started master planning in response to the evolution of zoning law which initially gave municipalities the power to determine land use patterns for commercial, residential, industrial and open space uses. The practice of land use planning through zoning has evolved and resulted in many new tools for shaping the City’s growth, economic health,… Read More
City Software: From Silos to Platform
By Barbara Thornton. Originally published 9-27-14 as a guest post in Sangeet Paul Choudary‘s blog Platform Thinking, The New Rules of Business in a Networked World. This post leverages the Magnet – Tools & Rules – Data framework that Choudary first alluded to in a Harvard Business Review article here. In this post, Barbara uses… Read More
Feds Offer Bigger Playbook for Guiding Government Managers into Digital Era
On August 3, 2014 AssetStewardship.com posted Top 10 Tasks Required For Cities Acquiring Digital Software to help remedy the dearth of guidelines for municipalities investing in IT. Not to be outdone, the federal government, on August 12, 2014, launched the U.S. Digital Service and presented a Digital Services Playbook. We like this a lot. There… Read More
Top 10 Tasks for Cities Acquiring Software
Cities face new and unanticipated challenges as they consider adding software. For city, town, county and regional governments around the world, this is the dawn of a new era, digital cities. Over 557,000 municipalities in the world and most of them still rely primarily on paper processing for their workflow. The 2013 attempt by… Read More
Boston New Urban Mechanics Office Leads Civic Tech Implementation
Boston, the “City on a Hill”, prides itself as a thought leader on topics of philosophy (transcendentalism), political theory (John Adams, Declaration of Independence) and public policy (Boston’s implementation of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act) for over 300 years. Clearly the City of Boston hasn’t always got it right. But the City gets big credit… Read More
Re-Phrase the Declaration of Independence to Find Its Power for the 21st Century
Following the recommendation of a friend to read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July, I struggled through the antiquated sentence structure, nouns and verbs to excavate the power of our forefathers’ anger, vision and intent in declaring their separation from a tyrant King who they claimed had usurped their basic rights as… Read More
Open Governments, Open Data: A New Lever for Transparency
Citizen Engagement, and Economic Growth Posted on June 26, 2014 by Stefaan Verhulst in GovLab Digest Joel Gurin at the SAIS Review of International Affairs: “The international open data movement is beginning to have an impact on government policy, business strategy, and economic development. Roughly sixty countries in the Open Government Partnership have committed to… Read More
Detroit: Whither Thou Goest, So Goest US?
Whether it is with despair, empathy or schadenfreude, the nation watches one of it’s premier cities falter through corruption, decay and population decline, fail through bankruptcy and moved toward a hoped for renewal. An early price tag for the physical restructuring of the city was just presented by the Obama appointed Detroit Blight Removal Task… Read More
National Hackathon Offers New Fixes for Urban Problems
The second annual national “Civic Hacking” event, May 30 – June 1, brings together participants from the fields of software development, design, research, non-profits, local government and more to use their skills to solve civic challenges. Civic Hacking events are scheduled in over 122 locations across the U.S. and beyond. Sponsored by Intel, this is… Read More
Gas Leak Explosion Symbolizes Huge Need for Infrastructure Improvements
Gas leaks resulted in an explosion causing two buildings in East Harlem, NYC to collapse on March 12, 2014. Eight deaths and a substantial destruction of property catch the public attention this week, suggesting an even larger long smoldering issue of inadequate investment in the infrastructure we build our lives on and take for granted.… Read More
Slovenia Must Stop Dragging its Feet on Privatisation
By Luka Oresković and SaÅ¡o Stanovnik On Sunday, Slovenians vote for a new head of state in the second round of presidential elections. Although the incumbent, Danilo Türk, seemed a certain winner before the first round in November, Borut Pahor, the former centre-left prime minister, surprised pundits and pollsters by winning 40 per cent of… Read More
Why the Kremlin Won’t Privatize Rosneft
by Luka Oreskovic After World War II, French governments from both sides of the political aisle pursued a policy known as dirigisme. Dirigisme entailed consolidating fragmented industrial assets into large holdings, or “national champions’, that could carry long-term economic growth and speed up recovery in the postwar years. National champions to this day remain enshrined… Read More
Water Privatization in Russia: More Than a Drop in the Ocean
By Luka Oreskovic Without water, humans can only live for a few days. Yet only about 1 percent of the earth’s water is suitable for human consumption. Rising GDP brings increases in demand for food production, including meat, which demands the greatest amount of water. Treating water is therefore a key utility. With over $400… Read More
Selling the Georgian Dream
By Luka Oreskovic Eight years ago, an enthusiastic crowd gathered in front of the Tbilisi parliament for Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidential inauguration. “We must create the Georgia that our ancestors dreamed of,” he told them, “the Georgia that we dream of.” His dream was that of a democratic, NATO member country with a growing liberalized economy,… Read More