Urban planners can take a page from the “Field of Dreams” movie’s playbook. In the movie, Kevin Costner built a baseball diamond in a cornfield and his dreams came true. Planners around the world are finding that this technique can work for reshaping cities, too. In the old days of “master planning” lots of night… 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 for… 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 Force. The… Read More