Thursday, February 11, 2016

Thursday Must Read Part 2: "Eleven signs a city will succeed" -- how does New Albany's score?

I'm happy the Bulldogs are doing so well, but these are the points that matter to the greatest number of people in terms of their lives, apart from games.

How does New Albany score?

I've snipped to the root, but go read the article, and comment here or at Facebook. I'm seeing three, maybe four.

Eleven Signs a City Will Succeed, by James Fallows (The Atlantic)

This article appears in the March print edition alongside the cover story, “Can America Put Itself Back Together?”—a summation of James and Deb Fallows’s 54,000-mile journey around America in a single-engine plane ...

By the time we had been to half a dozen cities, we had developed an informal checklist of the traits that distinguished a place where things seemed to work. These items are obviously different in nature, most of them are subjective, and some of them overlap. But if you tell us how a town measures up based on these standards, we can guess a lot of other things about it. In our experiences, these things were true of the cities, large or small, that were working best:

1. Divisive national politics seem a distant concern.
2. You can pick out the local patriots.
3. “Public-private partnerships” are real.
4. People know the civic story.
5. They have a downtown.
6. They are near a research university.
7. They have, and care about, a community college.
8. They have unusual schools.
9. They make themselves open.
10. They have big plans.
11. They have craft breweries.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

How about honest leaders? If you don't have that, you don't have success.