Paging Bill Allen: "Blight is eating American cities. Here’s how Mobile, Alabama, stopped it."

Long article, good article.

Blight is eating American cities. Here’s how Mobile, Alabama, stopped it, by Hana Schank (Fast Company)

The story of blight in Mobile, Alabama, is the story of the rich and poor in America, of unregulated real estate, and of centuries of inequality. But in Mobile, a small team figured out how to change the narrative.

... This is the story of how one city reduced blight, but it is also the story of what happens when cities think differently about how to solve their problems, when politicians are willing to embrace policies that might not line up with the party line, when city workers look beyond band-aid solutions. It is the story of how cities can do good things for their residents, and how people can work across the city to unravel knotty problems that are centuries in the making. While the crafters of the Alabama constitution wrote the document as a giant middle finger to the rest of the nation, to the government, and to any elected official who might ever try to wield power, Mobile’s modern-day residents have discovered that they need government’s help. They perhaps don’t want to be left alone as much as Mobilians did a century ago. They see their perpetual potential ...

"How Europe’s industrial cities bounced back from the brink of ruin."

Reusing what's already there, re-skilling people ... recycle, remake and regrow ... but nowhere is it explained how TIF-driven campaign financing makes it all possible.

How Europe’s industrial cities bounced back from the brink of ruin, by Anne Power (The Conversation)

From Sheffield to Torino, Lille to Leipzig, Belfast to Bilbao, Europe’s industrial cities are no strangers to hard times. Faced with depleted resources, plummeting populations and urban degradation, these cities struggled to round a corner. But somehow, around the turn of the century they recovered and began to flourish. The 2008 bank crash and the eurozone crisis dented their progress, but couldn’t stall it completely.

I have spent the last 20 years seeking to understand how the cities of Europe’s industrial heartlands backed away from the brink of ruin and recaptured their former glory. I discovered a strong common thread of industrial collapse, reinvestment and pulling through in spite of austerity ...

 ... All these cities rely heavily on small and medium-sized enterprises, many of which survived the industrial crisis. This model of small-scale survival and reinvention has served the “weak market cities” well. Their populations have slowly recovered, jobs have returned and they have found new ways of making and doing which reuses what is already there – starting with their civic infrastructure, and spreading to poorer neighbourhoods. They are re-skilling their people, as well as restoring their homes.

Along the way, the shrinkage in global resources, the urgency of climate change, the potential of green energy illustrates the need for the circular economy – where we only take out what can be restored. Europe’s former industrial cities are developing new ways to recycle, remake and regrow, as well as pioneering renewable technologies. For the world’s smallest continent, these cities are the future.

A boy can dream: "To truly empower placemaking as a strategy for accelerating innovation, districts must experiment with new models of Place Governance."

Lots of good ideas herein, of the sort that might be considered by downtown New Albany merchants.

8 Placemaking Principles for Innovation Districts, by Project for Public Spaces

PPS staff Nate Storring and Meg Walker reflect on the possibilities and challenges of placemaking in innovation districts. This article is part of the Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking, a collaboration between PPS and the Brookings Institution.

Let's skip to Number Eight.

8. UNITY: GOVERN WITH VISION AND HOLISTIC, INCLUSIVE STRATEGIES

A district cannot follow any of these principles very far without encountering the issue of governance. How do stakeholders within the district collaborate and make decisions? Where does the money come from? Who has the power to implement the plans and policies? Who is going to get their hands dirty and actually do the implementing?

To truly empower placemaking as a strategy for accelerating innovation, districts must experiment with new models of Place Governance. This means breaking down silos between disciplines and addressing issues with integrated strategies of policy and place. It means planning proactively and accountably with workers, students and residents—those end users again—not just leaders and experts. It means fostering a common sense of vision for the district’s future, while also leaving room for people to make many little plans. And ultimately, it means devolving more powers, responsibilities, and funding to the district level.

These are radical changes to the way that municipalities approach governance today, however Place Governance can begin with improving public spaces. The placemaking process brings together people from across disciplines, sectors, and interests, and provides tangible little wins that form the basis of shared trust for bigger endeavors. With relatively little investment, placemaking can literally produce the common ground for a broad, inclusive vision of the innovation district.

Um, never mind.

Perhaps we need to begin with something simpler, like "Maybe you and your employees should park somewhere else for a change."

Chattanooga is kicking ass with hyper speed Internet connections.

“While that’s more bandwidth than you can imagine needing now – it’s an enormous blank slate of possibility for whatever opportunities innovative thinkers can dream up next."

The preceding thought has never occurred to an entire generation of New Albany politicians, whether pertaining to Internet or any other aspect of infrastructure in this city.

A regular reader offers this link (below), and a few thoughts.

10 Gigabit per second is 2,000 times faster than the internet I'm able to obtain in my home in New Albany. The download rate provided by AT&T U-verse in my home is 5.63 megabits per second. My upload rate is a measly 0.69 megabits per second.

What's your internet service allowing you in New Albany? Check it out with this webpage: Speed Test

Why not ask your readers to send in their internet stats?

There won't be any "high-speed" gigabit internet in them there luxury apartments… will there?

My upload rate is 1.14. Feel free to quote yours in comments.

Want fast Internet? Move to Chattanooga, by Mario Trujillo (The Hill)

Chattanooga, Tenn., is rolling out Internet speeds hundreds of times faster than the federal broadband benchmark through its city-owned utility company.

The city announced Thursday that it would allow any of its residents to purchase 10 gigabit per second Internet connections for the price of $299 per month — in what is the largest rollout of those hyper speeds in the country.

The Tennessee town has offered 1 gigabit speeds for the past five years through its fiber network, which was helped along by tens of millions of dollars in federal grants.

To put the speed in context, 10 gigs is 400 times faster than the 25 megabit per second (Mbps) baseline broadband speed the Federal Communications Commission set earlier this year. Many homes, however, have speeds in single-digit Mbps.

Two other cities in North Carolina and Vermont have offered the 10 gig speeds, but to a more limited population. Chatanooga has a population of about 170,000.

Observers say the massive bandwidth is overkill for any traditional household at this point. It is unclear how many residents will take up the offer of speeds usually only needed for large businesses. The city already offers its 1 gig speeds at a fraction of the cost and has attracted about 6,300 customers, according to city officials.

“With 10,000 Mbps of Internet speed, that's enough bandwidth to stream 1,754 online movies all at the same time – in HD – from a single Internet connection without experiencing any buffering or lag time,” the city boasted. “While that’s more bandwidth than you can imagine needing now – it’s an enormous blank slate of possibility for whatever opportunities innovative thinkers can dream up next."

Verizon has recently tested out a 10 gig fiber network. It said the speed would only be attractive to businesses at first but noted that will change with the use of high-definition video and an increasing amount of connected devices in homes.

Other large Internet service providers, such as AT&T and Comcast, have rolled out 1-2 gig speeds in limited areas. And Google Fiber has also expanded its 1 gig network to a number of cities.

Chattanooga has been at the center of a federal fight as the Obama administration and the FCC sought to override state laws that put restrictions on the expansion of city-owned broadband networks, which they allege are being pushed by major Internet providers seeking to cut out competition.

The FCC earlier this year voted to override a Tennessee law that prevented the city from expanding the super-fast Internet service outside the boundaries of its utility service. Tennessee is fighting the move in court.

Say the word "innovation" in New Albany ...

... and they generally think you said "syncopation," so they start dancing the Charleston -- say, wasn't flapper dancing a Bicentennial showcase event?

"If it works, keep it" and "it's all I've ever known and so I'm terrified" are two very different things. As I reminded Bob Caesar last week, it isn't like his long reign as arbiter of all that's good and decent downtown let to streets paved with gold (those turned out to be the ones leading to his domicile in Silver Hills.

No, it took different people, different money and different ways of thinking about development to so much as take the hesitant baby steps of recent years. When you read the first two comments in the discussion below, you see ideas -- streets comprise a real estate portfolio, and that parks needn't be big and expensive to be desirable -- that fully qualify as the AntiCaesar.

Just get out of the way, Bob. Your time has passed, and we must adapt and experiment now if we're too have any hope of surviving the effects of the bridges and tolling regime that you, yourself, tragically joined in imposing.

Dynamic Duos: Michael Bloomberg And Janette Sadik-Khan On The Future Of Walking, Biking, And Driving

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor
Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, Department of Transportation

Sadik-Khan: The streets in a city like New York--6,300 miles of streets--it's the largest real estate portfolio the city has. So we have to make it more efficient. That's why designing in bike lanes, bus lanes, new capacity on the seven-line [subway] extension--it's all about using that existing resource, but looking at it differently.

Bloomberg: And it's not just roads. It's parks. With our PlaNYC, a park for everyone within 10 minutes was our [goal]; to get that, you have to take schoolyards and convert them into parks in the off-hours, simply because there's no room to go build new parks in the dense parts of our city. There are a lot of those kinds of things, and they impact the economy, they impact the psyche of the people who live here, they make the city more attractive.