Category: Revitalization
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The Fight to Save the Town
Book Review In an era where the narrative of urban decay often overshadows tales of recovery, a recent podcast episode featuring Michelle Wild Anderson offers a refreshing counter-narrative. Anderson, author of “The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America,” shares a compelling account of resilience and renewal in America’s most overlooked towns. This episode…
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Aging Commercial Corridors
With the future of most downtowns largely secured after several decades of reinvestment, attention is now turning to other components of our cities for revitalization. The transition has been slow, but in recent years planners, investors, city leaders, and businesses have been looking to the commercial strip as the next home for their rehabilitation efforts.…
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Reviving the Great Plains: A New Future for Small Towns
As is the theme with anything related to reading or writing lately, I’m a little behind on my Planning Magazine subscriptions. Its the beginning of December and I’m just getting to the heart of the October issue. Nonetheless, when I came to the article titled “After the Dust Settles: Revisiting the Buffalo Commons 30 Year…
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The Legacy of Nicodemus: A Black Settlement Story
I recently finished reading First Dawn by Judith Miller, a fiction book about two separate families moving from Kentucky to Kansas to new settlements on the prairie. One family was headed by a wealthy white doctor while the other was a former slave/sharecropper. Each group moved to a different town separated by a mere 30…
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From Decline to Growth: Lessons from Company Town Histories
I have been working in small towns across the Midwest for about a year now and have seen firsthand the struggle they face in trying to maintain growth or in some cases, turnaround their decline. Many communities are successful, as noted in the book Our Towns which I recently read and reviewed. Oftentimes, the recommendations…
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Creative Redevelopment: Old Retail Spaces Finding New Life
The first big box store reuse that I witnessed first hand was in Seward, Nebraska. For years, the original small scale Walmart store sat empty along Highway 15, less than a mile from the new Walmart Super Center that replaced it. For a town of just under 7,000 people it was hard to imagine it…
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The Rise of Craft Breweries
Whenever the topic of breweries is brought up, I always hear “when are we going to finally over saturate the market with breweries?” While it may seem like there are a lot, the market share of local craft beer sold pales in comparison to national conglomerates. Only 12 percent of the market is craft beer…
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10 Insights for Creating Livable Cities from Santa Fe Conference
The International Making Cities Livable Conference held their annual conference the first week in October in Santa Fe, New Mexico this year. Each year a new city is selected based on the innovate approaches that have been implemented by their local governments. Dozens of countries were represented at the conference this year despite political tension,…
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Understanding Density: The Future of Living Spaces
It is hard to keep pace with the ever changing trend of where people want to live. One week we seem to be moving back into cities, the next the suburbs are back on the rise. Larger trends like the suburban flight of the 1950’s and 60’s are easier to see, but the year to year…
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Preserving Minneapolis’ Historic Wesley Center
I recently had the opportunity to tour the Historic Wesley Center in downtown Minneapolis. The former home of the Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church now houses 8 nonprofit groups and hosts outside events. The Historic Wesley Center nonprofit, was formed about a year ago to preserve and protect the building after its viability as a church…
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The Planning Lady 