Revitalization

Michael Wood-Lewis’s recent article on The Huffington Post highlights the great strides that Front Porch Forum (FPF) has taken since he launched it with his wife, Valerie, in 2006. In this article, Michael crystalizes the great irony of the Information Age: “In an era where national and global information is broadly available online, it seems that few of us know our neighbors and what's going on down the street.” Ain’t it the truth.

Front Porch Forum’s goal dovetails well with the Foundation’s—to help small cities and towns navigate growth and change while enhancing what they value most. FPF does just this, but on a neighbor-to-neighbor scale; residents can share announcements about key local meetings and events, encourage participation in projects, or simply post items they want to buy or sell—all via their email inboxes. Forum members are always surprised what they learn about people they’ve lived next door to for years.

The Maine Arts Commission has launched a new initiative called Creative Communities = Economic Development, which makes “substantial awards to communities that will allow cultural organizations to become strong partners in their communities’ development, leveraging collaboration between cultural, municipal and economic development interests.” Executive Director Donna McNeil says she was “tremendously inspired” by the Foundation’s Heart & Soul work in Maine (and by Bill Roper’s talk last year at the Friends of Midcoast Maine’s annual meeting). McNeil wants to give the arts and culture sector a voice in larger community economic development planning, where they are usually undervalued or overlooked.

The project will help put the State’s Quality of Place Initiative into action, “putting your money where your mouth is,” so to speak, by offering two $50,000 grants to Maine cultural organizations in partnership with a municipality. Successful applicants, “should be on the precipice of redevelopment with culture as a central player and demonstrate that these funds will function as a ‘tipping point.’” Other criteria include a commitment of leadership, collaboration, and public engagement, including youth.

On CSRwire Talkback, Frances Moore Lappé disputes the contemporary notion that growth is bad. Lappé asserts, conversely, that growth is good, but that the real culprit is waste and scarcity. She describes the opposite of growth as “shrink, shrivel, decline, decrease, die” and suggests that no growth leaves an assumption unchallenged: “...that today’s economy is in fact defined by growth—ever expanding abundance.” Lappé urges us to shed ‘no-growth’ and ‘limits’ and to begin reframing “the challenge as that of aligning with the laws of nature to enhance life; and from there ask, What are the frames about human nature that drive the current waste and destruction within an economy driven by one rule, highest return to existing wealth?”

The late urbanist, writer and activist Jane Jacobs lives on through the work she accomplished in life. Most know her “as the ultimate champion of cities” and for opposing neighborhood demolition. In her landmark work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs saw urban “improvement” projects for what they really were: urban emasculation projects that left entire districts barren. And now, three years since her death and a year plus into the economic downturn, people are taking another look at her economic ideas.

What if you didn’t have to drive anywhere? What if you could bike to work, and the grocery store, and the doctor’s office? What if your kids could skateboard to school? How does a stroll downtown for dinner and a movie sound? Need to travel a distance? Walk to the train station, which can get you to the nearest city or to the airport.

This is the way of life supported by the planning concept called “20-minute living,” a term coined by the Portland, Oregon-based real estate development firm Gerding Edlen to describe neighborhoods in which everything residents need is within 20 minutes of their homes. Not only are these neighborhoods convenient; they are planned with people in mind. As Allison Arieff put it in a post on BNet, “Less time in transit means more time for family and friends, and less wear and tear on you and the planet. Or, as we like to call it, the good life.”

I’ve been reviewing the case study of Moss Point, Mississippi—a partnership between this Gulf Coast town of 16,000 (mostly African American) and the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) in Montpelier and have been really impressed by ISC’s work. Similar to the Foundation’s Heart & Soul program, ISC offers resources, coaching and training, and a certain methodology for community action and public engagement. They, like the Foundation, also serve as a catalyst for change.

Forbes magazine recently published an article about Stu Lichter, a re-developer of abandoned factories in the Midwest. Here’s the Forbes intro:

“In 1950 canal place, the 3-million-square-foot epicenter of BF Goodrich in Akron, Ohio employed 23,000 and had its own police and fire departments. By 1990 competitors using cheap foreign labor had turned the tire factory into a ghost town. ‘It was a recipe for blight,’ says Stuart Lichter, who offered $2.5 million for the land and 27 remaining buildings.