Gillis says that before the modern era, people in
coastal areas treated the ocean with respect and a healthy dose of fear.
"The sea was understood to be what it is," he says. "Not
necessarily an antagonist, but a capricious, dangerous creature."
People often built their dwellings facing away from the
waves and the threat they presented to human life and order. Fens and tidal
areas provided a buffer between settled areas and incroaching water. European
port cities were not right on the seacoast, but further inland, up rivers.
Cautionary tales of "drowned cities" were well known. Some, such as
Atlantis, were legendary. Some, like Dunwich in England, were very real.
…
Regional Plan Association mourns the loss of life and
devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy. As we begin to recover, we share a
responsibility to learn from this tragedy and develop a new approach to
managing the impact of storms in the tri-state region.
This can occur only through concerted political
leadership at the federal, state and local levels. We are very encouraged by
statements this week by Governors Cuomo, Christie and Malloy and Mayor
Bloomberg recognizing the need to re-examine our policies, plans and
infrastructure in light of the threats of severe storms and rising sea levels.
States and localities throughout the region have made some progress in recent
years in planning for volatile weather. But more needs to be done.
There are many steps that the region should consider to
help reduce damage from the inevitable storms in our future, from physically
protecting urban shorelines to rethinking our transit and power networks so
that localized outages don't cripple an entire city or region. In all
likelihood, we will need to adopt both "hard" infrastructure changes and
"soft" solutions that rely on better land-use decisions and tap
ecological systems to limit damage.
Read the full RPA statement on recommendations for
preparing for storms [PDF]
Nationally-recognized real estate developer and regional
growth expert Joe Minicozzi presented an economic development analysis of the
region that says local governments get more return for their buck when they put
the tax revenue potential of land in the city center at the forefront of their
urban planning decisions. The perspective is contrary to conventional wisdom
that big-box retailers bring big tax revenue and challenges economic developers
in communities across southeast Tennessee to look at the value-per-acre return
on their “Main Street” investments.
At a public meeting and luncheon sponsored by the
Chattanooga Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, Southeast Tennessee
Development District, River City Company and the Lyndhurst Foundation, Joe
Minicozzi of Urban3, a consulting company of the real estate developer Public
Interest Projects out of Asheville, N.C., highlighted the fact that dense,
mixed-use urban development pays better dividends than suburban mall
counterparts when comparing on a value-per-acre basis.
To illustrate his point, Mr. Minicozzi studied
Chattanooga and Hamilton County property taxes from 2012 to derive a
yield-per-acre. …
Kansas City, MO - infoZine - Community AGEnda grant from
Grantmakers In Aging and Pfizer Foundation is part of $1.3 million national
effort to help America’s towns and cities prepare for a growing older
population
Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) has been awarded a
$150,000 grant from the Pfizer Foundation and Grantmakers In Aging (GIA), a
national association of funders, as part of Community AGEnda: Improving America
for All Ages. MARC has secured $50,000 in matching funding through a grant from
the W J Brace Charitable Trust at Bank of America.
This new initiative is funding nonprofits in five U.S.
communities to help accelerate local efforts to make communities “age-friendly”
— that is, great places to grow up and grow old.
MARC will assess and improve older-adult transportation
and mobility options in the Greater Kansas City area. MARC will also launch a
two-pronged public awareness campaign to increase support for caregivers, and
to tap the expertise of older adults as community resources. They also plan to
work with the region’s First Suburbs Coalition to examine needs and plans for
making surrounding areas more age-friendly.
…
SAUGATUCK, MI -- A 1,640-mile bike, hike and kayak trail
around the shoreline of Lake Michigan goes into the planning stage Nov. 8 and 9
at Lake Michigan Trail Conference at the Saugatuck Center for the Arts.
The proposed four-state trail over land and across water
is on a scale with the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail through East Coast state,
planners say.
More than 150 people including government planners from
Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin are expected to attend the conference
called to start work on creating a unified vision for the trail.
“The objective of this conference will be to establish a
long-distance recreational trail that highlights the vast natural beauty of the
Lake Michigan shoreline and the many historic, recreational and cultural
offerings along its 1,640-mile long coast line,” said Dave Lemberg, conference
planner and associate professor of Geography at Western Michigan University.
States and regional organizations have independently
been putting together their own trail parts over in the past 10 years including
a 75-mile kayak trail in Indiana and the announced commitment for a 425-mile
shoreline trail section in Wisconsin along the lake shoreline.
“The conference will provide an opportunity to integrate
these independent regional efforts into a new type of tri-modal trail through a
collaborative planning process,” …
We are recognizing a large volume local cooperative
cross-sectoral cooperation.
For many years we have witnessed credit unions banding
together, rural electric co-ops forming national associations, and other co-ops
within each sector collaborating.But this isn’t cross-sectoral cooperation.
While intra-sectoral organizing is needed and successful, I’m addressing
something else.
Admittedly many states have the the cross-sectoral
equivalence of NCBA on the state level. However most of them exist as trade
associations; they typically aim to form a membership to support common and
dominate legislative issues. And then there is also some common resources for
education, though a lot of the time that is using professionals to organize
intra-sectoral education (senior housing cooperative, credit union, healthcare,
and other intra-sectoral educational needs).
The phenomena I’m revealing is concerted efforts to
promote cooperation as a local alternative to investor-owned businesses and
this effort being wrought by a group of cooperators from a variety of
cooperative sectors. Whether its merely the support that local co-ops (local
being a particular metro area, rural area, state, or inter-state region) can
give each, what shared activities they can facilitate, or what they can do to
support new co-operative formation, these monthly or bi-monthly meetings can
only do good.
We recognize these cross-sectoral regional cooperation
efforts in Philly, Minnesota, Austin, Seattle, Madison, Boston, Western New
England, Portland (OR), Upstate NY, Central Michigan, Southern Oregon,
Northwest Wisconsin, Providence, and an inter-state region amongst Washington,
Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, & Hawaii.
…
In a new report, commissioned by Downing Street, he says
that people think the UK "does not have a strategy for growth and wealth
creation".
He wants to devolve power from London to the English
regions.
In the Commons, David Cameron and Ed Milliband argued
over whether the report backed or damned the government.
Lord Heseltine's report, No Stone Unturned, makes 89
recommendations to help industry. One of its key aims is to move £49bn from
central government to the English regions to help local leaders and businesses.
The aim, he said, was to devolve power from Whitehall
and re-invigorate the big cities that had fuelled the growth and wealth that
the country had enjoyed in past decades.
Lord Heseltine, head of the Department of Trade and
Industry in the 1980s, said the government should allocate growth funds through
the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) that are being established in
England in place of Regional Development Agencies.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
This is a war cry from the man whose golden locks and
virtuoso performances earned him the nickname Tarzan”
In 2010, the government invited local business and civic
leaders to come forward with proposals for establishing LEPs that reflected
natural economic geographies.
Lord Heseltine believes these bodies could be key to
stimulating regional growth, but said that, at the moment, LEPs did not
currently have "the authority or resource to transform their locality in
the way our economy needs".
'Inertia'
At the national level, however, the government should
show greater leadership in promoting major infrastructure projects, Lord
Heseltine said. A national growth council should be created, chaired by the
prime minister and with a cross-government focus.
"Central government must retain control of
important, large scale infrastructure projects. This includes our motorway
network, national rail network and airports, as well as our energy
networks," Lord Heseltine said.
…
The character preservation legislation passed by the
South Australian Parliament covers 40,000 hectares of farm land in the McLaren
Vale region, south of Adelaide, and almost 150,000 hectares in the Barossa
Valley, to the north-east of the city.
It prohibits land in the zones from being subdivided for
housing and removes the planning minister's power to approve major developments
without parliamentary scrutiny.
Rosemount Estate chief winemaker Matt Koch is pleased
there will be laws to protect his region from being overrun by suburbia.
"It gives us the opportunity to not stop
progression but at least have our say in progression and give a voice for the
future of McLaren Vale and wine regions in general," he said.
Dudley Brown has been one of those fighting for better
protection.
"If you're an agriculture producer anywhere within
two or three hours of a city, if you're not looking at legislation like this to
protect your agricultural areas, you won't be in business in 25 years," he
said.
Mr Brown is a grape grower and winemaker who moved to
Australia almost a decade ago from Orange in California after his region
disappeared under cement.
"A city of almost 100,000 got built and it was all
orange groves when I got there and I was like "What a beautiful
place" and literally seven years later it was sort of gone," he said.
When Mr Brown saw housing start to crawl towards his
vineyard in the McLaren Vale region, he was determined to nip it in the bud.
He suggested McLaren Vale follow the lead of another
wine region, the Napa Valley in the US, which is protected from development
under the Williamson Act.
…
…
During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, we tried to develop
our manufacturing sector, hoping this would allow us to reduce our dependence
on imported goods. We tried to promote the development of local firms to
produce goods for the domestic market that had previously been imported. This
was known as a policy of "import substitution".
But from the early 1990s, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank encouraged us to start producing for export and
advised us and other countries in our region to start dropping import tariffs
which they claimed would force our manufacturing sector to become more
competitive. The reality, however, was different.
Trade liberalisation has, on the whole, negatively
impacted on our manufacturing sector. As we cut our import tariffs, we were
flooded with cheap imported goods. This caused many of the local industries to
collapse. And our companies that targeted export markets in Europe and the
United States lost their market share because they were unable to successfully
compete with producers in China and other Asian countries. The result was a
massive de-industrialisation due to companies closing down.
As a result, our manufacturing sector cannot grow under
the current unfair economic and trade system, even if they try to become
export-oriented. Thus, unemployment remains a massive problem.
In order to build a viable manufacturing sector, we will
have to fundamentally change the neo-liberal economic policies that we have
been so far following. This includes breaking the stranglehold of international
institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation and
creating policy space for increased local manufacturing. But of course this
cannot be achieved by Zambia alone. Thus, the states of the region would have
to try to integrate politically and economically into a single bloc, based on
fairness, and the drive for equality based on achieving common goals and
meeting common needs.
…
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