Multi-jurisdictional
intentional regional communities are, in all cases, “Greater Communities” where
“community motive” is at work at a more than a local scale. This newsletter
provides a scan of regional community, cooperation and collaboration activity
as reported in news media and blogs.
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Top 10 Stories
It's been 22 years since Jacksonville has seen a mass
shooting like the one in Colorado on Friday.
…
"If we got a situation where there is a shooter,
then law enforcement is in charge, as we want them to be," Jacksonville
Fire and Rescue Department Chief Marty Senterfitt said. "They understand
our needs. There are plans not only in the Fire Department, but with law
enforcement on how to deal with that, how to get the quickest medical care to
the victims and yet still secure the shooter. We don't talk about those plans,
obviously. They are very much out there, and we practice them and we know what
we are going to do in that situation."
"Our officers train for such events as this, and
stand ready to defend and protect," Sheriff John Rutherford said in a
statement. "We are…also strengthened by our regional security task force
and the intelligence gathering and sharing done in concert with many other
agencies."
Those plans are not only for shootings but also for
severe accidents, …
For all its sprawl and global impact, the greater London
area is astonishingly efficient: A mere 34 government entities look after all
the public safety, services, transportation, zoning and schools. Greater
Toronto has only 28.
Paris, by contrast, ranks among the most fragmented and
duplicative of the world's metro areas, presiding over 1,400 units of
government in its city and suburbs.
But when it comes to overlap, unnecessary taxpayer
spending and political fragmentation, the Chicago-Milwaukee metroplex is in a
league of its own. The two adjoining metro regions are conjoined by common
industries, highways and shoreline but splintered into a profusion of 2,155
separate entities of government.
That welter of inefficiencies and jurisdictional
rivalries - with Wisconsinites proudly poaching Illinois companies and balking
at joint transportation policies - undermine what otherwise could become a
vibrant economic bloc with the potential to lift both regions in international
rankings according to findings this year from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
...
The Southwest Regional Development Commission welcomed
rural optimist Ben Winchester as a special guest speaker at its annual meeting…
Winchester is a research fellow at the University of
Minnesota Extension Center for Community Vitality and was invited to speak to
the nine-county regional association about the "brain gain" in rural
Minnesota.
Winchester has been studying population trends in rural
areas of the region, and he says the news is good in spite of a lot of
gloom-and-doom about the death of small towns foretold by the closing of
businesses, hospitals, schools and churches.
"The research base does not support the notion that
if X closes the town dies," Winchester said. "Only three Minnesota
towns have dissolved in the past century. It's not our fault the rural economy
is restructuring due to globalization. Not every town can be a regional
center."
What the data shows is…the number of people living in
rural areas has been increasing in terms of absolute numbers since 1970…
OCLC, the library research and services corporation
based in Dublin, Ohio, has published a report on Print Management at
"Mega-scale": A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in
North America:
…
"This report explores a counterfactual scenario
where local US and Canadian print book collections are consolidated into
regional shared collections based on the mega-regions framework. We begin by
briefly reviewing the conclusions from the Cloud-sourcing report, and then
present a simple framework that organizes the landscape of print book
collection consolidation models and distinguishes the basic assumptions
underpinning the Cloud-sourcing report and the present report. We then
introduce the mega-regions framework, and use WorldCat data to construct twelve
mega-regional consolidated print book collections. Analysis of the regional
collections is synthesized into a set of stylized facts describing their
salient characteristics, as well as key cross-regional relationships ...
In 2011 the Washington region was the second most
prosperous Metropolitan Statistical Area in the country when ranked by the
average annual wage. But adjust wages for the cost of living, and the region
fell to 18th place among the nation’s largest 51 largest MSAs, according to an
exercise conducted by economic geographer Joel Kotkin.
Richmond lost ground, too, falling one notch to the 22nd
place, while Hampton Roads fell four notches to 42nd place. Virginia, it
appears, has a cost of living problem. We celebrate our relatively high incomes
but tend not to ask what quality of life those wages bring us.
These findings touch upon a point that I have made off
and on at Bacon’s Rebellion for many years. There is more to building
prosperous societies than maximizing incomes. A balanced strategy for building
more prosperous, livable and sustainable communities entails increasing incomes
and restraining the cost of living.
While I agree with him on that fundamental point, it’s
important to root around in the weeds to gain a more acute understanding of
metropolitan dynamics. Kotkin is a big defender of the suburban status quo. …
I don't own a car. In fact, I'm among the 26 percent of
America's 14- to 34-year-olds who don't even have a driver's license, a number
that has increased from 21 percent in recent years.
I take transit everywhere, or walk. And I'm not alone:
There are hundreds of thousands of "Millennials," as our age group is
called, in metro Atlanta with commuting preferences distinctly different from
our parents'. When metro leaders are considering long-range transportation
planning, such as the July 31 transportation vote, they ought to keep us in
mind. Because if they fail to create a metro Atlanta where there are
transportation options — bus, rail, bike paths and pedestrian access as well as
roads — we Millennials will take our education and skills and talents to create
jobs and businesses elsewhere.
Many Baby Boomers and older Atlantans are opposing this
transportation referendum because it does not do enough for them. They've
forgotten, conveniently, that their parents paid taxes to build transportation
system that has driven their prosperity — and it is their obligation to do the
same next generations. It's as if they are stuck in time. They argue that the
BeltLine is a boondoggle, oblivious that it is exactly the kind of
transportation Millennials want and will demand.
John Sherman of the Fulton County Taxpayers Association
recently argued that the project list has too much transit, stating again that
only 5 percent of commuters in the region use transit. But Sherman seems blind
to the preferences of a younger generation that will benefit most from these
projects. He ignores that the average number of vehicle miles traveled by 16-
to 34-year-olds dropped 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, according to the
National Household Travel Survey.
...
Twenty-seven leaders have stepped forward as the first
wave of Regional Transportation Champions today, joining the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance to give people a say
on what a better transportation system means to them, and what they're willing
to do to make it better.
The group's reach is broad, collectively representing
over 2 million employees, students, customers, and members across the Greater
Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).
"We need to move people and goods quickly and
easily for our region to be a great place to live, work, play and invest, and
yet we're decades behind in making that happen," said John Tory, Chair of
CivicAction. "Everyone agrees we have a crisis on our hands. We want to
give residents a way to say, 'we need a better system, and we need to find
sustainable ways to pay for it'."
Campaign this fall: CivicAction, together with its
Regional Transportation Champions Council, will launch a campaign this fall to
kick-start a region-wide conversation. ...
Greater Vancouver is the most congested metropolitan
area in Canada, and the second-most in North America behind Los Angeles, …
On average, it takes 30% longer to travel through
Greater Vancouver than it should were traffic flowing freely. During evening
rush hour that time grows to 65% longer, the TomTom congestion index study
showed. It also said the average Vancouver driver with a 30-minute commute is
delayed 83 hours per year.
…
But the report is heavily skewed, warned urban planner
Gordon Price. Because it only takes data from people in cars, the bulk of the
data comes from areas where vehicles are heavily used, such as South of the
Fraser.
“It’s a good reflection of people stuck in cars who have
no choice. The study shows if you build around the car, you turn into Los
Angeles.
“The part of the region reflected in the TomTom study is
the part that built themselves around wide arterials, freeway interchanges,
parking lots, big box retail, single–use low density suburban development.”
…
There's a lot going on in a recent Star article about
deputy Toronto Mayor Doug Holyday saying he doesn't think downtown Toronto is a
good place for families to raise their children.
… article frames this as a left/right divide…
The real divide is between councillors who understand
how cities work and councillors who don't - or won't.
Cities are by necessity diverse, eclectic and messy.
They bring a huge number and variety of different things into close proximity,
producing unpredictable combinations and novel inventions. They allow for much
wider personal expression and allow distinct subcultures to form.
They thrive on tolerance - tolerance of different ideas,
different values and different ways of living. The more diversity that can
coexist in a city, the more opportunities there are for that city to produce
new ideas.
The leaders of great cities tend to transcend narrow
political orientation. Think of Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson
extolling the values of bicycles and bragging about a "communist
scheme" to deploy a city-wide bike share.
In his book The
Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser writes extensively about what he calls “self-protecting
urban innovation, cities' ability to generate the information needed to solve
their own problems. …
Historic Italian cities such as Pisa and Lucca, which
have been feuding since medieval times, are to be forced to coexist under
cost-saving measures to slash the number of provinces in half.
Mario Monti, Italy's prime minister, hopes to shave the
country's two trillion euro national debt by reducing the number of provinces
from 110 to just 43, in a redrawing of the country's administrative borders.
Only provinces which have a population of at least
350,000 and a land area of 2,500 square kilometres will be spared, as the
government tries to tackle Italy's bloated bureaucracy and its four overstaffed
tiers of government – national, regional, provincial and local.
But the austerity-driven reform will throw together
ancient towns and cities which boast different food, architecture, cultural
traditions and dialects, and whose inhabitants often resent their neighbours
just down the road.
"Better a corpse in the home than a Pisan at the
door," goes a saying from the nearby town of Livorno.
Rival towns swap insults over the quality of their
cuisine and the beauty of their women, and regional identity is often stronger
than the sense of being Italian.
…
Extra –
What is Seven50? Seven50 (“seven counties, 50 years”) is
a blueprint for growing a more prosperous, more desirable Southeast Florida
during the next 50 years and beyond. The plan is being developed to help ensure
socially inclusive communities, a vibrant and resilient economy, and
stewardship of the fragile ecosystem in what is quickly becoming one of the
world’s most important mega-regions.
Spearheaded by the South Florida and Treasure Coast
Regional Planning Councils and the Southeast Florida Regional Partnership
(SFRP), a unique collaboration of more than 200 public, private, and civic
stakeholders, Seven50 is mapping the strategy for the best-possible quality of
life for the more than six million residents of Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward,
Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties.
The plan is being devised through a series of public
summits, workshops, online outreach and high-impact studies led by the region’s
top thinkers. ...
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0000 - Earth
0900 - Arctic Ocean
1000 - Europe
2000 - Africa
3000 - Atlantic Ocean
4000 - Antarctica
5000 - Americas
6000 - Pacific Ocean
7000 - Oceana
8000 - Asia
9000 - Indian Ocean
"Global Region-builder Geo-Code
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