the good city

Will the Obama White House recognize changes in American culture, or assume we’re still living in the ’80s? Here’s David Brooks: The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe. [...]

I’m a little late to the party, but I should add my voice to the Spaulding brothers’ and point out the recent study reported in the Portland Tribune that dedicated bike lanes help encourage people to try bicycling. As the story points out: According to (Portland State University professor Jennifer) Dill, most regular bicyclists are young [...]

It seems I don’t know enough about how Internet Explorer reads code. But TGC seems to be in working order again — for everyone.

It’s time to take the wraps off the new Web site! I hope to be able to once again add to the general discussion about urban life in Fort Wayne, but as the subhead of this Web site says, I’llbe on the lookout for items on church and culture, too. Thanks, and I’m looking forward [...]

The new TGC blog will be up and going again soon! I have a couple more technical wrinkles to iron out — for example, setting up FeedBurner feed for RSS and email — but I’ll start posting in the near future.

I will soon move this whole blog over to my new hosting provider, so The Good City will actually live at thegoodcity.com. But until I do so, this blog will be a little ugly, since I didn’t pay the annual CSS prettifying fee to WordPress.com. Stay tuned for details!

Will our cities step up and improve our streets for non-car traffic for our seniors? A new poll by AARP finds that while many Americans ages 50+ are trying to move away from car transportation as a result of high gas prices, their attempt to go “green” is challenged by inadequate sidewalks and bike lanes, [...]

Is eminent domain not cleaning up your city fast enough? You could take a tip from Beijing and simply surround the offending non-glittery neighborhood with a giant brick wall.

As ranked by Forbes magazine. The Rust Belt is pretty much the entire list. The big loser? Ohio, with four cities on the list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. Runner-up is Michigan, with Detroit and Flint. Read the article and view the related photo package. – Photo by abardwell on Flickr