New Community Paradigms

Lismore City Council is kicking off a 14-month community-wide conversation where we are inviting you to share your views about what you would like for your community, your quality of life, your family, your employment or business opportunities, your facilities, your environment and your ability to have your say about future decisions for your place.

This is what Jane Jacobs taught us long ago in her book The Economy of Cities. This is what the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas meant when he formalized Jacob's argument into a theory of "human capital externalities" that stem from the dense clustering of people in cities as the basic mechanism of economic growth. Cities themselves power economic progress, driving artistic, technological, and overall economic growth at one and the same time.

There's an important debate taking place right now, as you know, about what will happen to the suburbs and particularly the more distant exurbs when economic conditions and the real estate market pick up a little more. On one side are the suburbanists, such as Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, who believe that the march of the affluent to distant locations will simply continue, and we will be building more subdivisions 30 and 40 miles out from the cities. Then there are the urbanists, such as Christopher Leinberger, who argue that the Great Recession marks a demographic turning point, and communities far from the urban center are going to be much less attractive to the next generation of affluent homebuyers.

The Center for Reinventing Government was founded by Paul Wolf an attorney with 17 years of experience working for various government agencies in Buffalo, New York. During his years of government service Paul often questioned why services were delivered in the manner they were. The typical response provided was "that is the way we have always done things". The status quo is not enough for any organization or individual to survive today's fast changing world. Government needs to strive for continuous improvement and reinvent how it makes decisions and provide services.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama's administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

Existing patterns of urban and suburban development seriously impair our quality of life. The symptoms are: more congestion and air pollution resulting from our increased dependence on automobiles, the loss of precious open space, the need for costly improvements to roads and public services, the inequitable distribution of economic resources, and the loss of a sense of community. By drawing upon the best from the past and the present, we can plan communities that will more successfully serve the needs of those who live and work within them. Such planning should adhere to certain fundamental principles.

New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies.

The Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne - CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged around the world by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of architecture (such as landscape, urbanism, industrial design, and many others).

The Athens Charter, or Charte d'Athènes was a document about urban planning published by the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier in 1943. The work was based upon Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) book of 1935 and urban studies undertaken by the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the early 1930s.

With his very honest, stark, and poignant perspective, Chuck deconstructed our nation's infrastructure maintenance deficiencies and compared our current pattern of development to a bonafide Ponzi scheme. For example, California needs an additional $37 billion per year just to maintain our existing highway system. Like experiencing Springsteen's "Nebraska" or Boston's City Hall for the first time, Chuck's message weighed heavily on the audience as he painted a bleak picture for our economic, social and cultural landscape.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture - a modern "museum" on the Internet - promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Director Carlo Ratti founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004 within the City Design and Development group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, as well as in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The Lab's mission states...See More

Here's why: the internet offers virtual spaces where citizens, in absolute equality, can reclaim an active role in the political process. In essence, these virtual rooms today have the same function as the public squares in ancient times, where citizens gathered to exchange ideas and jointly agree to common solutions. So ironically, it is only through sophisticated information and communication technology that we will succesfully revive the fundamental principles of democracy and citizenship, and confront the global issues of our time.

Social Finance is a London based organisation created in 2007 with the express aim of developing an effective social investment market in the UK.

Serve.gov is designed to help Americans create and find opportunities to serve their communities and our nation.

The first-ever comprehensive, collaborative, consensus Strategic Plan for Economic Development in Los Angeles County, a clear, comprehensive, collaborative strategy that guides job and business retention, expansion and attraction.

In 2009, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) engaged and solicited input from more than 1,000 stakeholders in more than two dozen public forums that brought together leaders from the public, private, business, government, labor, education, environmental, and community-based organizations to develop the first-ever comprehensive, collaborative, consensus Strategic Plan for Economic Development in Los Angeles County.

BALLE believes in the power of local businesses to transform communities for the better by working cooperatively toward a shared vision. We imagine cities and towns of every size and political stripe engaged in shared learning to build community assets like sustainable agriculture, green building, renewable energy, community capital, zero-waste manufacturing and independent retail - what we call the building blocks of Living Economies. We envision a time when local economies not only generate community wealth, but also are catalysts for civic action, social diversity and ecological health -- for sustainable communities.

Good Jobs First is the nation's leading resource center for grassroots groups and public officials seeking to make economic development incentives (we prefer to call them subsidies) more accountable and effective. We also promote smart growth and green jobs policies that benefit working families. We are based in Washington, DC and have an affiliate in New York.

If you work in the fields of public engagement, conflict resolution or community problem solving, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation is here to help you stay on top of news, resources and goings-on in the field, and to connect you with other movers-and-shakers who share your interests.