Editor’s note: This guest editorial come from Brett Wiewiora, Founder and CEO of Onlyinpgh (http://onlyinpgh.com), a tech startup creating an online system to visualize an area’s sense of place and connect people to local happenings.
Take a second to think about the favorite places in your city. What types of places are they?  Do they tend to be places unique to your town? Are they places that the locals know but are otherwise off the beaten path? I know that’s the case with me.
My favorite part of Pittsburgh is an area …

This multimedia project by student journalist Estelle Tran highlights two former church sites in Pittsburgh that have now been converted into other uses – one a brew pub and the other a concert venue and recording studio.
Places like this are what I love about Pittsburgh!
Any other good converted churches in your community?
-KG
 
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More than 50 US cities are competing to win a $1 million prize if they increase their number of college-educated residents.
The Talent Dividend Prize will be awarded by CEOs for Cities to the metropolitan area that exhibits the greatest increase in the number of post-secondary degrees granted per capita over a three-year period, the organization announced recently.
Competing cities include: Akron, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago; Cleveland, Dayton, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Rochester, St. Louis and Youngstown.
Read the complete list of competing cities and more details here. Is your city on the …

The answer is: ‘Yes.’ That’s according to MinnPost writer Steve Berg in a column about a proposed Minneapolis gaming venture.
He writes:
“aside from Las Vegas, a fantasy island built on gambling and tourism, I’m unaware of any U.S. city that has built a casino for any reason other than desperation. Failing Rust Belt cities build casinos. Detroit and Pittsburgh have them. Cleveland and Cincinnati are joining the list. Saginaw and Lansing, Mich., and Rockford, Ill., want to build them.”
I’d also add Milwaukee; Gary, Indiana and Erie, Pennsylvania to that list. I’m sure there’s …

Every decade or so in Cleveland the headlines reappear like locusts—a Renaissance, a Rebirth.  In fact the city has been remade in the visions of its leaders over and over.  But today, we are still poor, still municipally cash-strapped, more vacant, and shrunk.
Today is 2011, and the reality is not what was envisioned in the late 80′s and 90′s—or that Cleveland heyday of being high on the renaissance hog.  After all, the leaders had been building new stuff: the Galleria (’87), Key Tower (’91), the Rock and Roll Hall of …

Stephan Whitaker, a research economist at the Cleveland Fed, has noticed two salubrious trends in RustBelt demographics:

1) between 2000 and 2008, college graduates rose sharply as a share of the work-force in several urban areas

2) in the future, the graduate share will keep rising as older, less-educated workers retire

This news is good taken at face value, because research by Ed Glaeser and other urban economists suggests cities thrive as idea-generating centers. When educated people interact face-to-face, they breed businesses and insights.

Andrew Basile, writer of the infamous Detroit sprawl letter, shared this video he has been working on with us. It outlines how car culture destroyed Detroit and how the Woodward Corridor presents an opportunity for revitalization.

What an inspiring guy. Kudos to Mr. Basile for fighting the good fight and not “silently surrendering,” like so many other businesses.
Detroit’s Woodward Avenue:
Before:                                                                                    After:

-AS
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Ok, I know, we’ve written about this before (see here and here) so my apologies if you are sick of hearing about it.
But frankly, I think it’s important to remember that whatever challenges our part of the country faces, it’s no bed of roses in the Sun Belt, either.  And now there’s a book to explain more on this topic.
USA Today says the “sunburnt” cities of Florida, California and the Southwest must rethink themselves.
The paper writes, “Boomtowns that have been scorched by the housing crisis could learn from struggling Rust Belt …

Duluth, Minnesota, is aiming to grow its population and reach 90,000 residents by 2020, according to this article in The Duluth News Tribune.
The city plans to build on its historic strengths such as shipping, and grow other areas like medicine and IT, according to the story.
It currently has about 84,000 residents, per the US Census via Wikipedia.
Do we have any readers in Duluth? What do you think?
Also, a personal observation – I was in Duluth for the first time last summer and was frankly blown away by how beautiful it …

Today I posed a seemingly obvious question to myself: Why do we care about saving the cities we live in?

Some of us care about carbon emissions, but people were concerned about cities before we knew about climate change. I like living in the city because I would rather spend an hour reading my Kindle on a bus than sit twenty minutes in stop-and-go traffic, but that doesn’t explain why I want other people to live in Pittsburgh with me. In fact, the more people, the more traffic.

One obvious answer is that cities are full of people, and people care about people. But the death of a city often means people simply moving to other cities. Why do I care about tipping people’s decisions towards living in Pittsburgh, where I happen to want to live? (The exception is when a city dies because Godzilla attacks it.)