Youngstown’s Idora Neighborhood, working with some local nonprofit groups, is undergoing an ambitious campaign to get into urban fish farming. This is part of a wider urban agriculture strategy for the Idora Neighborhood, which is the site of targeted reinvestment.

This video is for a kickstarter campaign supporting the project. The group hopes to raise $860 dollars, so that they can start raising some talapia in the city. Only 21 days left!

Check out the video after the jump!

In case you needed a reminder how awesome St. Louis is … on Friday the city held its fifth annual MetroLink Prom, a formal celebration of the city’s beloved lightrail system.
Organized by some of the city’s most creative urban-dwellers, the event honors public transit and the vitality it brings to a city.
“Why do we do this year after year? Because MetroLink—and public transit in general—makes St. Louis a better, more accessible city,” event organizers said in a press release.
This year prom-goers even had a marching band to escort them to …

Urban gardening in the Rust Belt needs to be scaled up, as the era of cheap food is not: supply costs, health care costs, subsidy costs, etc. Moreover, the new economy is again becoming a localized, “handshake” economy, with ingenuity and partnerships within the sphere of a city creating for a web of social capital that can itself be consumed before being churned out. To that end, the old model has been one based on consumption and exhaust. This waste has led to our post-industrial ruin. Our future must be …

With the housing crash came a change in the meaning of our homes.  Perceived once as a solid investment—and as a place of domesticity—the American home is no longer simply about financial and physical security. Rather, homes are increasingly serving as place-makers in the formation of social capital by social entrepreneurs.
A few weeks ago I read in Freshwater Cleveland of a Near West Side Cleveland home that doubled as a concert hall of sorts. The Spares, a Chicago-based duet, were next on schedule for the Mechanic Street Concerts, and so …

Check out the work being done by the folks at the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which they highlighted in this video.
Learn more about their history and their work downtown, which has gotten some recent publicity.
-KG
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My new best friend Joe Baur at Mildly Relevant sent me this fantastic video showing how Cleveland’s transit agency, RTA, continues to shape Cleveland for the better.
This video, made for Siemens’ Changing Your City for the Better Contest, focuses on Cleveland’s new $500 million bus-rapid-transit line, the Euclid Corridor, and the more than $4 billion worth of private investment that has followed.
 

Inspiring!
RTA, we here at Rust Wire salute you. We need more projects like the Euclid Corridor in this region and less like the Avon interchange.
-AS

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Rust Wire contributor Sean Posey always has something interesting and smart to add to the discussion. And he is starting to get noticed for it. Beginning October 16 and running through Dec. 18 Sean’s photography will be displayed at Youngstown’s Butler Museum of Art, easily one of the coolest and most respected museums in our region. He has written a little bit about the project for us below:

Youngstown, Ohio is often presented in photography as a desolate place filled with decaying buildings—a post-apocalyptic landscape presumably bereft of humans. My current work on the city focuses on a different aspect of Youngstown: the underrepresented people and communities in the area. Activists, cultural groups, the youth of Youngstown, and the faces of neighborhood residents represent a Youngstown that many outside of the city will never see.

Ah, Toledo. My hometown, technically.
I was only two when my family moved away so my memories are vague. But one memory that is very clear is my mom singing me the song “We’re strong for Toledo.”
She told us her father, my grandfather, was so proud of his city that when the family was away on vacation, he would order her to perform this song for people they met.
It’s a catchy, but very old-fashioned tune “the girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest.” But definitely more flattering than the …

Some great photos of the Steel City from my pal Estelle Tran at her new blog, Pixburgh N’at.

Recognize this spot in Oakland?

Another great street scene.

Love this one.

Make sure you read the sign.
Check more of ‘em out here.
-KG
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I am on an Amtrak to DC sitting in the lounge area and about me is America in the morning: a group of teenagers on a trip enjoying the confluence of freedom that is a train and headphones—a cowboy rebounding between dropped-call phone calls and catnaps—towns outside the window that bleed centrality and history. Life is at the moment.
I am heading to the Living Cities 20th Anniversary Conference. Rust Wire was lucky enough to be asked to lend a hand to Next American City for their live-blog coverage. …