Monday evening I had the honor to join approximately 100 fellow participants, planners, partners, and stakeholders from throughout Greater Lansing at a kick-off meeting for the Mid-Michigan Program for Greater Sustainability at East Lansing’s Hannah Community Center. Partners in the program include the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, Lansing Area Economic Partnership, Michigan State University Land Policy Institute, Michigan Energy Options, the Michigan Fitness Foundation, Greater Lansing Housing Coalition, the Mid-Michigan Environmental Action Council, and CAM-TV.
The four-hour event showcased the nine sustainability projects that will be part of the three-year effort …

Founded in 1994, Share-a-Bike is an East Lansing, Michigan-based charity that receives old, unused, discarded, and donated bicycles. Whenever practical, these bicycles are completely refurbished and then donated to the underprivileged in the community, including the homeless, new immigrants, and the poor. Last Saturday, I had the honor to work with them collecting bicycles at a local spring recycling event in the community.
For many of the recipients, the gift of an operable bicycle may be their lifeline of last resort. Either they cannot afford to purchase or maintain an automobile, may …

Announcement of sorts: a national speaker on the topic of transportation and cities is coming to Cleveland on May 9th (Bike Month) and Rust Wire is helping spread the word.
The event, to be held at the City Club on May 9th, will feature Mark Gorton and a panel of local decision makers.
Mark Gorton is the founder of Openplans, a group of New York City-based nonprofits that are using technology to help solve the problems facing American cities. The Openplans group of organizations includes Streetsblog, Streetfilms, and …

Good news, Clevelandphiles/cyclonerds.
Clevelandtown now has a green, two-way cycle track downtown. This lovely example of sustainable transportation infrastructure is to remain on display all week, educating the local populace about the latest in transportation innovation and helping build awareness of the city’s new complete streets policy.
Check out these beautiful pictures:

This project cost $35,000 to put together (grants) and was designed by the brilliant students at Kent State University’s Urban Design Center, a group that is behind approximately 50 percent of the cool things happening in Cleveland.
Yay, us!!
Also, I asked an …

There has not been a new, enclosed mall to open in the United States, the land of malls and honey, since 2006. This might not seem to be too significant, but given our country’s obsession with shopping, the comfort of remaining in a climate-controlled environment for as long as humanly possible, eating at mediocre chain restaurants, and our fetishization of a suburban-style utopia that just wont go away; trust me, it’s a very big deal.

Indoor shopping malls, for the purposes of retail, are dying and it is a good thing. It is good because it is creating the opportunities to re-think what these massive properties can mean for a neighborhood, and how, through their abandonment, help point toward what is truly important and valuable to a community.

It’s branding season again in Cleveland, so says the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In its 2012 editorial agenda, a main goal for the upcoming year is “[rebranding Cleveland] to change not only the look and feel of our region’s “capital city,”… but also the way the world and Clevelanders themselves look at it.”

But the branding of a Rust Belt city is tricky business, as you’re dealing with the prospect of putting lipstick on a poorhouse, or at least that’s how it can be perceived. For example, Atlantic Cities recently did a study examining perceptions of the country’s big cities, and the Rust Belt claimed six of the top ten spots in highest percentage of negative reactions, with Detroit and Cleveland claiming first and third place, respectively.

Pretty cool video about Cincinnati’s 1970s-era “Urban Walls Movement,” when more than half a dozen large murals were painted on downtown buildings. Murals really dress up a city and give it life.

Urban Walls Cincinnati from Jacob Fox on Vimeo.
I would love to see something like this in downtown Cleveland.
H/t Urban Cincy

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My hometown of Indianapolis has been a logically designed community based on traditional geometric shapes ever since it’s designer Alexander Ralston first put pen to paper. Monument Circle (source of the ‘Circle City’ nickname) sits at the heart of the original mile square, with a radiating street pattern extending outward from there, though it becomes more grid-oriented in the midtown areas. Later, an outer loop (not circle) was created by Interstate 465 and a near perfect oval was constructed for high-speed excitement and adventure in the suburb of Speedway. Because of Monument Circle and …

There’s no consensus in the urban planning profession — or in public opinion more generally — about how to handle declining cities like Detroit.

All sorts of solutions have been proposed, ranging from the outlandish (making Detroit a “skyscraper ruins park”) to the more widely accepted (converting vacant land into urban agriculture).

But lately Michigan leaders have seized on a strategy that may be the most promising yet: placemaking.

From newspaper columnists to business executives, from the Department of Transportation and Governor Rick Snyder, Wolverines of all stripes seem to be coming to the conclusion that creating vibrant, walkable urban places is perhaps as important to the future of the state as the auto industry was to its past.

Recently, I became aware of one woman’s inspiring effort that is underway here in Greater Lansing. Ariniko O’Meara plans to walk (saunter) every single street in the City of Lansing and relay her thoughts and impressions about them across the net on her City Saunter blog, Facebook page, and on Twitter. There is also an interview on YouTube about her project.

While I had heard some previous references to this ongoing project, I never fully realized the scope and scale of it until the past week or two. There are over 600 miles of streets in Lansing, so her saunter will be continuing over an extended period of time. Instead of me trying to express the spirit of her grand crusade, here’s the summary Ariniko provided on her terrific blog found on wordpress.com.