Take a look at the pieces created by Buffalo artist Dennis Maher using materials salvaged from demolished buildings.

The Baltimore native came to Buffalo eight years ago and finds the city to be a very inspiring place, he said in an interview with Rust Wire.

“There are very few places where I could do the kind of work I’m doing here,” working with debris, Maher said.

When he first came to Buffalo, he worked on a demolition crew to earn extra income.

His interest in demolition has different aspects, he said: the physicality of it, the political aspect of it as a development strategy, and as a process of erasure.

Music is Art is a not for profit (federal 501c3) organization founded in 2004 by The Goo Goo Dolls bassist and Buffalo native Robby Takac. Now, the Music is Art Festival is Buffalo’s most extensive exhibition of local music, dance and art. Every year the Festival features live music performances of many genres on multiple stages, plus:

Visual artists displaying their work

A stage dedicated to dance troupes

A Kids’ Village featuring live music and hands on art creation

Live art being created right in the middle of the action

Other not …

Take a look at these two quirky videos about congestion pricing by Lewis Lehe

If you are in Pittsburgh Saturday afternoon, check out Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City, screening at The Carnegie Museum of Art at 3 p.m.
Burnham was “one of America’s most important architects and urban planners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
-KG
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A joint application by the regional planning agencies in Cleveland, Youngstown and Akron has won a $4.25 million grant under the President’s Sustainable Communities program.
The money will be used to conduct land-use, housing, environmental, transportation and economic development planning on a region level. You may recall, we wrote about how badly this type of planning is needed in the Cleveland area on this blog before. In fact, I would venture to say, there isn’t a community in the country that needs land use planning more than Cleveland.
So, Akron, Youngstown, Cleveland, …

Clevelanders: This sounds like a great film screening to attend- The Olmsted Legacy: a film about Frederick Law Olmsted and America’s great city parks.
Lots of people know Olmsted as the landscape architect of New York’s Central Park, but he designed nearly 100 public parks in his lifetime.
You likely have even been in a park he designed – in any one of Buffalo’s system of parks, Belle Isle Park in Detroit, as well as parks in Chicago, Milwaukee, Dayton and Scranton.
“The parks, he held, were to be vital democratic spaces in …

Editor’s note: This piece comes from Michigan correspondent Ivy Hughes. -KG
Mid-Michigan doesn’t need economic indicators to validate the recent surge of entrepreneurial activity. In less than two years, four incubators have popped up giving business, technology, science and creative startups an opportunity to make money doing what they love.
Incubator is a loose term generally used to describe the capture of new talent, economic programs and business support in a physical structure. The greater Lansing area has four: The TIC, the Hatch, ITEC and the NEO Center. Between the four, approximately …

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is preparing to launch a new, online business portal that will make it easier for businesses to operate and locate in the Motor City.
“We hear the horror stories of why businesses won’t come into the city of Detroit,” said Karla Henderson, part of Bing’s planning team. “So we know we need to change that perception.”
The $2 million system was designed by Detroit-based Compuware Corp. It is expected to save up to 100,000 staff hours annually.
Are you listening, Cleveland? Full story at Crain’s Detroit.
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Editor’s note: This piece is a guest editorial from William Black, an organizer of the Pages & Places book festival in Scranton, PA, in October. Here he describes a number of other developments happening in his hometown. -KG

If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton …

For years, environmentalists have pushed for the development of green and energy-efficient technologies as a way to curb climate change and prevent a future ecological catastrophe.

But Thursday morning, speaking to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning D.C.-based think tank, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm said that focusing on global warming is the wrong message — if you really want to grab Americans’ attention, focus on the economic opportunities in a greener economy — especially for auto-dependent areas.

“The bottom line is, that if we’re not talking about jobs, then it’s not going to resonate across the country,” Granholm said, speaking to about 100 people in the CAP’s downtown office. “Maybe that’s just my view as a governor from the industrial Midwest.”