This is seriously the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The Bridge is a video about a movement started by DeKorda Jackson and his efforts for the push of getting a public skate-park built in the city of Youngstown, Ohio.

The video was produced by Stuck in Ohio, a Northeast Ohio creative studio.

Skateparks are a great way for cities to demonstrate their youth friendliness and also boost their hip factor. Plus it’s better to get kids off the street where they could get killed by a car. This is what you call a win, win. A no brainer. I hope this effort is successful.

Video after the jump …

For weeks now, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been running biographies of the 11 women who were found murdered just over a year ago by serial killer Anthony Sowell in a house of the east side of Cleveland.

This week, they profiled Amelda “Amy” Hunter, a “bookworm” from Chicago, that eventually got mixed up with men and drugs. All of the stories, more or less, follow the same pattern: A young woman, loved by her family, full of promise, falls prey to older men, crack and a life on the streets, and her life meets its tragic ending at the hands of a sociopath.

It’s all, of course, terribly sad.

A friend of mine pointed out, in all these stories, in all their coverage, sympathetic as it may be, the Plain Dealer never raises the bigger issue.

The Scene: A maze of decaying streets intermingled with dirt-tinged smokestacks and neglected church steeples.

The Action: A small knot of cyclists set off en masse from a Carnegie-built library in a formerly robust steel town.

Background: Cycling is still a fringe activity in this Rust Belt metropolis, wedged as it is between the trendier East and West coasts. But a small yet committed group of riders shrug off the incredulous stares. Some even commute to work, though few of their employers provide showers and lockers, much less secure bike parking. At least the local transit authority finally has installed bike racks.

Welcome to Pittsburgh circa 2003, when the Post-Gazette published the story “Can Pittsburgh Learn to Love Bikes?”

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.

Cleveland still operates like a body with two heads that have lived different lives.

To what extent is black culture representative of Rust Belt Chic? This is important on a number of levels, for if the grit-chic brand is (or is destined to become) heavily white and hipster—or white and Springsteen-like—or white and ethic, then what is occurring is an economic development strategy catering to part of a city’s flavor, which only serves to reinforce said segregation that so often kills any chance of building a mass of dynamic thought.

How many times have you heard this line: Young people prefer urban living.

Of course, everyone acknowledges, this isn’t a universal preference. But a clear generational shift away from suburban lifestyles is the phenomena on which many of our discussions about urbanism are premised.

However, while young people may be a driving force in demanding vibrant urban environments, they aren’t necessarily in the driver’s seat when it comes to the important policy decisions that continue to shape metro areas, often at the expense of cities.

Alex Ihnen at NextSTL articulated this generational tension last month in a blog post

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.)

It is with some trepidation that I am coming out of the closet as a Clevelander who still loves Lebron James. That’s right, I said it.

I didn’t always feel this way. I was a pretty big fan in his heyday here in Cleveland. I own his biography and a No. 23 jersey in red and gold. Even though I was upset when he left, I didn’t burn it. Now I’m glad.

It was hard, the way Lebron’s “Decision” put Cleveland under the always-harsh national spotlight. There was so much pride in hosting a superstar for a city that’s athletic legacy reads like a Greek tragedy.

Discourse can explain a lot. It hints at the state of things. It hints at our needs. What’s more, discourse can prove self-fulfilling as the social conditions influence what’s being written or said whereas what’s being heard or read can influence the conditions.

What follows is a quick and dirty exercise examining the discourse in Cleveland via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Specifically, a word cloud was developed on all local stories appearing in the February 9th, 11th, and 13th editions. Examining the reaction to this “official” discourse, a word cloud was also developed for reader comments for each of the aforementioned stories.

When I bought a house in the city of Cleveland, one of the constant questions I faced was: “but what about the schools?”

Failing public schools are a problem in urban areas throughout Ohio and more broadly throughout the country. And that is hindering efforts to repopulate even some of the more fashionable city neighborhoods in places like Cleveland. That was the basic premise of the thesis I just completed for my master’s in urban planning.

Using original research, I explored the extent to which failing public schools undermine neighborhood stability by encouraging residential turnover among middle-class residents. I thought the readers of this blog might be interested in the results.