Rust Wire has previously highlighted Donald Carter, the David Lewis Director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. (Take a look at our prior post on Carter’s efforts to trade the term “Rust Belt” for “Water Belt” and change “Sun Belt” into “Drought Belt.”)
Here’s a piece by Carter from Sunday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette discussing The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, which took place last month with mayors from Springfield, Illinois; Elkhart, Indiana; Canton, Ohio; Charleston and Huntington, West Virginia; Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin.
See if you agree with …

You may have already seen this USA Today story on a suburban Atlanta congregation that wants to purchase a closed Buffalo church, take it apart, ship it to Georgia and rebuild it there.
Some groups say it is a great way to preserve an otherwise vacant and unused structure. (The Diocese closed the church in 2008 because of declining enrollment - an issue many of our cities have faced that we’ve written about on this blog before.) You can see the web site for the parish that wants to bring the …

Cleveland residents,
The Great Lakes Urban Exchange is hosing its third annual conference in Cleveland this year.
The group, which aims to share ideas and best practices for revitalizing Great Lakes cities, has a survey about how how the conference can best be used for “ACTION, rather than agendas.”
The group is “issuing this preemptive survey to help us plan conference activities that will be immediately actionable, useful, and effective in answering the needs of the ‘do-ers’ who are making Cleveland a healthier, more sustainable, more equitable and successful city.”
Find out more and …

Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

We at Rust Wire don’t like to toot our own horn that much.
But I just couldn’t help it after seeing this recent story in The New York Times about Buffalo’s lower west side neighborhood.
The story notes that this historically blue-collar Italian section of the city has recently become home to a number of different immigrant groups, such as people from Puerto Rico, Myamar and Somalia.
In a post about Buffalo back in March 2009, Rust Wire made this observation about the area:
“Our next stop was Niagara Street, on the city’s West …

I’m going to borrow an idea from this Cleveland Scene article, which asked a number of Clevelanders what they hoped for in 2010 for their city.
Among the responses: safer streets for walkers and cyclists, more neighborhood gardens, more tourists, a sports championship and many more goals.
What do you hope for your city in the coming year?
-KG

I took off on a road trip across the Rust Belt this summer both because I saw it as a potential for some good stories (which you can find here) and because it seemed like a great opportunity to visit a part of the country that I knew solely through reading and conversation. I also veered a bit out of the Rust Belt’s traditional boundaries to do a story for NPR’s Latino USA (scroll down and then listen here) on immigrant urban farmers in Cincinnati.

And it turns out I wasn’t the only person with such ideas. One group of planning students from Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois made a similar trip, calling it “Rust Belt Road Trip.” Another group did the same thing as well. It has to be more than the catchy alliteration–there must be something in the air.

Reading the Digging Pitt blog recently, I want to second their call to have Pittsburgh (or any other Rust Belt city, for that matter) host a Jane’s Walk - a neighborhood walk in the spirit of urban thinker Jane Jacobs.
A number of other cities have done this and Pittsburgh - or Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, etc. - should all jump on the bandwagon.
Volunteer guides lead tours of various neighborhoods. From Digging Pitt, “Some tours focus on heritage sites, while others explore the nooks and crannies of the city. From great hangouts …

Our friends at Great Lakes Urban Echange (GLUE) alerted me to this event: a film screening Tuesday, (Nov. 24) at 7:30 pm at the Drexel Theater, located at 2254 E. Main Street, in Bexley, Ohio.
The film is The New Metropolis, about America’s first suburbs and the problems they face. For a more detailed explaination of the film, click the link to the movie’s web site (above), or read a more detailed explanation from Cincinnati CityBeat.
The film will be followed by a panel discussion. The screening is being hosted by Greater …

It’s always terrible to hear about people losing their jobs — but it seems even worse in a bad recession and in a place like McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
Earlier this week, a call center that employed 600 - and had received considerable tax abatements from local governments - announced it would be shutting down.
You can read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s coverage, or the excellent post by McKeesport blogger Jason Togyer.
I think some (like Togyer) would say this situation shows the folly of expecting low-wage, easily outsourceable service jobs to replace the manufacturing jobs …