Posts Tagged: cities

GovBytes: Can a Font Bring a City Together? Introducing Chatype

A small group of designers and entrepreneurs in Chattanooga, TN have been engaged in a grass-roots effort to make their city first city in the US to have its own font. It started last year when collaboration began on a font to encapsulate the unique aspects of the city. In January, the group unveiled Chatype,Read… Read more »

Are more “super-sized cities” coming soon?

For years, people have talked about a phenomenon called “suburban sprawl” – what happens when cities tend to blend into each other along a stretch of road, making it difficult (if not impossible) to tell when you have passed into a bordering community. This is often said of the Chicago to Milwaukee corridor – bothRead… Read more »

GovBytes: Using Technology to Manage Traffic Congestion

The West Coast is famous for being sprawling, but some cities are now using technology to reduce traffic congestion. According to a recent article in Government Technology, some of their innovative solutions include: Green lights that automatically adjust with traffic flows in Portland Creating HOT lanes that allow drivers to pay varying rates depending onRead… Read more »

Government Layoffs – The 10 Cities Who Have It Worst

The Top 10 list: New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI Stockton, CA New Haven-Milford, CT Fresno, CA Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA Bakersfield-Delano, CA Kansas City, MO-KS Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA Methodology: “24/7 Wall St. used data from the Bureau of Labor for statistics for estimated government employment and regional unemployment. The employment change figuresRead… Read more »

What Could Possibly Be Next?

450,000 Govies Outta Work in FY2012 Sorry for the grim news, but that that’s exactly what they reported last week. So, if you’re a government worker either for a state, county, town or village – pink slips are in the forecast. If you thought it was bad last year (300,000 jobs were cut) – braceRead… Read more »

3 Reasons Why Cities Should Focus on Seniors, Not Whippersnappers

Last week, I served on a panel at the National League of Cities Congress in Denver, Colorado. Fellow panelists included Harvard’s John O’Leary, The Performance Institute’s Alan Shark, Muni Gov 2.0 co-founder Pam Broviak and Social Media for Responders founder Mark Basnight. Each of us offered our insights about the state of social media inRead… Read more »

A Little Laboratory of Democracy: An Open Cities ThinkUp

Local governments are considered “laboratories of democracy” — the places where ideas are generated, tried, and evaluated. Instead of relying on just the one, decidedly cumbersome national government to generate new policy, the founders crafted a flexible federal structure, where the more numerous and more nimble states and cities could experiment on their own andRead… Read more »

Crime Rankings for Cities: A Fair Comparison?

February 10, 2010 There is a recent article in the New York Times addressing whether or not officers and command staff accurately recorded crime data. The article by William Rashbaum states: “More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annualRead… Read more »

Interesting Mix of People at CityCamp

So today is the start of CityCamp…. There has been a really cool introductions going on via the citycamp listserv and it looks like a fascinating bunch of people. A couple quick thoughts: CityCamp seems to bring slightly different people than the Gov 2.0 Camps and conferences I’ve been to. For example: -More journalist-related, hyperlocalRead… Read more »