Knight Cities Podcast

A new kind of journalism is being born in Philadelphia. It’s manifested in The Philadelphia Citizen, and its purpose is nothing less than to spark a new movement of citizens who refuse to outsource leadership to a political class. With Jeremy Nowak.

Joy. Play. Whimsy. Those are words not often used to describe city planning and the associated public engagement it usually requires. But with its Market Street Prototyping Festival, San Francisco inverted the traditional planning model and turned its main street into a canvas for testing ideas submitted by citizens.

Are “creative” and “bureaucracy” mutually exclusive terms? Erma Ranieri is working hard to prove otherwise. As commissioner for public sector employment in South Australia, she is leading Change@SouthAustralia to speed change in government. For her efforts to make government bureaucracy creative and responsive to citizens she was named 2014 Telstra South Australia Business Woman of the Year.

Kathryn Ott Lovell is responsible for one of the nation’s largest non-commercial public-private partnerships. She is executive director of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, an independent nonprofit organization that champions Philadelphia’s vast park system, where she orchestrates the daily dance of balancing public and private concerns and responsibilities to produce quality parks for citizens.

Shawn McCaney, program director of creative communities at the William Penn Foundation, has been a leader in reimagining Philadelphia’s civic commons, those places that together encourage us to cross paths with our neighbors, encounter new ideas and make broader connections.

Is it time for a new kind of local economy in our cities, one that's based on people sharing their knowledge? Tessy Britton believes it is. Tessy and her colleagues at Civic Systems Lab are building a city framework where people can teach skills to those around them and learn new ones. It's part sharing economy, part neighborliness. I asked Tessy about the Civic Systems Lab and what she calls the 'new civic economy' she is helping to build.

Are neighbors vanishing in America? Marc Dunkelman thinks so. Marc is a fellow in public policy with the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University and author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.”

An estimated one third of adults can be called soloists, people who work in non-traditional relationships with their employers. And the rate is growing rapidly, 15 to 17 percent every year. A soloist is, as George Gendron puts it, an extreme version of an entrepreneur and requires much of the same support and same capacities. George should know. He was editor-in-chief of Inc. Magazine for two decades, where he founded the Inc. 500 and worked with Michael Porter on the creation of the Inner City 100, a ranking of the fastest-growing companies in Americas inner cities.

An estimated one third of adults can be called soloists, people who work in non-traditional relationships with their employers. And the rate is growing rapidly, 15 to 17 percent every year. A soloist is, as George Gendron puts it, an extreme version of an entrepreneur and requires much of the same support and same capacities. George should know. He was editor-in-chief of Inc. Magazine for two decades, where he founded the Inc. 500 and worked with Michael Porter on the creation of the Inner City 100, a ranking of the fastest-growing companies in Americas inner cities.

Paul Grogan is one of the nations great civic innovators. He has had a 360-degree view of what makes cities tick—from his early service as aide to two Boston mayors, to the creation of the nation’s first national intermediary for community development, to the founding of CEOs for Cities, then to Harvard and now as president and CEO of the Boston Foundation. Its been a tour de force of civic service, which is why Paul always has important new insights to share on cities.

Each week, it seems someone publishes yet another list of essentials for city success. In fact, at Knight, we have our own list of these essentials: talent, opportunity and engagement. But Charles Leadbeater, a leading authority on innovation and creativity, believes empathy should be right at the top of these lists. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

Do you ever look at an abandoned building in your city and think, why doesn’t someone fix that up? Do you ever imagine that you might be the one to bring it back to life? Avra Jain is a Miami-based real estate investor and developer. Her latest project is the redevelopment of the famous Vagabond Motel in the up-and-coming MiMo Biscayne Boulevard Historic District, and she has advice for would-be developers. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

Making art general in cities across America is the charge of Dennis Scholl, vice president for arts at Knight Foundation. Dennis and his colleagues are the brains behind the Knight Arts Challenge (which is currently open for ideas in South Florida), the enormously popular Random Acts of Culture, and Inside|Out, the project that takes replicas of famous works of art in museums and puts them in unexpected places. This week on “Knight Cities,” Dennis and I talk about his work and how art is bringing new vibrancy to cities. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

How do you create a sense of community in a brand new development? Its a question Sandra Kulli, a real estate marketing strategist, has been wrestling with for years. She is president of Kulli Marketing, and we had a chance to catch up recently in Todos Santos, Mexico, the site of one of her newest projects, Tres Santos. Its a project that could have been a typical resort on the Pacific, but the developer chose instead to forego gates and golf courses to reach for an authentic connection to the people in this small Mexican town. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

Can business muster the will, the know-how and the capital to take on the problems cities face? Shaun Abrahamson is betting on it. He is co-founder of Urban.us, a new public benefit corporation based in Miami - and a Knight Foundation grantee - that supports companies working to solve the most urgent urban challenges. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

What’s your Walk Score? Thats a question that has become increasingly popular among urbanists since the founding of Walk Score seven years ago. Now real estate agents prominently display the number on their listings, knowing the value it adds to properties. Matt Lerner is a co-founder of Walk Score and its original chief technology officer, and is now vice president of local engineering at Redfin, the company that purchased Walk Score in October. He is our guest this week on 'Knight Cities.' Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

He’s been called the shadow mayor of Center City Philadelphia, and there is no one in America today who knows more about how to cultivate a downtown than Paul R. Levy. Paul is president and CEO of Center City District, the organization supported by property owners that makes the district appeal to businesses and residents alike by keeping it clean, safe, green and active. In our conversation this week, Paul explains why Philadelphia, a Knight community, is thriving again, even as it weathers a profound economic transition. And it all starts with the revitalization of the city’s Center City. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

Before planning fatigue sets in, why not just build a better block? That’s the approach of Jason Roberts who leads Team Better Block. Jason is a charismatic man who works with communities – first his own in Oak Cliff, Texas, and now with communities around the world – to turn vacant properties into lively, thriving blocks that showcase what’s possible in a neighborhood. He usually has to break a few laws to do it, but the result is places people love and want to be. It’s an approach that employs acting your way to success versus planning your way to success. Note: We're off for the holidays. We'll return on Jan. 7, 2015. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

Scott Stowell runs Open, a design studio in New York. He is in the final days of a Kickstarter campaign for his new book, “Design for People,” which is filled with the stories behind the stories of the firm’s biggest design projects. In this week’s “Knight Cities,” Scott and I talk about his book and how to organize the kind of Kickstarter campaign he is using to fund it. Listen to our conversation here. And sign up for the Knight Cities newsletter to get alerts as soon as new conversations are posted. You can follow us on Twitter at #KnightCities or @KnightFdn. And if you have ideas for people you’d like to hear more from, please email me. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.

The Atlanta BeltLine is a massive development turning 22 miles of historic railroad corridors circling downtown into a network of parks, trails and transit to link 45 of the city’s neighborhoods. It is among the largest and most wide-ranging urban development and mobility projects in the United States. And it all began with a master’s thesis by a student at Georgia Tech, Ryan Gravel. Ryan, now a senior urban designer at Perkins+Will in the firm’s Atlanta office, explains how deep community engagement made the BeltLine a reality against all odds on this week’s “Knight Cities.” Listen to our conversation here. And sign up for the “Knight Cities” newsletter to get alerts as soon as new conversations are posted. Email me via: Coletta (at) knightfoundation.org.