Creating sustainability through Smart City Projects

Smart Cities are a key mechanism for facilitating sustainability – be that in the use of resources (e.g. energy, water), the running of city infrastructure (e.g. transport) or in terms of social policy (e.g. politics). Using our experience of a Smart City project, MK:Smart, we describe what role citizen-led innovation could have in promoting long-term sustainable change. Beyond this we detail some of the barriers to success we have identified in the hope that design patterns might help us address these challenges

Creating welcoming spaces in the city : exploring the theory and practice of ‘hospitality’ in two regional theatres

This paper explores the relationship between notions of ‘access’ and ‘hospitality’ by focusing on two practice-led research interventions conducted in two regional arts venues in the culturally and ethnically diverse city of Coventry, UK. By conceptualising Warwick Arts Centre and The Belgrade Theatre as potential sites of hospitality, I consider the ways they might offer young people spaces of access, conviviality, and belonging in this multicultural city. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ hospitality, both cases offer examples of devised youth theatre practice that aimed to renegotiate the ‘host/guest’ binary towards more meaningful and convivial relationships

City Systems: Building Blocks for Achieving Sustainability and Creating Good Jobs

In this issue brief, we examine three different systems that underlie cities and keep them running: water, waste, and energy. Within each of these systems are opportunities for states and cities to modernize their local infrastructure, improve their communities, and ultimately create jobs

Solving the Many Problems with Inner City Jobs

Inner-city business development is often proposed as a solution to inner-city poverty. However, research evidence suggests that creating new jobs in the inner city is unlikely by itself to significantly increase the employment or earnings of the inner city poor. Public subsidies for inner city business development may be justified by greater environmental, congestion, and fiscal benefits of inner city vs. suburban business location decisions. The research evidence suggests that some boost in inner city business development may be provided by a combination of economic development incentives with enhanced public services. A different set of policies must be used to increase the earnings of the inner city poor. These employment solutions to inner city poverty should include two components; (1) creating more effective labor market intermediaries to make it easier for inner-city residents to find good jobs and for employers throughout the metropolitan area to find good inner city workers; (2) enhancing the job skills of the inner-city poor, particularly their "soft skills", by training programs that have closer ties to employers and incorporate subsidized employment experience. Given the magnitude of the poverty problem, any realistic policy to significantly reduce inner-city poverty through enhanced earnings will require tens of billions of dollars of annual government spending.wages, inner city, earnings, poverty, welfare, labor demand, Bartik

Transcript of Creating the Dory Days Posters

This story is an excerpt from an interview collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. The on-the-spot interview was conducted on the beach at Cape Kiwanda during Dory Days 2012. In this story, Carol Miles Johnson, Pacific City artist and dorywoman, describes the inspiration and process involved in the design of her series of Dory Days posters, which she began creating in 2004

Creating Work That Matters: Memphis Choreographs to the Soul of a City

Explores the artistic development of Ballet Memphis -- how it became a thriving company within a community that had not historically supported ballet, and how it continues to evolve artistically while remaining relevant to the community

Reforming Buffalo\u27s Tax Foreclosure Process

The City of Buffalo holds an annual foreclosure auction to collect on delinquent taxes and fees owed by its residents. This is a way for the City to raise revenue that would otherwise go unpaid and for Buffalo citizens to buy buildings and lots at bargain prices. But the foreclosure process is imposing a high cost upon some of Buffalo’s most vulnerable citizens, creating an unnecessary burden on people trying to stay in their homes, and adding to the already existing epidemic of housing abandonment and blight

Creating the strategic learning environment at City University London

Purpose: This paper describes the creation of a new approach to the implementation of educational technologies at a UK Higher Education Institution. Driven by changes in technology, an evaluation of the virtual learning environment (VLE) provided the opportunity to reassess the application of technology to the curriculum. However, such an evaluation and subsequent implementation is not about technology but a social process of negotiation and stakeholder engagement. The narrative of the evaluation is explored to offer lessons to other institutions. Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes a story telling approach as this enables greater emotional engagement with the reader as well as the description of the social and organisational aspects of such a VLE evaluation. This approach enables the difficulty of change in complex organisations, such as a University, to be addressed more fully. Findings: Key lessons from the evaluation of the VLE and resulting creation of the strategic learning environment (SLE) are drawn which can be of use to other institutions. The main finding is the fact that such evaluations and implementation of educational technologies are not about technical factors but about opportunities and threats presented by such technologies to the educational experience. These findings also inform future development of the SLE at the institution. Originality/value: This paper will be of interest to institutions that are undertaking evaluation exercises of their educational technology provision as well as those that are implementing new technologies or considering large scale organisational change