The Center for Community Progress, with the support of Enterprise Community Partners, produced a toolkit to help local practitioners think through strategies and utilize specific tools to carry out those strategies. The toolkit is divided into four elements:
The Center for Community Progress’s mission is
Community gardens and urban agriculture initiatives help serve neighborhoods in a variety of ways:
In the summer of 2017, Greater Ohio Policy Center ran a blog series on shrinking cities – or communities that have experienced significant population decline. The blog series summarizes academic books and articles that explore how U.S. cities can manage the many consequences of population decline.
The site has two topic areas that might be of interest to people who are working on community or strategic planning in smaller legacy cities:
Vacant and abandoned structures have challenged cities for generations. The first land banks were established throughout the 1970s to 1990s in an effort to address the vacant properties left behind as a result urban abandonment. These passive organizations held relatively little power compared to the land banks of today.
“Planning in America’s Legacy Cities: Toward Better, Smaller Communities after Decline,” by Margaret Dewar and Hunter Morrison, explores the unique challenges facing planners in cities with declining populations. This paper appears as a chapter in the volume Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland, which was edited Alan Mallach and published by the American Assembly.
Many challenges facing cities of all sizes do not stop at municipal borders – issues related to development, taxation, economic competitiveness, and environmental resources are shared among many communities and political subdivisions within a region. Confronting these shared issues can present yet another challenge, as stakeholders from different jurisdictions may have competing priorities.
The National Equity Atlas is a tool for understanding the demographic and socio-economic makeup of communities. Produced by PolicyLink and The USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), the tool provides data on “equitable growth indicators.”
One advantage of living in the modern-era is the sheer amount of data available to individuals making decisions. Data can be used by leaders to make informed decisions on how best to distribute resources to projects.