What can small cities do to spruce up their decaying downtowns? According to the mayor of Chilliwack, B.C., where I live, not much. A couple weeks ago the owner of a downtown movie theatre shut the two-screen operation down and donated the building and the land to the city. It was that worthless, apparently. The… [Read more…]
October 25, 2010
A couple weeks ago, Maclean's magazine released its annual rankings of the most "crime-ridden" cities in Canada.
October 20, 2010
The Milken Institute released a fascinating set of data last week. The institute analyzed 379 cities to determine the “best performing cities” in the United States. In the above map and the below charts, I’ve experimented with Excel to try and show some interesting trends. I may or may not have succeeded, but I think… [Read more…]
October 18, 2010
The Fargo metropolitan area in North Dakota/Minnesota is a pretty bitchin’ place to find the job according to the Milken Institute. Fargo topped their most recent best-performing cities list, among the smallest 179 metropolitan statistic areas (MSAs). The Milken Institute’s index ranks cities by “by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs… [Read more…]
October 15, 2010
I am fortunate enough to work for a publisher very fond of saying that he doesn’t mind if people don’t like what we write, as long as they read what we write. That is an amazing vote of confidence for a journalist in a small city. The economic realities of local journalism mean that money… [Read more…]
October 14, 2010
We here at NQU headquarters take a particular interest in the media in, and depictions of, small cities. There’s a couple reasons for this; First, we’re part of the so-called “mainstream media,” or alternately, the MSM. But the other reason is that the predominance of media outlets in large cities tend to shape our culture… [Read more…]
October 12, 2010
I’m not sure when Mark Oppenheimer wrote this article (although it seems to have been before the death of David Foster Wallace), but he does a wonderful job of articulating why small cities may not be the cultural wastelands some people think them to be. Oppenheimer, who grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and now … [Read more…]
October 11, 2010
In a long and interesting article (with graphs! and charts! and maps!) cribbed from his Wall Street Journal column, Richard Florida writes about how some suburbs are trying to remake themselves these days. In short, he paints a picture of suburbs trying to escape the much-mocked car-and-strip mall idea for more urbanized, walkable… [Read more…]
October 10, 2010
I wrote the following opinion column about a young woman who has, pretty much overnight, turned mass transit into something discussed in the media, and by local politicians. With no experience, Jennifer Bigham has turned herself into an expert on local transit and has sparked a very real conversation. In our tiny little… [Read more…]
October 8, 2010
Australia’s New South Wales state is trying to attract discontent Sydney residents to its seven largest towns, Albury, Armidale, Bathurst, Dubbo, Orange, Tamworth and Wagga Wagga (I live in a town in Chilliwack, so I’m hardly one to question a name but still, Wagga Wagga? Apparently “Wagga” means crow in the local Aboriginal language. They… [Read more…]
November 15, 2010
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