1. Selling the region - Worcester Business Journal - Worcester, MA,USA

Region taps destination branding trend

It’s being dubbed a new "guiding star" for the 60 communities in Central Massachusetts and looked to as a unifying force for regions from the Lake Champlain Valley to the rural reaches of Wisconsin. Old Sturbridge Village is questing after it. Soon Worcester will be too. Branding is not just for breakfast foods or car companies anymore.

In fact, "destination branding" is all the rage in cities, regions and states across the country, striving to determine what people find special and unique about their locales and playing up those traits in selling themselves to visitors, residents and businesses. And, branding gurus will tell you, it’s not to be confused with mere marketing or advertising.

"It’s not about me sitting around and making up stuff about Central Mass.," stresses Gary Sherwin, whose Rancho Mirage, CA-based company, Believable Brands, just completed a yearlong, $35,000 brand analysis for the Central Mass. County Convention and Visitors Bureau. Rather, branding is a deliberate process of research and analysis to find out what a community’s image is and to act on it. Slogans, logos and taglines may be a part of that strategy eventually, he says, but they are definitely not a starting or ending point.

Sherwin says that municipalities began using branding in the late 1990s and the trend really took hold in 2002 and 2003 when the Destination Marketing Association termed the practice a must. He describes a brand as the consumer’s strong positive and emotional connection with a product or experience that has functional benefits. What a successful destination brand does, he explained to CVB members at its recent annual meeting, goes far beyond the warm fuzzies of emotion. "We’re all about trying to get more wallets to come to this part of the world than any other part of the world," he summarizes.

...

  2. Water can bridge regional gap - Milwaukee Small Business Times - Milwaukee, WI,USA

The future of southeastern Wisconsin depends on our ability to embrace regional interdependence and to end the mindset of us vs. them. When competing globally, jurisdictional boundaries are obsolete. A culture change has begun among many leaders, but all stakeholders must embrace regional cooperation if we are to stay competitive. The old ways of regional in-fighting should be rejected. Progress toward our future must first begin with trust.

In his fascinating book adopted by Channel 10 in a recent documentary about the history of Milwaukee, “The Making of Milwaukee,” area historian and writer, John Gurda documents the old battles between the respective barons of the east and west sides of the Milwaukee River. As a result of those battles by Byron Kilbourn and Solomon Juneau, the east-west streets approaching the Milwaukee River were intentionally designed to be unaligned. Because of this short-sighted territorial struggle, bridges built to span the Milwaukee River downtown had to be built at sharp angles to meet the streets on each side of the river.

The current debate over whether the city of Milwaukee should provide water from Lake Michigan to cities in Waukesha County has the potential to repeat the mistakes of our past.

Enlightened leaders in the area should avoid repeating the early history of parochial regional politics and find a cooperative solution that serves the interests of the metropolitan region.

...

 

  3. Regional water supply plans to focus on growth - Kankakee Daily Journal - Kankakee, IL,USA

"Troubled Water: Meeting Future Water Needs in Illinois."

Sounds ominous.

It's the title of a public forum coming up Friday at Oak Brook by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning -- CMAP.

The agency is one of two in Illinois charged by Gov. Rod Blagojevich early this year with creating "regional water quantity plans" for areas identified by state agencies as "most at risk for water shortages and conflicts."

The CMAP area covers 11 counties in northeastern Illinois -- including Kankakee, Will and Grundy.

The other agency to start planning is the Mahomet Aquifer Consortium, covering 15 counties from Iroquois, Ford, Vermilion and Champaign west to the Illinois River from Peoria south beyond Havana.

...

 

  4. Region needs unification on economic front: GVRD - White Rock Peace Arch News - B.C., Canada

The need for a regional agency to co-ordinate economic planning and overcome protective instincts of cities is getting support from Greater Vancouver Regional District.

Directors last week tentatively endorsed a business-led group called Greater Vancouver Economic Council, which hopes to raise $30 million from the federal government and $10 million from other partners.

The resulting fund would finance GVEC’s proposed office and staff of 14.

GVRD chair Lois Jackson said a co-ordinated regional effort could address issues like a projected shortage of industrial land.

But she said GVEC must serve the whole region.

“My concern is it not be Vancouver city-based,” Jackson said.

“We’ve got to be looking at Maple Ridge and the Langleys and Surrey to spread the jobs throughout the region to keep people working closer to home.”

She said the GVRD will have more meetings to advance GVEC’s plan. The council sprang out of two regional economic forums attended by hundreds of delegates in 2004.

Vancouver Coun. Peter Ladner said GVEC is as close as the region has ever got to bringing together various business leaders, along with municipalties, to tackle common challenges.

Rather than work together for the good of the region, he said, local cities tend to “hunker down” with their own economic development offices and defend their turf.

There are signs that is changing, he said.

...

  5. Report offers guide to solving Hamilton County's problems - Chattanooga Times Free Press - TN, USA

Hamilton County residents, civic leaders and policy-makers now have a 360-page "go to" guide that unlocks the contents of government databases for the average person to access.

The Community Research Council on Thursday released its first-ever "2006 State of Chattanooga Region Report" that dissects crime, health, education and the economy in Hamilton County.

"Now that the elections are over, it is the right time for people to start talking about how to solve the problems that face our neighborhoods, county and region," said David Eichenthal, president and CEO of the Community Research Council, a local nonprofit research organization.

The council collected data from federal, state and local government agencies for the report. It also used the results of a survey done this year of 1,000 Hamilton County residents that asked which factors were most important in determining their quality of life.

The information is broken down to the regional or county level. In most cases, it extends to either nine subareas within the county or 36 different neighborhoods.

...

 

  6. Worldchanging Interview: Thomas Homer-Dixon - WorldChanging – USA

Why is Thomas Homer-Dixon so worth listening to? There are many writers out there taking on energy issues: Vaclav Smil's works, Out of Gas, Paul Gipe on practical wind power. Society's robustness to breakdowns? Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter. Climate change? Sure, a few, though that niche is just heating up. Biodiversity and environmental damage? Yes: some of my favorites are Red Sky at Morning, Something New Under the Sun, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The inappropriateness of focusing on GDP as the default measure of progress? That's an interesting one, with an intermittent thread of scholarship through the last 40 years: Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy, Hazel Henderson, Herman Daly, some recent Ecological Economics. But there are few if any authors who are writing books which cover this range of topics in a sensitive, contextualized, way.

In his new book, The Upside of Down (book review forthcoming), Thomas Homer-Dixon does just that. Many of us here at Worldchanging liked his previous book The Ingenuity Gap. This book takes an even longer view at how we can navigate successfully through societal breakdowns, leaving societies stronger and more resilient.

We wanted to know more about the man behind the book, so he and I sat down for a conversation (distilled below). --HM

Hassan Masum: With regard to the potential of online tools, what do you see as the next simple step beyond transmitting and sharing information?

Thomas Homer-Dixon: One thing we need to achieve is winnowing - we need to increase the signal to noise ratio. But it has to be a democratic process - you can't have people on the outside saying "I like this idea but I don't like that idea, this idea is going forward and that one isn't." Instead, it needs to be internally legitimate, in the sense that the community as a whole decides what ideas are going to be winnowed out, and what ideas are going to go to the next stage.

One of the remarkable things about the Wikipedia environment is that there seems to be a general cumulation of quality - entries tend to improve over time. I had occasion when writing this book to go and look at the entries on thermodynamics, and they were terrific, but I'm sure they're not the result of a single person's contribution. Many people have been contributing, and the quality over time has improved.

I don't think anybody except the diehard advocates would have predicted, 5 or 10 years ago, that you would have been able to have an information source of such high quality that was produced entirely by volunteers, collaboratively. So there is a winnowing and cumulation of quality process there that's very effective. But, and here's where Wikipedia seems to run into trouble, there's the hijacking problem. Especially when you have morally fraught issues, or issues that have strong value conflicts or connotations for people - capital punishment, abortion, the nature of capitalism, some celebrities doing things that annoy people a lot. You get so many divergent interventions that you won't come to a consensus in terms of the entry, and what they've had to do is implement a series of protocols for cooling off discussion or limiting the range of people who can intervene.

Hijacking tends to happen when issues are value-fraught, and a lot of the problems that I think we need to address within an open-source democratic framework will be value-fraught, and so they're going to be vulnerable to hijacking by small groups of highly motivated and not terribly tolerant people who are fixated on one idea, one solution, or one enemy.

When it's possible to replicate your voice easily with the push of a button, hijacking becomes much more of a problem than it does in a personal conversation or a room. It's like somebody in a town hall meeting getting hold of the microphone, and nobody can take it away. So in terms of the institutional design, there needs to be a capacity to legitimately reduce the risk of hijacking, and sideline people who aren't prepared to engage in a cumulative winnowed conversation over time about a particular problem.

I think this is a very important institutional requirement for an open-source democratic decision-making system for dealing with complex social problems. Another is the relationship between lay people and experts. Some of the most difficult problems we're facing - climate change, energy - are technical problems that are enormously complex, and it's very easy for experts to just take over the discussion.

...

 

  7. U.S. regional communities - sub-State, State or multi-State - in news articles. Highlighted words are Google search terms. In this and the following section, links to websites of organizations are added to the news excerpt when this is the first time an organization has been found. A goal of this newsletter is to find every regional council in the U.S. in a news story.  In most cases, where a full name is present a Google search will quickly get one to that organization. 

 

      a) Beyond Red and Blue

CommonWealth – MassINC

... So CommonWealth decided to make a map of our own. Aiming somewhere between the reductionist red-and-blue model and the most accurate (but least useful) subdivision of the United States into infinity, we split the county into 10 regions, each with a distinct political character. ...

 

      b) ‘We’ve got a partnership’: A history of Oregon land use law
Hood River News - Hood River, OR,USA
The history of planning in Oregon tells of a unique effort, imperfect but honest, to preserve something huge and desirable — the physical character of a state — by pushing against powerful societal currents. ... passed the state-focused program existing today, but only after thrashing out four key issues: local control, regionalization, ...

      c) ARC to host greenspace forum
Henry Herald - McDonough, GA,USA
... the Green Infrastructure Priorities Map. This mapping system details areas in the region where greenspace currently exists and potential priority areas for conservation....

      d) Council members wish they had say in budget
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Pittsburgh, PA,USA

... Pittsburgh's oversight board, the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, OK'd the budget Oct. 20 with a few caveats -- one of which said council couldn't amend it or the five-year spending plan. ...

 

      e) Slayings on the rise this year in Broward County
Sun-Sentinel.com - Fort Lauderdale, FL,USA
... Homicides nationwide are on the rise, leaving police to struggle to explain why 2006 has proved so deadly. Explanations vary: criminals are becoming more vicious, ... It's a crisis that Broward County needs to face, said Jeff Gorley, chairman of the Regional Community Collaboration on Violence, a group building an anti-violence coalition. ...

 

      f) Price of Power
Bangor Daily News - Bangor, ME,USA
... If it does, lawmakers will look again at leaving the regional organization. The decision should be made with a view of the long-term benefits and costs. ...

     g) Volusia, cities try to make up
Orlando Sentinel - Orlando, FL,USA
... County ... has called for a meeting of the county and its cities. He said the two groups must figure out how to work together to preserve rural Volusia. That was the stated goal of two amendments that would have given county government control over land planning in Volusia's rural heartland, even after property was annexed into city limits. ...

      h) Explorer endorses new path for trail
Roanoke Times - Roanoke, VA,USA
The National Geographic Society's top explorer has joined the effort to convert the Appalachian Trail into an early warning system for environmental threats to the eastern United States. ... scientists, land managers and volunteer leaders created an action plan in their ongoing effort to convert the AT into a "mega-transect." ...

 ...

 

      i) Detroit-area civic groups team, promise regional change
Detroit Free Press - United States
... from metro Detroit announced a new alliance this morning that was short on specifics but long on promise to achieve a new level of regional cooperation. ...

 

      j) Rapid transit plans panned
Ann Arbor News - Ann Arbor, MI,USA
A new analysis of a proposal for rapid transit between Ann Arbor and Detroit says the five alternatives under consideration are too expensive and would attract too few riders to be competitive for the federal funds needed to start the service.... "The light rail didn't work at all,'' said Carmine Palombo, director of transportation programs for the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, ...

      k) Studies and traffic keep stacking up
Ann Arbor News - Ann Arbor ,MI,USA
The worst part about last week's downbeat report on the prospect for mass transit between Ann Arbor and Detroit isn't the finding itself: It's how much time and money went into demonstrating what anyone with even a passing acquaintance with mass transportation would have known....  

      l) The exurbia phenomenon
Pocono Record - Stroudsburg, PA,USA
They have a name for places like ours — the fast-growing communities on the outer fringe, beyond the suburbs of major metropolitan communities, with a growing number of urban commuters: Exurbia. ...

      m) Town eyes "regional center" label
Asbury Park Press - Asbury Park,NJ,USA
Township officials are poised to ask the state for permission to have all of Lakewood declared a "regional center" — a designation that allows local authorities more control over zoning and development. About 60 percent of Lakewood already is designated as a regional center. ...

      n) Forum focus: ‘regionalism'
Craig Daily Press - Craig, CO,USA

In a continuation of a discussion series that began in the spring, the Yampa Valley Partners organization will again bring together people from a three-county area to focus on regional trends. Partners is a nonprofit organization that has pledged to support the development of "healthy communities" in Moffat, Routt and Rio Blanco counties. ...

 

      o) Growth of bowling exposure helps make magic
Gary Post Tribune - Gary, IN,USA
... Regional Players Championship three years ago, along with the inaugural Tour Trials to put the national spotlight on the Region. ... It puts our area on the map.".

 

      p) Green growth, green harvest
The Lumberjack Online – Humboldt ,CA,USA
... the council has different standards for different bioregions. Humboldt County and the surrounding area falls in the Pacific Northwest bioregion, which promotes certain kinds of practices. These practices differ from the industry standard in forestry management. ...

      q) Fordham Regional Parking Facility
Fordham University - NY,USA
By John DeSio, FCRH ‘00. The long-awaited Fordham Regional Parking Facility, serving both the University and the local community, is open for business. ...

 

  8. Other in the news: Highlighted words are Google search terms.

      a) Asia : China expands police presence in countryside
Telugu Portal - Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India
China is deploying more police in its rural regions following a government call to build a peaceful countryside. More than 30,000 police stations have been built in rural regions as the government reorganises larger police stations and redeploys police officers to "frontier grass roots" rural regions ...

      b) Regional economic divide may be closing
Times Online - UK
... the first signs that a new chapter is about to be written.” The improvement in competitiveness outside the South East is attributed to regional policy for for attracting investment and diversifying local economies....

      c) Devolution is bearing fruit as Wales shrinks competition gap
ic Wales - United Kingdom
... "It is a hugely positive development that the Government's devolution and regional development policies may at last be bearing fruit. ...

 

      d)  Dam will 'drought-proof' region
Melbourne Herald Sun - Australia

A $342 MILLION dam to be built in the Hunter Valley would drought-proof Newcastle and the Central Coast for the next 60 years, ... construction of the 450 billion litre dam - the centrepiece of a new water grid for the region - would ensure the area's water "crisis" would never happen again. ...

 

      e) UNWTO and Microsoft launch new Emergency Response Portal
e-Travel Blackboard (press release) - Sydney, NSW, Australia
UNWTO has unveiled the BETA site of its new Emergency Response System (ERS) developed by Microsoft, as part of a continuing effort to help the tourism sector respond to natural and man made disaster situations...Tourism Emergency Response Network (TERN), which allows global, regional and national industry organizations to collaborate ...

      f) Dubai School of Government to Host First Arab Regional Network of Innovators in Governance
Dubai City Guide - Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The region’s first Arab networking gathering of Innovators in Governance, organized by the Dubai School of Government, will bring together more than 60 top innovators from around the world, Arab ministers, and government officials, to discuss the creation of a knowledge base within the Arab world to drive effective regional governance. ...

 

      g) Municipalities team up for water plan
Edmonton Sun - Alberta, Canada

Municipalities in northwestern Alberta are teaming up to find a long-term solution for supplying water to the region. Three years of dry summers, a rising population and increased residential and industrial demand are straining current supplies, said George Neurohr of Alberta Environment.

 

 

      h) FEMIP Conference: Regional integration in the Euro-Mediterranean area through transport systems
EUROPA (press release) - Brussels, Belgium

... (1980-2004), the partner countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean have only benefited to a limited extent from globalisation. This situation is due in particular to inadequate regional integration in terms of available infrastructure, and the need for structural reform and modernisation of administrative capacity. ...

 

      i) Debate rages over location of new Beijing airport
People's Daily Online - Beijing, China

Beijing is keen to start building a new airport before 2010, but experts cannot see eye to eye on where the airport should be located. ... The General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) confirmed that it has a construction schedule for the new airport but that no decision has yet been taken concerning its location. ...

      j) Northern Nations Block South Pacific Fish Conservation
Environment News Service - USA
... a regional fisheries management organization for non ... disappointed that the European community refused to limit their current fishing effort in the region. ...

      k) Goff China Speech: NZ’s Strategic Situation
Scoop.co.nz (press release) - New Zealand

... Today I would like to talk about New Zealand’s strategic situation and how we see the global and regional security environment. I will also refer to developments in our political, security and military relationship with China. ... New Zealand does not pose a threat to any other nation. Our influence comes not from our ability to impose our will on other countries, but from working with others and persuading them of the merits of our arguments. ...

      l) Sector has potential to create more jobs in rural areas
ChronicleHerald.ca - Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
... The Natural Resources Department works with the Office of Economic Development and regional development agencies to foster industrial mineral developments in the province, ...

      m) Groundwater ruling marks boundaries
Los Angeles Daily News - Los Angeles, CA,USA
Ruling against the federal government, a judge has decided that the groundwater basin will serve as the geographic boundary in a case that could place limits on how much well water can be pumped annually from Antelope Valley's dwindling aquifer. ...

      n) Singapore will soon be part of world risk intelligence network
TODAYonline - Singapore
... will soon join hands with a global intelligence provider to become a key link in the flow of risk-relevant intelligence within the international community. ...

      o) Efficiency and service improvement - two sides of the same coin
eGov monitor - London, UK

...new White Paper, ‘Strong and Prosperous Communities', Sykes is “pleased to see the support given to what is already happening around the Regional Centres of Excellence and the moving closer together with regional improvement partnerships”. This is a good idea, he says, “because efficiency and service improvement are two sides of the same coin”. ...

 

      p) Mercosur addresses regional migration legalization
MercoPress - Montevideo, Uruguay

... Apparently the success of the Argentine program has moved Brazil into adopting a similar bilateral reciprocity plan which should help 300.000 Argentines in Brazil legalize their situation. ...

      q) Travesty of our place names
Sunday Times.lk - Columbo, Sri Lanka
... Other countries in this region like India and Bangladesh have quite rightly asserted their individuality by gaining international recognition of pre-colonial names like Chennai and Mumbai for Madras and Bombay, as well as Kolkata for Calcutta. We have only managed to change ‘Ceylon’ back to Sri Lanka....

      r) The Power Of Collaboration
Processor.com - Lincoln, NE,USA

... Those companies that haven’t yet explored collaboration are likely to run into it soon, according to research firm Gartner, which noted that in 10 years, 80% of all work will be collaborative rather than independent. ...

 

  9. Blogs: Highlighted words are Google search terms.

 

      a) Sexy public transit, part 2
By craig_cal
Just look at the map above. It’s called a regional approach to public transit in the GTA. The map is an amalgamation of recent BRT/LRT proposals from the:. TTC’s Ridership Growth Strategy (BRT/LRT network = thick red lines on above map) ...

 

       b) Virtual Regionalism

By Phillip J. Windley
Most creative would be what I call "virtual regionalism ": not statutory regional bodies, but ad hoc, voluntary ones ... Because virtual regionalism wouldn't be statutory, communities could instantly form working arrangements -- and ...

 

      c) Local government officials oppose a minor government consolidation Albany County

UpstateBlog.net
And to most advocates of regionalism--this page included--it would appear that way as well. Why raise taxes when you can cut them? Why spend money when you can save it? Yet as self-evident as the answers to these questions might appear, ...

 

      d) I-91: bad policy or bad process?

by Goldy
Perhaps that’s one of the things we saw in Tuesday’s election when traditionally Republican Eastside districts were virtually swept by the Democrats: a growing regionalism in which suburban voters recognize how much in common they have ...

       e) Depth Introduction: Professional Learning Communities
By Mark Wagner
For Senge et al, “communities of practice are not defined. They have no names, no formal memberships, and no status. But they move information” (p. 478). The professional learning communities discussed below are an attempt to formalize ...

      f) Japanese post-war economic miracle
By rob
The keiretsu spurred both horizontal and vertical integration, ... the Japanese government undertook an ambitious "income-doubling plan. ... as a part of a regional hierarchy where the production of commoditized goods would continuously ...

      g) Ann Arbor to Detroit Transit Study
By Michi
Forget regionalism for just a moment, though. Apart fom regionalism, why in the world is there not a rail connection from at least downtown to Detroit Metro, one of the busiest airports in this country and this world? ...

 

      h) Tennessee didn't make the list. Interesting review on the research ...
By Bill Johns
Since "research" is a "core competency" of the region, I guess there are others ... The map and the charts below comprise the third installment of our ongoing ... measures are used to generate the research scores reflected in the map. ...

 

10. Sub-State Regions  - Utah - U.S. Census – West Region; Mountain Division, FIPS Code 43

Following  is a selection of links relating to regional arrangements in Utah. This year each issue features a State with links to maps of regions and regional related resources. The Census Regions and Divisions of the United States map (PDF) is being used going, region by region from the Northeast to the South to the Midwest to the West.

      a) UT Dept. of Transportation Regions and Districts Map

      b) Utah Geographic Regions - Vacation Guide

      c) Utah - Judicial Districts Map

      d) Discover Utah

      e) Utah Tribal Lands Map and Counties

      f) UT 16 Hydrologic Regions - USGS

      g) UT Physiogeographic Regions - Habitat

      h) UT Div. Wildlife Resources- Region Map

      i) Maps.utah.gov - Maps by Geographic Extent

      j) UT Citizen Wilderness Proposal Regions

 11. Announcements and Links

Latest Earthquakes - Last 7 Days – U.S. & World - USGS

 

12. Density

Las Vegas closing in on full house - USA Today 

...

Mixing housing, retail

High-rises, shorter "mid-rises" and town houses aren't confined to the Strip and downtown Las Vegas. Projects that planners in other cities call "smart growth" and "new urbanism" are on drawing boards across Clark County.

That means more units to an acre and a variety of housing types and architectural styles, tiny yards or no yards but generous public spaces, narrow one-way streets that slow traffic, neighborhood designs that promote walking and old-fashioned alleys with garages in back instead of showcased out front.

"This isn't something that's trickling down, it's flowing down, top to bottom, fast," Bottfeld says. "It's the Manhattanization of Las Vegas."

Focus One has three new urbanism projects in design. "It's like Southern California, New York, San Francisco and any other place with a very constrained supply of land and a lot of demand," Ritter says.

"Mixed use" is now in vogue — projects that blend housing, retail and entertainment and cut down on driving. Sullivan Square will be built on that model: 1,300 units in 20-story high-rises on 16.5 acres off the Interstate 215 beltway, 6 miles from the Strip.

"It's very Old World, very European," says Marc Medrano, a casino designer who bought a 17th-floor unit because he got tired of maintaining a big yard at his house on a golf course. "It's like a self-contained walking community," he says. "You could go to the gym, go to the bank, go to the butcher, get your lashes tinted, whatever."

Consumers don't resist because most Las Vegans are from someplace else, Smith says. "They've seen it, they know it, they're comfortable with it," he says. "We hear people say, 'I never thought it would happen here. I've been waiting for it.' "

Since Clark County passed zoning changes that promote higher density, more than 80 projects have been approved in the past two years. "This is the time to be visionary, to do things that urban areas seem to do historically, which is become more dense," says Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid.

 

13. Google News for “Regional Community”

 

Other menu sections available from this link include: Regional Development; Regional Council;  Regional Commission; Regional America; Regional Asia; Regional Europe; Regional Competition; Regionalism; Intergovernmental and other search terms. They can be sorted by date or relevance. These are among the 50 search terms I use to produce this newsletter.