CEOs For Cities

In this Issue: New Years Resolutions: The City Edition • Call for Abstracts: Delft Conference on Using ICT, Social Media and Mobile Technologies to Foster Self-Organisation in Urban and Neighbourhood Governance • Strategies for City Success Webinar: Municipal Leadership for Local Postsecondary Completion Initiatives • Learning and Planning for the Future: The Talent Dividend •Winner Announced!
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New Year Resolutions: The City Edition

Photo via Sean MacEntee
If your city had a voice, what would it choose as its New Years Resolution? As we make our way steadily into 2013, we encourage you to explore new ideas for making your city succeed. We've compiled a few, but would love to hear others on our Facebook or Twitter pages.

Share more ideas: Pecha Kucha nights have popped up in hundreds of cities around the world. At these events, local speakers give six-minute-fourty-second presentations about a topic of their choice. It could be about their work as a National Geographic photographer to their process of creating thousands of paper cranes. What a better way to know about the talent in your city than to hear about it from the source? Find out if your city has any upcoming events here.
Think outside the bench: Bringing life to public spaces may take more than a bench or a tree. In 2008, Rebar Group in San Francisco came up with Bushwaffle: modular, inflatable street furniture for creative and comfortable use. Whether or not these inflatables are a fit for your city, the stories behind them will inspire creative thinking.
Follow the people: In many cities, getting people to use public transit is an uphill battle. But what if public transportation offered the same convenience of using your car, but with less traffic and no stopping. Magic! This article in The Atlantic Cities talks about the potential of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). Heathrow Airport in the U.K. has installed a PRT system, and while it would be unreasonable to install a similar system in a large city, it has great potential in small or medium-sized communities around the world.

Call for Abstracts: Delft Conference on Using ICT, Social Media and Mobile Technologies to Foster Self-Organisation in Urban and Neighbourhood Governance

Lee Fisher, the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, will be speaking about Change By Us this May at a conference in the Netherlands. In addition to showcasing the work of three other keynotes, the conference organizers are looking for paper abstracts from people working to use technology to better connect people within an urban environment. Find more information about the conference here, and if you would like to submit an abstract, click here. The deadline for submission is January 29, 2013.

Strategies for City Success Webinar: Municipal Leadership for Local Postsecondary Completion Initiatives

Hosted by the National League of Cities
February 1, 2013, 2:30pm ET
Assessing starting points and gauging progress regarding postsecondary completion goals entails sharing data. School districts, community colleges, and four-year institutions, and city planning departments charged with digesting census data all bring key data to the table. Sources such as the National Student Clearinghouse, to which districts and colleges may belong, also play important roles. Representatives of Dayton, Ohio and one other CLIP site will describe how they’ve successfully shared data and reflect on data sharing lessons learned.
Register for the Webinar

Learning and Planning for the Future: The Talent Dividend

If you've been following #talentdividend on Twitter, you know that every day more and more people become convinced of the economic value of higher education. So as more people wake up to the potential of the Talent Dividend, what's next for the project and the competition in 2013? What have we learned so far about what works? And what are the most exciting experiments happening around the country? Mark your calendars and join us for a live chat on the Civic Commons with Talent Dividend National Director Noel Harmon on January 29th from 2-3pm EST, moderated by Dan Moulthrop of The Civic Commons. Visit the Talent Dividend Network for more information. Login instructions will be posted soon!

Winner Announced!

Congrats to Twitter User @TweetinTams for winning last week's competition, seeking out great #CityIdeas from around the globe:

As promised, a copy of our City Vitals 2.0 Report will be given to the winner. The rest of the entries will be included in a collection of great ideas, which will be coming soon! We'd like to thank everyone who sent an idea, and hope you all look out for additional contests and opportunities to win prizes in the near future!

CEOs for Cities
Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, 1155 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 - 773.795.1409

Good News on the Housing Market

Housing Starts Surged in December

Housing starts jumped 12.1% to 954,000 in December, with gains in multi-family starts continuing to outpace gains in single-family starts. Gains were broad-based across all regions, with the largest gains in the South and West. This matches a pattern we have seen in home prices, as prices are now rising fastest in areas hit the hardest by the subprime crisis, where inventories have now evaporated.

Gains in the Northeast picked up slightly from the pace that we saw last month in the multi-family category. It will take some time for reconstruction efforts in the wake of Superstorm Sandy to get in full swing, but it seems a good bet that the annual total of housing starts will cross the one million mark in 2013. That would be a full year in advance of when many hoped at this time last year.

Bottom Line: The housing market is healing faster in multi-family rentals than in the single-family market. This dampens, but does not change, its effect on the overall economy, which is unequivocally positive.

http://www.mesirowfinancial.com/

Paris, City of Light Video

Click to See the Video

Walkable City

"Walkable City, the new book by Jeff Speck, has been lauded by the Los Angeles Times as nothing less than a primer on "pedestrianism as a baseline for urban life." Planetizen recently named it one of their 10 best planning books of 2013."

Walkability? Why is this important?"

Click to Read the Article

South Suburban Airport - Third Airport For Chicago

Planning and land purchase continues for the Third Airport for Chicago. The map above shows the progress of land acquisition.

Planning for the airport has been underway for over forty years. My wife and I worked on this issue for many years.

It is of course very controversial. Many of the people who live in or near the site are very opposed. Other people see the airport as the economic engine for the south side of Chicago.

The area is at the south end of the Chicago developed metro area, bounded by Crete, University Park, Monee, Peotone, and Beecher. I-57 is on the west side, I-294/Rt 1 on the east side, and the new I-355 Tollway would be on the north side.

A considerable amount of land has been acquired for the initial airport. It probably will not be developed until the economic recovery creates additional demand for air traffic. O'Hare and Midway are of course very busy and congested and Chicago is the major Hub for the United States.

I prepared the Land Use Plan Map above. The Plan is a mosaic of the plans of Will and Kankakee County and the Villages of Crete, Monee, University Park, Peotone, Beecher, Manteno, and Grant Park.

The web sites below tell more about the airport.

http://www.southsuburbanairport.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Chicago_south_suburban_airport

http://www.suntimes.com/news/14080173-418/top-idot-official-says-third-airport-will-be-built.html

Great Lakes Megalopolis

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Megalopolis

Gun Limitation

Guns are pervasive in America. They are very difficult to control. Gun rights advocates vigorously oppose any restrictions, despite some of the recent mass murders.

Weapons used in the American Revolution took a long time to reload after each single round was fired. A mass killing of numbers of civilians by a lunatic gunman was virtually impossible.

www.11thpa.org/neumann.html

But guns gradually became more accurate and with a much higher rate of fire. We developed revolvers with 5 and 6 round capacities. And then bolt and lever actuated rifles with higher rates of fire. And then finally semi automatic and fully automatic weapons.

We do accept some limitations on guns. We prohibit fully automatic machine guns and grenades, for example. This came about in 1934 when America was aghast at the carnage committed by organized crime with Thompson sub machine guns. It was obvious that the Thompson was good for war, gangland slayings, mass murder and nothing much else. The laws let citizens keep rifles and shotguns and pistols for hunting and self defense.

listvisit.com/top-ten-most-dangerous-guns-in-the-world

In 1934 normal guns were far more limited then they are today. We regulated fully automatic weapons, but did not restrict semi automatic weapons.

A fully automatic weapon continues to fire as long as you keep the trigger pulled. A semi automatic weapon fires one bullet with each trigger pull. The movies make it seem that fully automatic weapon fire is very deadly. It is, but aimed semi automatic fire is also very deadly. In fact, in Vietnam our M-16's were all fully automatic, encouraging the troops to shoot too fast and too wildly. Our M-16's now permit firing in three round bursts - one trigger pull for three rounds.

The weapon above is the M1911 .45 caliber semi automatic pistol, called the 1911 for the year of its beginning. It was used by the US Military in World War I and II and in Korea and Vietnam and helped us win those wars. It is still used by some units in the military. It had a magazine of seven or eight rounds. It was the weapon my father used in World War II and it was the one I used in Vietnam.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_pistol

The weapon below is a more modern Glock, a popular pistol. It can be used with 33 round magazines. This number of rounds could be handy in a firefight in a war but are not needed for self defense unless you are a really poor shot and unconcerned about wounding nearby innocent people.

Glock with 33 round magazine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glock

The weapon above an Ar-15 GL-Shock M4 similar to the M-16 that we used in Vietnam and currently and the M-4, the carbine version of the M-16. We used twenty round magazines in Vietnam - you can get 30 to 50 round magazines now.

50 round magazine for AR 15

Videos:

Civilian versions do not permit full automatic fire. Still, it will shoot as fast as you pull the trigger. A very formidable weapon.

Another facet to the appeal of the assault rifle is that it looks cool and dangerous and is dangerous. That is fine for normal people. But for angry suicidal lunatics Rambo Wannabes it is a formula for disaster.

Do we really want lunatics to have access to these weapons? Do the rights of responsible gun owners trump public safety?

Would gun control opponents agree to any legislation that would restrict them from high capacity magazines?

Let us look at two recent examples. The shootings in Arizona were stopped when the gunman ran out of ammo and had to reload. People were able to jump him and disarm him. Two teachers in Connecticut apparently tried to jump the gunman. But with his high capacity magazines they could not succeed. If either man had had to reload after a few rounds the carnage might have been much less.

Politics is the art of compromise. I advocate that the second amendment and our history supports the rights of civilians to own rifles, pistols, and shotguns for hunting, target practice, and self defense.

And I get the idea that permitting concealed carry by responsible citizens could be a good thing. I support that idea. But it is unlikely that the right person will often be in the right place at the right time.

But I also support the elimination of assault rifles, and the elimination of any magazines over 7 rounds. That permits anyone to hunt and defend themselves, but limits the carnage created when a lunatic finds high capacity weapons.