Join CommunityMatters® and the CIRD on Thursday, August 22, 2013 from 3-4pm Eastern for our free conference call! This month’s special event will be an in-depth interview with Ed McMahon of the Urban Land Institute. Register Now... and bring friends! Host a listening party in your community to kickstart the conversation.
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The East Fourth neighborhood of Cleveland used to be a stretch of vacant buildings, blighted street corners and shadowy glances from people walking briskly through. Today it is an up-and-coming hotspot, with pedestrian plazas, hopping nightlife and flocks of new employers and young professionals eager to live and work downtown.
Seven hundred miles to the east, the small town of Amesbury, Massachusetts has undergone a similar transformation. Forty years ago, this New England mill town had a crumbling downtown with empty storefronts, stagnant economy and a declining population. Today, its graceful Main Street is filled with far more restaurants and shops than you’d expect in a town of 16,000 people. Thoroughly modern businesses and artists’ studios are packed into the historic brick mill buildings, accented by big, bright murals celebrating Amesbury’s arc through the centuries.
It turns out there is a recipe for success, but it sure doesn’t involve cookie cutters.
This week’s conference call will delve into the answer to this question. Ed McMahon, one of the nation’s leading thinkers and writers about building unique and successful places, recently wrote a seven-part series for PlannersWeb on Secrets of Successful Communities.
Here’s a taste, from Ed’s introduction to the series:
There are many communities that have found ways to retain their small town values, historic character, scenic beauty and sense of community, yet sustain a prosperous economy. And they’ve done it without accepting the kind of cookie-cutter development that has turned many communities into faceless places that young people flee, tourists avoid and which no longer instill a sense of pride in residents.
Every “successful” community has its own strengths and weaknesses, but they all share some common characteristics. It’s clear for instance that successful communities involve a broad cross-section of residents in determining and planning the future. They also capitalize on their distinctive assets — their architecture, history, natural surroundings, and homegrown businesses — rather than trying to adopt a new and different identity.
Ed has identified seven distinct secrets that places like Cleveland’s East Fourth neighborhood and Amesbury have used to move from struggling pasts to bright futures. Ed finds that successful communities don’t necessarily adhere to all seven secrets, but have embraced at least three or four:
1. Have a vision for the future
2. Inventory community assets and build on them
3. Use education and incentives, not just regulation
4. Pick and choose among development projects
5. Cooperate with neighbors for mutual benefit
6. Pay attention to community aesthetics
7. Have strong leaders and committed citizens
Join us this Thursday for an exclusive interview with Ed and hear more about these seven secrets of success, as well as the stories of communities across the country that have embraced them and reaped the benefits – economic, social, aesthetic, environmental and more. Ed will share tangible examples, trends facing communities today and key steps for any town to get started.
Special thanks to PlannersWeb for support of this call and our Listening Parties. Be sure to check out Ed’s seven-part series on PlannersWeb to read about all the Secrets of Success!
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Rebecca Sanborn Stone is a Senior Associate in Communications at the Orton Family Foundation. This post was cross-published from the CommunityMatters blog. The original can be read here.
