Author: SCM

Editor’s note: Sam Chaltain is a Washington-based writer and educator and author of “We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America” and “Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of...

From Placemakers:  Over a decade ago Andres Duany of DPZ taught me that, more times than not, NIMBY opposition stems from a sense that proposed development is not of equal or greater value to what would be lost. Tony...

From Financial Times: Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too...

From ESPN: MEMPHIS — For those of us who do not call Memphis home, President Obama’s upcoming visit to Booker T. Washington High School on Monday seems like just a kind gesture for a city that’s been a bit...

From Place: These are brutal times for public libraries. Two years ago they froze book purchases. Last year they cut staff and reduced service hours, spreading the pain among branches in rolling blackouts. This year they are on...

From Education Week: Love them or hate them, the proposals collectively known as “school reform” are mostly top-down policies: Divert public money to quasi-private charter schools, pit states against one another in a race for...

The Mayor’s Institute on City Design is celebrating 25 years of persuading and preparing city mayors to be chief urban design official.  And yet, for 24 of those years, no mayor of Memphis ever attended. That changed last...

From Governing magazine: To accommodate tomorrow’s governments, we need leaders who excel at innovating and getting results, not climbing ladders. Jim Chrisinger | April 20, 2011 Collective bargaining rights and pensions...

From Vanity Fair: Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the...