Author: Smart City Memphis

Fire investigators at the scene of the devastating fire at downtown’s First United Methodist Church are looking into the possibility that a vagrant could have been involved in the three-alarm blaze.It’s one of...

If all politics is local, then surely all government is personal.So, forgive us for being less than optimistic about throwing more than 600 new police officers at the city’s crime problems. We’re just waiting to see if the MPD...

Forgive the skepticism, but the premature announcement by the former president of the Memphis Music Foundation about the interest of an Australian film production company in opening a regional operation in Memphis feels awfully...

With the impending approval by the board of directors to hire former county mayor Jim Rout as head of the Mid-South Fair, the organization seems to see a future more shaped by politics than event management.It’s a shift in...

What happens when a dying town’s civic leaders decide they have to change the way their citizens think about the future? If you’re Linz, Austria, you create Ars Electronica. Its artistic director, Gerfried Stocker,...

Memphis doesn’t have to look outside its own city limits to find one of the nation’s leading economic development strategies. It’s taking shape at Union and Dudley in the form of the UT-Baptist Research Park, according to Kip...

Reform. It’s one of those words used so often by politicians that it’s almost lost all meaning. It’s right up there with world-class, state-of-the-art, public-private partnership, new paradigm, and summit. For once, reform is...

We appreciate the tendencies of people to defend the efforts of the Music Commission aka Music Foundation for the past few years, but let’s be honest, the results are meager at best. Today, The Commercial Appeal reported...

A commentary by Otis White – weekly regular on Smart City – for Governing magazine:You know hip when you see it in Coconut Grove in Miami, Buckhead in Atlanta or LoDo in Denver. But what does hip look like in...

Keith Bellows may have the best job in America. He’s editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler and this week he’ll tell us about the must see cities on his list of top destinations. And we’ll talk about...