Spring has sprung…for real? For this week? Who knows, but I’ll take it. Thanks to PostModern Sleaze, a.k.a. Andrew Faulkner, who took this picture of the first green of the year. The home in the background, though, isn’t getting revived by the good weather. It’s old and abandoned, but you can see how beautiful this house and yard would have been in March years ago. Andrew’s caption for this photo is “Life imitates art imitating life?” Thanks for the photo, Andrew, and thanks to everyone for submitting your photos to the Flickr Pool.

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In celebration of local public transit and in an effort to display creative support for the April 6, 2010 county vote on Proposition A, St. Louis activists have organized the most innovative music festival in the United States. Whats Up Magazine, a local independent social justice publication providing unique perspective and employment to the homeless, will present the CITY SOUND TRACKS Music Festival on Saturday, March 27, 2010. This should be a great, innovative, and fun event for St. Louis residents and out-of-towners!

Here’s some information from What’s Up Magazine:

“CITY SOUND TRACKS is the music festival that moves you. Over the course of a full day, CITY SOUND TRACKS will provide riders with the opportunity to move along MetroLink, the local light rail system, while stopping off to listen to great local bands. The price of admission is the train ticket – any pass will be sufficient – and each stage will be only a short walk from one of several stations. In a joint effort with local organizations, CITY SOUND TRACKS will offer a listening and traveling experience that is peerless, while also demonstrating how useable public transit is for bringing our community together…

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The Federal Communications Commission and the Knight Foundation are hosting a March 9th summit to highlight solutions to the challenge of providing broadband for everyone. Called America’s Digital Inclusion Summit: Working Together to Expand Opportunity Through Universal Access, the event will be held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. and will feature a wide range of broadband leaders and members of Congress. The program will include a “voices of inclusion” segment providing an opportunity for people to share their stories about how broadband – or the lack of it – has affected their lives.

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In last Thursday’s GLUEsletter, we announced that our new website will contain a feature for which we need you (yes, YOU) to produce some content. GLUE is looking for volunteer writers from each of our 20+ cities to help us tell the insider’s story of Flint, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, and beyond. Our in-design new website will contain City Portals–travel guides for the Rust Belt enthusiasts and civically engaged. You can write about what trends you believe are changing Milwaukee; great green space and other city assets in Columbus; or simply give us a tour of your Pittsburgh neighborhood. Here’s a teaser from Anthony Armstrong’s reflections on Buffalo: …

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The nature of the artist is to help us reimagine the future. A combination of group and solo shows at Cleveland’s Spaces Gallery focuses on what happens after the built environment disintegrates.

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If you go to Chicago, you have to get a picture with the bean. That’s just how it is. Making funny faces in the bean, holding up the bean, under the bean…no matter how you take it, the picture is basically obligatory. Dave Langlois’s picture, though, shows how the bean reflects and distort’s the city’s skyline. It’s easy to laugh at how strange you look in the bean’s reflection, but it’s harder to put the sculpture into perspective with the rest of the city. Thanks, Dave, for sending this photo to GLUE’s Flickr Pool, and thanks to everyone still sending in pictures!

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Cleveland’s I Will Stay If… party in November revealed a few things to me.  Clevelanders have so many good ideas for their city that it’s easy to understand why a feeling of change pervades the city.  They also might be disproportionately optimistic about their city’s future.  Check out a sampling of smiling faces here, and be sure to visit the IWSI site to see all of the photos from the event.

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On Tuesday, February 23rd, the MSU Land Policy Institute for a legislative forum will host “Right Sizing Michigan” in the Mackinac Room in the Anderson House Office Building near the State Capitol in Lansing.

Here’s some information from MSU:

“Rep. Ed Clemente will host the forum that will provide insights on how the shifting–and in some cases, declining–population in Michigan are affecting our cities, suburbs and rural areas. “Right-sizing,” “smart decline,” “land banking,” “smarter density,” “shrinking”–these and other related concepts and practices will be explored and explained by the presenters.

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The Opportunity Dividend Summit will be held March 1-2, 2010 in Detroit. In partnership with United Way for Southeastern Michigan, CEOs for Cities is convening poverty experts from throughout the nation to present their best recommendations on how to achieve the Opportunity Dividend with local action. Tackling the issue of poverty may just be one of the toughest, most important, challenges for cities today.

Here’s some information from the summit’s sponsors:

“The Opportunity Dividend analysis shows that if we reduce poverty by one percentage point in each of the top 51 metro areas, the nation would realize $13 billion in annual savings (and this doesn’t include the education and income benefits that would likely lead to and result from reductions in poverty).

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It’s the middle of winter; you’ve been wearing scarves, gloves, and sleeping bag coats for too long, and (of course) it just snowed a ton all week. So what do you do? Go to your local monster truck rally, of course.

At least, that’s what AJL in Chicago did. And, like she says…

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