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.

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.

Expected performance locations will be near some of the most important stations. Bands will perform throughout the day, allowing audiences to move back and forth from station to station – the stages only a short walk from stations - to see their favorite acts. CITY SOUND TRACKS holds the potential to be one of the most unique music festival experiences. Whats Up Magazine also foresees the possibility of other non-festival groups performing near the stations and we commend the potential for any and all community participation. The goal is to showcase the talents of our community, as well as exhibit the usefulness and convenience of our local transit system.”

Thanks, too, to Jeff Vines in St. Louis who submitted this picture of St. Louis’s light rail system in action to the Flickr Pool!

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.

Here’s some information from the Knight Foundation:

“Nearly a third of American households lack broadband access at home, even when it is available in their community. The program will unveil some of the working recommendations in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan for increasing the nation’s rate of broadband adoption, a critical goal in an era when broadband is central to education, job search and training, economic development, and the information needs of communities. An Inclusion Showcase will demonstrate applications and programs that are already working to effectively bridge the digital divide and promote broadband adoption.”

To register for the summit, click here.

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:

Across our city, Buffalo’s majestic legacy is on display side-by-side with its steady decline.  However, the place that Frederick Law Olmstead deemed “the best planned city… in the United States, if not the world” still has its good bones–which are not just its physical infrastructure and building stock, but its people, culture, and history as well.

Compact and flat, Buffalo’s great to see on a bike, but however you get around, you need to experience:

Allentown: About a five-minute walk from downtown, this was Buffalo’s first suburban neighborhood and then its first and largest historic district.  Long a bastion for artists, stately Victorians and a bohemian commercial strip fill in this economically and racially diverse neighborhood…

If you’d like to volunteer to tell one piece of your city’s story, email sarah@gluespace.org.

The nature of the artist is to help us reimagine the future. A combination of group and solo shows currently at Cleveland’s Spaces Gallery focuses on what happens after the built environment disintegrates.In the group show, 15 artists from Athens, OH to New York rethink the future of the Rust Belt as they draw between the lines of abandonment and sprawl. Photos of shuttered plants and an abandoned Dairy Queen are whimsically adorned with rosy captions indicating the dreams of urban planners like green technology center or high performance home. “Green tech center” is the caption for a bombed out warehouse; “high performance home” is under an empty Dairy Queen. Is this meant to be a critique of urban planners or of our disposable culture? Perhaps there’s a simpler explanation – they are ways of rethinking these “liabilities” as potential assets.Then there’s the Ohio University School of Art Critical Regionalism Initiative in Athens where they reckon with the destructive forces of mining coal and burning it for power. They picked up 800 pounds of coal in a Prius and drove it to the gallery where it symbolizes the amount of power it will take (4,000 kilowatt hours) to keep the lights on during the run of their show (3 months). Didactic images of mining and community are imposed on a map that was painted using the acid spoils that are readily available from coal mines.Bright ribbons illuminate trash and the rusted pylons leaning on abandoned lots in Corrie Slawson’s Work Party 118. The title refers to an in-gallery and on-site installation on abandoned lots in Midtown Cleveland (the parcel numbers all start with 118). This past weekend, Slawson and twenty volunteer ‘workers’ gathered on snow covered lots to stretch strands of colorful ribbon and illuminate interesting fragments of the landscape in the city’s donut hole – some trash, bits of wall with barbed wire, a pocket park framed by small trees growing bright orange fruit. What was nice was the occasion to stop and enjoy vacant land, and to create an opportunity for new interactions.Instead of always seeing it as a liability or a depressing reminder of poverty in the city, twenty people who might otherwise pass these lots without a reason to interact with them shared a whole day of really fun participatory art and left behind big swaths of candy colored lines stretched over a ‘blank’ canvas. Or as Doug Max Utter wrote in his review in Cleveland Scene, “the resulting triangular shapes shimmered above the snow, vibrating in the breeze like a stringed instrument. Nobody was expecting anything quite so sweet.”Some curiosity seekers and pedestrians strolling by seemed taken (or taken aback) by the goings on, and we had a chance to share what we were doing with anyone who asked, including one gentleman who shared that instead of being promised another development scheme, as least this was something he could see happening.

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!

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.

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.

Our distinguished speakers will be:
- Dan Kildee, former Genesee County Treasurer and Co-Founder and President of the new Washington, D.C.-based Center for Community Progress
- Conan Smith, Executive Director of the Michigan Suburbs Alliance
- Christine Rector, Director of Regional Strategies at Northern Initiatives
- Yohannes Hailu, Associate Director of the Land Policy Research program at LPI.

Following the presentations, audience members can ask questions of the panelists. Don’t miss this opportunity to access the most contemporary knowledge on the New Economy and to join in dialogue with colleagues and key constituent groups about Michigan’s future.”

To register for this event, RSVP to Jessica McFarland at mcfarland@landpolicy.msu.edu or call 517.432.8800 Ext. 103. For more information, check out the Legislative forum on Facebook or follow the Land Policy Institute on Twitter.

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).

Join us to hear their strategies for reducing poverty, and together we will identify the key ideas that leaders can put into action to reduce poverty in our cities now.”

If you’re interested in attending this intimate conversation should register here by February 28. For more information contact Rebecca Eggleston at reggleston@ceosforcities.org. Space is limited, so register soon!

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,

“When you’re good, you pose like this on top of your Monster truck, ‘Grave Digger’, which is on top of a pile of crushed cars which is on top of some piled up soil which is in AllState Arena near Chicago. It all adds up, to a greatly fun day.Thanks, AJL, for submitting these great photos, and thanks again to everyone who’s still uploading pictures to the Flickr pool!