In the market place, for practical reasons, innumerable qualitative distinctions which are of vital importance for man and society are suppressed; they are not allowed to surface. Thus the reign of quantity celebrates its greatest triumphs in “The Market.” Everything is equated with everything else. To equate things means to give them a price and [...]

If there is an increase in economic impact in a local economy, it is probable that there also will be an increase in costs associated with it. ... [E]conomic impact studies report only economic benefits, and monetary costs and nonmonetary negative impact inflicted on a community are not considered. Clearly, if these costs exceed the [...]

There are many examples from around the world of good environmental practice allied with profitability; there are examples of unquestionable altruism on the part of profit-maximizing companies… But the profit maximisation motive does have a tendency to subvert and subjugate other considerations, ethical and environmental. It is essential to keep this in mind in any [...]

“Economic development strategy shifts dramatically when regional competitiveness is the goal. The very root of competitiveness is a region understanding its inherent economic strengths – and the markets available to exploit them. Accordingly, development strategy is moving away from industrial recruitment and being a low-cost competitor to strategies that help regions identify and exploit their [...]

“Movement toward corporate concern for the ‘triple bottom line’ – financial, social, and environmental performance – requires radical change throughout the corporation. It is not ‘either/or’. The new paradigm is ‘and also’. A sustainable business excels on the traditional scorecard of return on financial assets and shareholder and customer value creation. It also embraces community [...]

The PBS website has one of the nicer tributes to Jane Jacobs, who passed away this week. Jane’s work, particularly her first book, Death and Life of Great American Cities, written in 1961, is central to the kind of healthy place-making that underpins Civic Tourism. Beyond community design, she wrote extensively about economics. The PBS [...]

“Urbanism must be understood as more than urbane amenities scattered between and within self-contained projects, more than cultural institutions, public parks, sports stadiums, attractive street furnishings, clean streets, and public art. Those are critical urbane embellishments, not the urban essence. The basics run deeper and are more complex than such surface attractions. Diverse economic functions [...]

To understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomenon. We have already seen the importance of this in the case of neighborhood parks. Parks can easily – too easily – be thought as phenomena in their own right and described as adequate or [...]

It stands to reason that people will be more likely to invest and stay rooted in places that are worth caring about – places with a strong and appealing local identity, an ambiance of belonging, and a sense of place. Given this assumption, communities seeking to foster a sense of place or to nurture local [...]

Now that the Civic Tourism conference is over, and there is clearly some momentum to pursue the concept, where do we go now?