Two small Tennessee towns reveal the mighty power of a traditional downtown square—even one that isn’t designed to achieve its full potential. It’s simply the most foolproof and financially productive style of development there is.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Darren Smith—Founder, President, and CEO of Traipse—about how you can boost your historic business district with gamification, including how to gamification can boost tourism, get more traffic for merchants, and make your historic business district the destination it deserves to be.
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Like many small, historic cities, Ellicott City, Maryland is a resilient town that has always rebuilt and recovered after natural disasters. It would be a shame if it could not recover from a man-made one.
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When a neighborhood commercial street comes back to life, the whole city benefits.
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A narrow main street demonstrates just how powerful small changes in street design can be.
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We can all learn from these communities' attempts to turn their downtowns back into places for people, not just cars.
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It’s pretty easy to destroy a walkable place. We’ve been doing it for so long.
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What is it about the built environment of a historic downtown that makes it a good home for the small independent business but not as appealing to the national retailers?
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Why old ways of building are good for both the body and the bottom line.
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Scranton, Pennsylvania is not a wealthy place, but it is a place with underappreciated intrinsic wealth. Bet on older mid-size cities like Scranton, whose built-in advantages leave them well-positioned to weather future economic disruption.
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Tradition can help make strong citizenship habitual, but first we need to come to terms with how we got here, who we want to be, and what traditions support the society we want.
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There’s a weird war raging these days between people who advocate high rise living in the urban core and folks who can’t stand to live in anything but a fully detached home on a quarter acre lot. I always choose the thing in the middle. I’m a Main Street kind of guy.
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Cities that tethered their future to this experiment are going to struggle while those that still have a pulse in their core neighborhoods will have a chance at renewed prosperity.
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