Fanpost
Dave Bing meets a(nother) wealthy industrialist.
SYRACUSE, N.Y., September 25th — Last night DBB's own wealthy industrialist was at an event with Dave Bing, former Piston and current mayor of Detroit. I introduced myself and we conversed...
mayor dave bing
Change Scope
Filter By
1
The Economist: The Parable of Detroit
posted by -PS-, Oct 25, 2011
IT IS hardly news that the city of Detroit has been in long-term decline, a victim of everything from the problems of the "big three" carmakers to family breakdown, crime and middle-class flight, both black and white. But the scale of the recent collapse has caught even hardened Detroiters by surprise. When the results from the most recent decennial census appeared earlier this year, they showed that in the decade from 2000 to 2010 Detroit lost an astonishing 25% of its population, a demographic catastrophe (New Orleans apart) without parallel in the developed world.
....
Yet despite all the gloom, there is a bit of a sense that things might just be starting to turn, and the reason is simple: Detroit is now incredibly cheap. And that has drawn some admittedly rather pioneering types back into town.
http://www.economist.com/node/21533407?frsc=dg|a
Expand
▾
- Share on Facebook
- Tweet post
- ⋆ Recs (1)
NYT: Can Microsoft Make You ‘Bing’?
posted by -PS-, Jul 30, 2011
Link
nytimes.com
Microsoft’s assault on Google in Internet search and search advertising may be the steepest competitive challenge in business today. It is certainly among the most costly. Trying to go head-to-head with Google costs Microsoft upward of $5 billion a year, industry executives and analysts estimate.
As the overwhelming search leader, Google has advantages that tend to reinforce one another. It has the most people typing in searches — billions a day — and that generates more data for Google’s algorithms to mine to improve its search results. All those users attract advertisers. And there is the huge behavioral advantage: "Google" is synonymous with search, the habitual choice.
Once it starts, this cycle of prosperity snowballs — more users, more data, and more ad dollars. Economists call the phenomenon "network effects"; business executives just call it momentum. In search, Google has it in spades, and Microsoft, against the odds, wants to reverse it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/technology/with-the-bing-search-engine-microsoft-plays-the-underdog.html
Expand
▾
The Odd Challenge for Detroit Planners: How to Shrink a City
posted by -PS-, Apr 05, 2011
Link
nytimes.com
DETROIT — When Marja M. Winters was studying urban planning in graduate school, she learned the art and science of helping cities grow.
Now Ms. Winters, a native of Detroit and the deputy director of the city’s planning and development department, finds herself in an utterly unexpected role, one that no school would have thought to prepare her for: she is sorting out how to help her hometown shrink, by working through difficult decisions that will determine which neighborhoods can be saved and which cannot.
....
Actually carrying out such an effort, particularly in a city as vast as Detroit, is like solving a complicated set of interwoven puzzles, as Ms. Winters has discovered over many long days and some nights poring over thousands of pages of maps and statistics in her 23rd-floor downtown office.
How to reconfigure roads, bus lines, police districts? How to encourage people — there is no power of eminent domain to force them — to move out of the worst neighborhoods and into better ones?
Expand
▾
UPDATE: Detroit's RoboCop statue
posted by -PS-, Mar 29, 2011
Link
freep.com
In a demonstration of the Internet's ability to connect like-minded people, the exchange led to a Facebook group promoting the idea to build a RoboCop statue here and a fund-raising drive with worldwide reach.
So far, more than $60,000 has been raised from metro Detroit and many other countries through the Kickstarter page set up by Imagination Station, a nonprofit that's building a creative campus in Corktown. The fund-raising was set to officially end on Saturday.
Detroit artist Jerry Paffendorf, who's involved in the statue drive, said he hopes a 10-foot-tall replica of RoboCop will be completed this summer. The planned location is somewhere in Wayne State University's TechTown research and technology park.
Wherever it winds up, "it's going to be a world-class statue, like you would see Thaddeus Kosciuszko on Michigan Avenue," says Paffendorf.
Expand
▾
- Share on Facebook
- Tweet post
- ⋆ Recs (1)
With Detroit in dire straits, mayor invites big thinking
posted by -PS-, Feb 09, 2011
Link
washingtonpost.com
With no salvation in sight, Bing, 67, has embarked on a mission few in his position have ever had to take on: dramatically shrinking a major American metropolis. To do so, Bing has issued an open invitation: anyone with a proposal, plan, theory - a notion, even - is welcome to try to save his crumbling city.
Numerous outfits have responded, turning Detroit into the new New Orleans - a giant testing ground for urban planners and developers.
Expand
▾
SBNU v1.2.1, May 1, 2013
Guiding Principles -
Terms of Use -
Privacy Policy
© 2013 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
