Architecture Commons^™

Designing Urban Policy For A Thriving New Jersey • New Jersey Urban Mayors Association Addresses Policy Priorities, Thomas Edison State University, Evan Weiss, New Jersey Urban Mayors Association

Urban Mayors Policy Center

Cities are the Solution, Not the Problem:

While decades of suburban development might suggest otherwise, New Jersey is at its core an urban state. It is dense, covered by one of the largest transit networks in the country and incredibly diverse. Every region of the state has great livable cities, with small, midsized and large cities all represented — most states are lucky to have just a handful. But, for decades, new jersey cities have too often been portrayed as problems that need to be fixed. As the economic and lifestyle preferences of future generations shift back toward cities and …

Symposium Report: Findings From The Research Roundtable On The Economic And Community Impact Of Broadband, Edward Feser, John Horrigan, William Lehr

Edward J Feser

In December 2012, a group of experts spanning disciplines and practice in the field of broadband policy met to discuss how the research community can better serve state and local policymakers and other stakeholders. This group of subject matter experts was convened to examine how best to measure the economic impact of state and national broadband deployment and capacity/adoption building efforts. The impetus for the symposium stemmed from the widespread view that there is a deficit of research, standards, and measurements to adequately inform the widely acknowledged view that broadband Internet is a driver of sustainable economic and community development. …

El Paso Economic Development System Review & Recommendations, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This report, commissioned by the City of El Paso, recommends that El Paso city government undertake a substantial reform of its economic development effort and that public and private sector stakeholders in the broader El Paso region mobilize to create an organizational vehicle for the kind of public‐private collaboration that is driving innovative economic development in many other major city‐regions in the United States. The analysis also calls for a stronger integration of physical, land use, and economic development planning activities in the city and region, consistent with a trend in international best practice in local and regional economic development.

Globalization, Regional Economic Policy And Research, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This paper considers two questions. First, are there unique implications of growing global economic integration for development planning and policy making at the city and regional level? Key issues include whether globalization is appreciably different today than it used to be and whether it means anything more, from the perspective of a given city or region, than heightened competition for resident industries and related challenges of more rapid macro-regional structural change and adjustment. Second, what kinds of spatial empirical research and model building would be most valuable to regional policy makers faced with designing programs and making specific allocative investment …

U.S. Regional Economic Fragmentation & Integration: Selected Empirical Evidence And Implications, Edward J. Feser, Geoffrey Hewings

Edward J Feser

The emergence of ten U.S. megaregions—increasingly contiguous spaces of high density development and population capturing a high share of U.S. economic activity—raises the question of appropriate scales for local, state and federal policy and how regional planning as a practice can adapt to an extended and, in some cases, almost continuous economic integration over space (RPA, 2006). Notions of cities as functional economic areas, more or less distinct spaces that operate as independent economic units, are less and less tenable as the basis for planning and policy making. At the same time, the megaregion phenomenon does not necessarily imply that …

Encouraging Broadband Deployment From The Bottom Up, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

State governments that have elected to make investments to increase the availability of affordable broadband service in rural areas and low income urban neighborhoods should organize their efforts around a strategy that encourages and leverages locally-driven initiatives, rather than follow a top-down approach that seeks to identify and close all broadband service gaps in a comprehensive fashion. A bottom-up approach to state broadband policy has three major advantages. First, it is a conservative policy response in an economic arena in which the appropriate role of the public sector is highly contested and in which private sector deployment is proceeding rapidly, …

Regional Technology Assets And Opportunities: The Geographic Clustering Of High-Tech Industry, Science And Innovation In Appalachia, Edward Feser, Harvey Goldstein, Henry Renski, Catherine Renault

Edward J Feser

This study constitutes a systematic location analysis of the technology assets of Appalachia. The report identifies and documents sub-regional concentrations of technology-related employment, R&D, and applied innovation within and immediately adjacent to the 406-county service area of the Appalachian Regional Commission. By assembling and analyzing an extensive set of data at high levels of functional and spatial detail, the study reveals localized technology strengths that might be nurtured through focused economic development policy.