Category Archives: Solutions

Engaging the Unengaged and Revitalizing Vacant Properties

On June 21, we’ll be collaborating on a “vacant properties” training project as part of the 2012 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference in New Orleans. It’s a great team, including Sarah Reginelli (a planner with the City of Albany, NY), Deenah Loeb (the executive director of the City Parks Association in Philadelphia), Jeff Debruyn (of the [...]

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PlaceMatters Blog Roundup: January 18, 2012

OpenIdeo is poised to announce the winner of their “restoring vibrancy to cities” crowdsourced challenge, winnowing down an initial list of 331 concepts to a short list of 20 finalists and now to a single winner. YPulse reports on Sesame Street’s new augmented reality app unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Civic Commons [...]

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Welcome Brad Barnett to the Team!

We are very excited to have someone new join our team here in Denver as our new Planning Analyst! We were immensely pleased with the caliber of the applicants to our GIS and Scenario Planning Analyst last fall, but Brad Barnett stood out even in such a strong field … he really impressed us and we [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Mobile, Social, and Local

Five trends I’m excited about for 2012: 1) Mobile Everything It’ll all be about mobile in 2012. Smartphone sales continue to grow, and consumers are increasingly shifting from PC-based web activity to using smartphones. Because of the pervasiveness of mobile devices and the growing sophistication of both native and HTML-based apps, many of the tools [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Sustainability, Equity, Transparency

2012 could be the end of the world as we know it. Or not. Either way, some things definitely will be ending–for example, funding for the Sustainable Communities Initiative program hasn’t been renewed for 2013.  Despite the end of funding this year, or perhaps because of it, I’ll point again this year (as I did [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Big Data, Collaborative Problem Solving

Big Data, Big Business 
Decision support systems that take massive data sets from multiple public and private entities and synthesize the data into valuable cross-discipline information for city and regional decision making is clearly becoming big business. Television, online, and magazine ads are populated with ads from IBM, Cisco, and Siemens, to name a few, [...]

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Looking Back at 2011: Augmented Reality, Mobile, and Regional Sustainability Planning

Way back in January of 2011, I asked my colleagues here at PlaceMatters what they were most excited about for the new year. Here’s a quick look at how our expectations for 2011 tracked to what the year actually held: Ken was excited about how the rumored addition of a camera on the new iPad [...]

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HUD Announces New Sustainable Communities Grants

HUD just announced its latest round of Sustainable Communities grants, and PlaceMatters is thrilled to be part of two projects teams. One is a $1.8 million grant in Erie County, Pennsylvania and the other is right here in our hometown, a $4.5 million grant for the Denver Metro region. On both of these projects, PlaceMatters [...]

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