Tag Archives: Great Lakes Urban Exchange

Writing about the Rust Belt – GLUE and Rustbelt Almanac

I’ve got two great projects to share with you, both are related to sharing stories about rustbelt cities including Pittsburgh.

If you have been a regular reader of IheartPGH over the years, you have probably read a few of our posts about GLUE. GLUE stands for Great Lakes Urban Exchange – a project that was started by a Pittsburgher and a Detroiter (is there a Detroit equivalent to the word Pittsburgher?). I’ve been fortunate to attend many of the GLUE conferences, the most recent conference was held in September 2011 here in Pittsburgh. Through GLUE I have had the chance to meet my blogging counterparts from other rust belt cities. Some of my fellow GLUE friends have been discussing another GLUE conference for this fall. We’ve also launched the GLUE Tumblr blog – which is open for submission. If you have a story, link, photos or video that you would like to share with fellow city lovers please submit here – http://gluespace.tumblr.com/submit

Speaking of story sharing. Meet Rustbelt Almanac – a new magazinge that will be launching very soon with a first issue about Pittsburgh. Congrats to the Rustbelt Almanac team on not only meeting but beating their fundraising goal. Check out the video below. (There is one more day to contribute – you can still donate to the Rustbelt Almanac kickstarter campaign here.)

Rustbelt Almanac Kickstarter (bloglocal.net)
Rust Belt Market seeks funding to expand (wxyz.com)
Rust Belt turns to ‘Tech Belt’ (wnd.com)
Detroit Leads the Way on Place-Centered Revitalization (sustainablecitiescollective.com)

Post-Gazette Article on the Upcoming Why Pittsburgh Party

: Image via Wikipedia

I wrote about the Why Pittsburgh Party on Friday and I wanted to post a follow up because I was worried that the info would get lost in the weekend emails. The Post-Gazette beat me to it with a great article about the upcoming Why Pittsburgh Party on September 17, 2009 (click here for the party details).

Here are some highlights from the article:

Carrie Hagan, a graduate student in history and policy at Carnegie Mellon University, met Ms. Wilson through the League of Young Voters and joined the party committee “and the next thing I know I am throwing the party,” said Ms. Hagan. “I couldn’t stand the idea of not being part of something like this.”

…

The Detroit party was “a qualified success,” said Ms. Szurpicki. “We had around 100 people and collected over 80 good photos” of participants holding a white board with the phrase “I Will Stay If …” completed.

“The photos show that people want better regional cooperation, public transit, bike lanes, curbside recycling, things like that. And what has come out of this is people saying ‘I am staying to be a part of something,’ ‘I am staying because I want to help build that curbside recycling program.’

…

“I fell in love with this city the moment I crossed the bridge and have not looked back since,” she said. “I’ve been a lot of places and this is the kind of place I want to live.

via post-gazette.com

Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Cities in between – GLUE Conference Day 1

Image via Wikipedia

I am in Milwaukee for the 2nd annual GLUE conference. GLUE stands for Great Lakes Urban Exchange – which is a project that was started 2 years ago by Pittsburgh’s Abby Wilson and Sarah Szurpicki of Detroit. The website GLUEspace.org has become a portal for anyone to share information about cities in the Great Lakes watershed. IheartPGH has been a fan of GLUE from the beginning (see the post from April 2008) and thanks to GLUE both great lakes city t-shirts from both IheartPGH and STL-Style made the New York Times last summer.

You can read more about the 2009 GLUE Conference here.

I just wanted to post a quick summary with some links from the first day of the conference.

We started with a tour of Growing Power, Inc. which is an urban farm in Milwaukee that has become a model and a training facility for urban agriculture around the country. They are doing some amazing work here growing food (and worms) in green houses.

We then headed over to Sprecher Brewery for dinner – which included salad made with greens from Growing Power.

The speakers after dinner were really interesting

Willie Hines Jr. is the president of Milwaukee Commons Council, he spoke about his experiences moving back to Milwakuee, working in business and government and running for office
Carol Coletta is president and CEO of CEO’s for Cities – a non profit organization that advocates for cities. Carol has lots of information and facts about cities and how to improve cities. The CEO’s for Cities websites has lots of resources for anyone interested in cities. (Carol was one of the panelists at the first CityLive PGH event back in Sept. 2007)