June is Great Outdoors Month here in the U.S. Coordinated by the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), the theme is getting outside to enjoy parks, trails, forests, waters, and other natural places. Some places have events. And there’s plenty of places to go with just you and whomever is in your buddy system. The celebration began…
I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Michigan last month for the American Planning Association‘s APA National Planning Conference. APA is a membership organization of professional urban planners, volunteers, and elected officials from across the US and around the world. About four to five thousand people usually attend the annual conference, held in…
Most of us know a small town or rural area when we see it. Certain thing stand out, like cows, crops, or more trees than people. Yet it is unlikely any two of us could agree, exactly, on a specific definition of how small a town must be to be considered “small”, or how rural…
AÂ team at McKinsey & Company explored this question earlier this year–there are many different “right” answers to who is rural. They pick up on the USDA ERS Rural-Urban Continuum codes and use this lens to look more closely at common characteristics of rural counties across the US. What did they find? In other words, the…
