WHAT IS GLUE?
Much has been said about the future of the Great Lakes region by academics and traditional stakeholders in public policy. Yet rarely have 18-40 year olds, the target of scores of ‘brain drain’ research and attraction and retention efforts, been asked as a demographic what they envision, or how their day-to-day experiences in “declining” post-industrial cities inform that vision.
“The economic potential of the Great Lakes region will not be fully realized unless water protection is paired with inclusive and innovative reinvestment in cities like Milwaukee, Erie, and Youngstown,” said Pittsburgh native Abby Wilson, Co-Founder of GLUE. “The shared potential of our region’s environmental and human capital is truly extraordinary, but untapped – partly because our cities are struggling. The region’s cities must be the laboratory, the nucleus, and the expression of that possibility.”
“Across the world, the number of people moving to cities drastically outpaces the ability of infrastructure to support them. Yet my city and others like it are fighting tooth and nail to stave off population decline,” Detroit native and GLUE Co-Founder Sarah Szurpicki said. “We can’t continue to sideline this region as our nation evolves in the 21st century.”
GLUE was developed in the fall of 2007 as a forum for people to exchange stories, ideas, andbest practices between otherwise isolated cities ranging from Buffalo to St. Louis to Minneapolis. The GLUE coalition, comprised of post-boomer urbanists located in the “rustbelt,” was founded to promote the power, aide in the positive transformation, and address the shared challenges of similarly-storied older industrial cities situated in the Great Lakes watershed. Among the ranks of GLUE coalition members are community organizers, urban planners, artists, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, and students living and working in over twenty cities in ten states.
GLUE’s website will serve as an idea and information clearinghouse for the Great Lakes Region. It will feature issue and solutions-oriented stories, a directory where city-lovers can connect with one another and exchange ideas, and links to organizations and initiatives where readers can get involved, both locally and regionally. GLUE will additionally host monthly local meetings and other off-line events, placing an emphasis on diversity and the inclusion of under-represented communities.
GLUE operates on four guiding principles:
Urbanism: Cities are our world’s economic drivers. Decision makers cannot afford to underestimate their value nor overlook their needs.
Regionalism: Great Lakes urban centers need to overcome outlooks of despair and isolation by forging a shared perspective and developing strength in numbers.
Storytelling: White papers alone cannot propel an agenda, particularly for the emerging generation of leadership. No need is expressed more powerfully than via human narrative.
Network Building: Connecting people and institutions who share challenges and objectives will foster regional collaboration and transfer examples of success throughout the basin.
hi
linking our cities
January 13, 2008 by ken54
i am thrilled to see glue.. and hope that i can be of some use to your efforts (even if i am 53!). in particular, i have been working for a number of years to increase interaction between the post industrial cities/regions of the great lakes and the ohio river valley, with a focus on people sharing and learning from each other how to deal with the losses of deindustrialization and ways to regenerate their communities in an equitable and healthful manner-it was in this spirit that i wrote a letter to the pittsburgh post-gazette last week (see below), suggesting that pittsburgh needs to see its 250th birthday as having regional and international significance- and that it needs to involve the people of the great lakes/ohio river (the “the land of fresh water”?) by inviting them to join us. perhaps glue might be interested in this? A conference on our shared heritage and future- with delegations from around the region would be fun and useful…ken thompson
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Who is coming to Pittsburgh’s birthday party?
Pittsburgh’s 250th birthday is clearly upon us. We have a year of exciting events to look forward to.A line from Kate Dewey’s Jan. 6 Forum piece “Past as Prologue” struck me and, I think, bears scrutiny. She wisely suggests that we “cannot afford to be insular and parochial.” Yet, I wonder if our approach to the 250th has not been just that.Who besides ourselves are we inviting to the celebrations? A good Pittsburgh birthday party usually involves good friends and family in equal measure — people who care about us and who we care about.Whom are Pittsburgh’s “good friends and family?” Let’s start with family. Our parents come from every distant shore — we are a child of the world. Clearly Eastern Pennsylvania is our oldest sibling, if a bit estranged. Since our birthday is also the birth of the gateway to the west, the cities and towns of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys are our younger siblings. We have close cousins in every industrial and post-industrial region in America and distant ones in similar regions around the globe.Our friends — people who have been touched by Pittsburgh, its story and its people — stretch the world over. It seems to me that, in celebrating ourselves, we are celebrating them, too. Perhaps we should let them know that, and specifically invite them, to rekindle our deep historic relationships. We have a lot of candles to blow out and could use their help. Roll out the carpet and roll out the barrel!
KEN THOMPSON, M.D.
Shadyside
Have a nice day !
well said, Ken and I could not agree more
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Hi – I am a recent grad of city planning and just moved to Detroit this summer, to work for an environmental justice nonprofit. I got excited about revitalizing post-industrial cities through a class in grad school… and heard about GLUE from my old high school physics teacher… and now that I’ve finally read about what GLUE is, am so thrilled that something like this exists!
Sandra Yu
MCP ’07
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