Philadelphia, like any other city that wants to compete in a global marketplace, needs a regional distinction that sets it apart, and in this place, nothing makes more sense than for Philadelphia to define itself as the hub for social entrepreneurship and urban renewal. Around the world, our hubs of innovation and culture, of education [...]

Prideful, working class white ethnic neighborhoods in cities have been ignored and poorly represented for at least a half century, goes a major theme of Peter Binzen’s 1968 Whitetown USA dissection. [Google Books here.] Written by a former Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper reporter with whom I was thrilled to have lunch last month, the book attacks [...]

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter gave an hour of his time this week to answer resident questions that came to host NBC 10 by way of email, Twitter and Facebook, as we reported on Technically Philly in sharing video of the event. Nutter has already been praised for use of Twitter – a move we had [...]

If you cover a big city with rambling and varied regions and neighborhoods, your reporting and writing should reflect that. Yet, from a culture of journalism that cycled reporters through various markets to urban decay that encouraged too many of them to live outside those big cities they covered, one of the more common complaints [...]

I have a friend who went to college where he did for, really, one leading reason: the accent. Sure, he found a nice campus at a respected university with a good reputation and a big price tag, but, ultimately, he sought colleges in and around Boston because he loved that accent. Boston, most might say, [...]

In a Technically Philly Entrance Exam back in March, Wil Reynolds called for reminding suburban companies of the value of being in the city: transit, regional hub, talent, quality of life, innovation and the like. In truth, large companies followed their employees to the suburbs in the 20th century for many of those same reasons, [...]

Back in February, Philadelphia magazine profiled Doogie Horner, a quirky stand up comedian who has gotten some national attention, a major publisher’s backing and has the audacity to think he’s going to stay living in Philadelphia. Doogie Horner is a comedian, and he isn’t encouraged by what he sees inside Noche, a Center City bar [...]

Three recently shared numbers stand out to me as being incredibly powerful, evocative and important for the future of Philadelphia: 8,456 The tiny, 0.6 increase in Philadelphia’s population from the 2000 to the 2010 U.S. Census, a small grow that halts an enormous trend: 50 years of population loss from a 1950 height of 2.1 [...]

With the passage of Resolution 110218, Philadelphia City Council officially named the last six days of April officially as Philly Tech Week, as celebrated with a reading of the resolution in council chambers Thursday morning. There, my colleague Sean Blanda and I, two of the three co-founders of Technically Philly and organizers of Philly Tech [...]

Back in July 2008, I finally got around to updating a WordPress.com I had been using to track the work I was doing on my undergraduate honors thesis researching the future of the beleaguered Philadelphia Republican Party. Two and a half years later, in looking to get a jump start on a 2011 resolution of [...]