A View from the Twin Cities

This past August I was honored to participate in Thriving Cities' own conference and workshop. Held over two days in Portland, Oregon, the seminar featured urban scholars and practitioners from all the across the country with topics ranging from the arts to economic development.

Since then, I have been thinking more and asking questions about how Thriving Cities' methodology and its Six Endowment Human Ecology framework speak to own my organization, Minnesota Compass—an initiative that seeks to inform local efforts to improve communities throughout our state by tracking social, economic, and demographic trends vital to quality of life. Specifically, I have been wondering how might we incorporate qualitative and even subjective assessment with data? And how might urban analysis include entire realms of experience, not currently tracked by Minnesota Compass, like religion and the arts?

Below is my preliminary effort to answer these questions, by applying Thriving Cities’ framework to my own backyard, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area, also known as "Greater MSP" or simply, the Twin Cities...