Geology Is Part of a Community's Brand

I’m learning that geology is part of a community’s unique brand. It differentiates or associates a community in many ways including water resources, landscape, appearance etc. But being nearby doesn’t mean communities share geology.

Durham, for instance, is on the Durham Triassic Basin that runs down to Sanford. Of course Research Triangle Park has this geology but so does Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Mostly to the south and east of Durham, some of Wake County and Raleigh are on what is called the Raleigh Belt, but a large part is on the Coastal Plain.

Orange County is largely on the Carolina Slate Belt, the same geology for much of the Piedmont.

This is part of the reason why communities can be proximate yet have very different issues for water, building etc.

Who Knew?

A couple of weeks ago I heard the term “rain harvesting” for the first time on a listserv. The Web quickly took me to a company in North Carolina that is one of the most recommended, and they have a source in Durham.

Within a few days, I had enough information for a 700-gallon system at home, perfect for hand-watering more than 100 shrubs and trees and a smidgeon of lawn. We’re also looking at a 5,600-gallon system at DCVB that would provide nearly 80,000 gallons a year for irrigation and help us promote Durham’s green reputation.

City water is still much less expensive, but drought or not, it just makes sense to move non-drinking uses to other sources.

But the point of this posting is how efficiently we can move now from learning a concept to practical implementation, thanks to the Web.

Last time we had a drought and I put in rain barrels, it poured, and I spent years bleeding them off. So getting a system now that requires less maintenance is a guarantee the lakes will be full soon.

Landfill Fires

You wouldn’t know it from all of the hullabaloo last year about the fire at the landfill, but there have been nearly 60,000 landfill fires in communities this decade. An average of more than 8,000 annually. Shoot, there are only 34,000 incorporated places in the U.S., so the odds of having a landfill fire appear to be high.

Why didn’t the news reports contain this information? Or did I just miss something, along with all of the other people who had a lot to say.

Why were people so quick to jump to the conclusion this was a very rare event or to assume someone was an idiot? Or that this just must be “Durham.”

Then again, knowing that news reports about content with which I am very familiar are at best 80-85% accurate (reporters and editors don’t pretend to be infallible) why do I read or listen or view reports on other topics and take them as 100% accurate?

Durham Accolades for 2007

Durham is one of 34,000 “places” in the US (1,237 over 25,000 population, one of 254 cities 100,000+, one of 3,140 counties, and the principal city in one of 361 MSAs). There are communities that rank higher in a category or two, but Durham is one of a handful that consistently rank high across so many different aspects in a given year. Below are some of the accolades Durham received during the past year either as a community or as the core community for a four-county MSA.

• #2 Best Green Cities For Lifestyle and Quality of Life – Country Home
• #3 Best Small City for Relocating Families - World ERC and Primacy Relocation
• #6 for bird counting lists submitted – Great Backyard Bird Count
• #7 for Business and Careers - Forbes
• #15 Best Place to Live in the USA - Bert Sperling’s City’s Ranked & Rated
• #16 Best Green Places (overall) in America - Country Home
• #26 City Where Business Opportunity Is Greatest For Growing Companies - ExpansionManagement.com
• #37 Best Walking City - Prevention
• #45 Hottest Business market in the Country - Inc. Magazine
• 100 Best Communities for Young People - America’s Promise - The Alliance for Youth
• 100 Best Communities for Music Education - American Music Conference
• Top Ten Tech Town - Wired
• Tree City USA for 24th year - National Arbor Day Foundation
• Top 20 MSA in the nation (only one in N.C.) ranked as Best Places to Educate Your Child - Forbes
  
• #1 MSA for College graduation rate among select national tech-focused MSAs - Knoxville (TN) News-Sentinel
• #1 MSA in the nation for percentage of workforce in the “Creative Class” - Catalytix
• #1 MSA for least excessive drinking and alcohol-related problems - Men’s Health Magazine
• #3 MSA for Fast Cities (when combined with another MSA and compared back to individual MSAs) - Fast Company
• #3 MSA for African-Americans to Work, Live and Play (when combined with another MSA and compared back to individual MSAs) – Black Enterprise

For all Durham accolades, click here.

Words to Describe a Community

A friend of mine recently shared with me some passages from a book she’s reading. The characters ruminate on “one” word associations for various cities. Words that characterize a community are truly the core elements of its brand. But to be valid in that sense, they need to be words associated with a community by both its internal constituents and its external audiences.

Here are some of the word/city associations in the book:

Rome	Sex
Vatican	Power
Los Angeles	Succeed
Stockholm	Conform
New York	Achieve
Naples	Fight

It is an understatement to say Raleigh and Durham have very different cultural identities. A NYT writer once told me one of these places just as well be Tulsa and the other Kuala Lumpur.

Folks in Raleigh always seem to have a lot to say about what they think of Durham. Well, here is what Durham thinks of itself and them. The Durham traits come right out of interviews, focus groups and surveys of both Durham residents and external audiences.

Raleigh	Durham
Conservative	Progressive
Adaptive	Innovative
Smooth	Gritty
Conventional	Original
Big League	Ivy League
Centric	Unpretentious
Comparable	Diverse
Government	Colorful
Extrinsic	Real
Exclusive	Accepting
Judge	Research
Moderate	Activist