A small bedroom community of 10,000 population does not currently have a true downtown. There is no street level retail, though the town is not completely sprawled out. There is some light density as retail is about 30' off the road, houses are about 20' from the street. The city is in the process of defining a formal downtown centered around public buildings and some of the most active retail. Does anyone here know of any other towns that have done something similar? Does anyone have any experience or tips for a community trying to do this?

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We are tasked with working in a rural community that has few assets, not even enough to put together an agritourism map with the area cooperative extension folk.

I need some ideas of things that people have seen elsewhere that I might suggest to citizen groups in this community as projects they would support. I'm trolling through 'best practice' sorts of websites to try and find something, anything that is a project that was successful elsewhere and might transfer here.

BTW - there is interest in hunting by the people who live there and those outside the area. I was thinking of maybe putting together an initiative to build a community-owned and operated hunting lodge. That would be seasonal, though, and it would be great to have something that is year round.

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Driving Detroit (http://media.freep.com/drivingdetroit/stories.html) is a series of articles from the Detroit Free Press that documents a four-month odyssey through all 2,700 miles (4,350 kilometers) of Detroit's over 2,100 streets. The idea of this unusual roadtrip was to get a unique view of Detroit; a short-term, street-level survey of the city's 138 square miles (357 square kilometers), and a snapshot of the city many insist is coming back.