That new group will run the festival, encourage Burning Man-style creativity worldwide and develop urban revitalization projects around the Central Market Street corridor of San Francisco, where the company opened new offices in May.
"Revitalization always revolves around a culture, not an industry," Mr. Hardin said.
Mr. Mahnovski succeeds David Bragdon, who will become the director of planning for the revitalization of parkland around Jamaica Bay.
It's just past Corktown, a blighted area undergoing a painstaking revitalization, chiefly organized around a few bars and Slows Bar B Q, a restaurant so popular that it draws lines of locals and suburbanites nightly.
A renaissance and revitalization was just around the corner, I was told.
But things have finally started to turn around, thanks to a revitalization campaign initiated in 2001 that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private investment into neglected neighborhoods.
The most far-reaching: revitalization of the area around the hopelessly polluted Inner Harbor, a one-mile-long channel that runs from Onondaga Lake to within a few blocks of downtown.
But you can organize one around a broad revitalization agenda, and, above all, love of country.
"It took 100,000 slumlord units and changed them into 100,000 units that catalyzed the redevelopment and revitalization of tens of neighborhoods around the city," said Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which represents dozens of housing groups.
Mr. Koeppel worked with the new president to start a $175 million revitalization of the decaying neighborhood around the Trinity campus in Hartford and to expand the college's studies of cities and urban life.
