City

Have you ever cooked something that prompted your friends and family to say, “You could go into business making these?” Perhaps you then thought, “Ugh, going into business sounds like so much red tape.” For sure, when it comes to taking a plan from drawing board to marketplace, there can be a lot of paperwork.

Public transportation, like telecommunications, too often suffers from the Last Mile Problem. That is to say, when it comes to bus travel or Internet connectivity, it can be relatively efficient to send vehicles or cables to a larger hub, but it gets more complex and expensive to extend service aong the final stretch -- the proverbial Last Mile -- to reach an individual client.

If you are a singer-songwriter in the process of drafting lyrics about the irony that it’s illegal to raise urban chickens in a city known for country music — and there is at least one such artist out there — you can put down your pen. Thanks to a vote by Metro Council in January, it’s now legal to raise hens in the majority of Davidson County.

Local farms may have called a winter hiatus to their CSA programs, through which they supply subscribers with a share of the weekly harvest, but a CSA of another sort is cropping up this season.

If you’ve ever thought education was wasted on the young, now’s your chance to get in on the action, as three schools gear up for a season of extracurricular classes for adults.

University School of Nashville Evening Classes

When it comes to witnessing the swell of creative energy in East Nashville, Meg and Bret MacFadyen have a prime view. For the past 11 years, their Art & Invention Gallery has perched at the epicenter of the neighborhood’s resurgence, smack in the middle of Five Points.

It’s been just over a decade since Metro passed a law directing one percent of capital-projects funding toward the creation of public art. In that time, the Percent for Art program has generated $6 million to fund sculptural elements designed to shape both Nashville’s communal spaces and its visual identity.

This month, award-winning authors from across the country will convene at Legislative Plaza for the Southern Festival of Books, a gathering of writers and readers now in its 23rd year.

As the seeds of the local food movement take root, urban farmers are repurposing the fallow land of schoolyards, vacant lots and industrial areas into fertile fields of sustainable agriculture.

Silence reigns in the community room of Porter East, the hybrid retail-residential development in East Nashville. Above cozy overstuffed sofas, a muted flat-screen television broadcasts the national news, while a tenant video chats voicelessly through her laptop.