The first, and only, green mall

Maybe I should start an entire category of “it was just a matter of time before this happened”, because here’s yet another one…

The Green Exchange in Chicago will be the first silver LEED-certified green building designated strictly for green tenants. Schedule for a Fall 2007 opening, it should be no surprise the 250,000 s.f. concrete loft building to be renovated is in Chicago, already regarded as the most green-minded major city in the U.S.

Regarded as

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China, Great Britan making creative class waves

When looking for creative class benchmarks in culture, placemaking and policy, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to look overseas.  Two such countries that are on the creative rise are China and Great Britain.

China

The best place to start understanding China’s impact is in Fast Company magazine cover story, China’s New Creative Class, “You can sense it in the trendy restaurants and slick boutiques popping up in major cities - and in the

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How green is your neighborhood?

A few months ago we wrote that neighborhoods can now be green certified, via the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development program.

Now that green building is becoming more of an expectation for emerging populations, here’s their criteria for what a green neighborhood should have, with (R) representing requirements and others below it being assigned points for ratings:

Smart Location & Linkage
(R) Smart Location - Walkability,

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Each year the innovative folks at Apartment Therapy award the smallest, coolest apartments across the country, and now around the world. Now when they say smallest, they really do mean smallest (ie some winning pads are 300 s.f.), but they also hold true to being utterly cool as well.

First place (top image), London - This tiny 300 s.f. residence won for its adaptability to different uses, moods. The kitchen and work areas can actually be concealed! Notice how the tops of the chairs fit

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‘Transparency tyranny’ will result in better places

What is transparency tyranny? From Trendwatching.com: “Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform.

Transparency tyranny represents what people really think of what’s out there - think The Daily Show

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Key to attainable housing? Combining multiple elements

Nowadays, one affordable housing strategy isn’t enough to make a difference. You need several all at once, and the Urban Land Institute illustrates just that in their article, Housing the Masses. Here are some of the programs that need to be combined:

Inclusionary zoning - This is esssentially an affordable housing requirement as a % of total units, often 15%-20%. San Diego, Tallahassee, Palm Beach, and Key West, Florida, have recently

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Land trusts preserving attainable housing as well as wilderness

Land trusts, like the Trust for Public Land, are widely known for purchasing and permanently conserving parks and natural lands. Now a new form of land trust, such as one created by the California Community Foundation in 2003, are preserving land for housing affordability. Partnered with private sector developers that specialize in workforce housing**, building costs are lowered by 30 to 50 percent. In exchange for being able to

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Main streets go virtual to serve local community

We all know Amazon.com serves the world’s goods, but how about if you just wanted to buy online from local neighborhood shops?  Not only that, but what if delivery was free?!  Well Pop to the Shops is another one of those ‘it was a matter of time’ services, though only in the UK.

What are the benefits to the consumer?
- Most local shops are open fewer hours and days, so this expands their hours to 24/7.
- Buy from all the stores in the

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MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube… are all making money hand over fist for its owners based on the crowdsourcing model where thousands of its users contribute their time for free.  Well, now that more and more companies are using free time from consumers to determine their future products from potato chips to electronics, it was a matter of time before they were allowed to make key decisions and share in the profits as well.

Some examples (and I’ll add to the list over time):

Profit sharing and

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Beatnik-inspired housing: The Jack Kerouac Lofts

What are the words often associated with Beta Generation writer Jack Kerouac? Free spirit, bohemian, unconventional, counter-culture…

It was only natural that he should provide the DNA for the 60 urban residences to rise from a one-acre lot in Denver surrounded by railyards and vacant industrial buildings dating back to the 1880s, now officially named the Jack Kerouac Lofts. Endorsed by the Kerouac family, it’s not surprising that the

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Reinventing the ‘burbs, sort of

The civic leaders of St. Louis Park, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis, wanted a downtown where there was none.  They got one in Excelsior & Grand, a 15-acre pedestrian-oriented mixed-use development adjacent to a major park.

Much of the placemaking is effectively urban, with contemporary urban architecture fronting tree-lined sidewalks, no surface parking, and high-ceiling apartments above restaurants and shops.  This is a vast improvement over a strip

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The Wall Street Journal article, Animal House Meets the Empty Nest, sums up the conflict real estate developers are having when trying to cater to the younger urban condo market:

“Get it right, and buyers will pay a premium for the chance to be surrounded by their friends. Get it wrong - too expensive, too many neighbors that are mom and dad’s age - and developers can be stuck with a building that doesn’t sell.”

One community that is suffering from extremes is Viridian, a downtown

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Can a co-workplace; community and collaboration space for entrepreneurs and independents, be so cool that a mayor of one of the most important cities in the world feels it deserves its own day?

Apparently, yes, for May 10, 2007 is now officially Affinity Lab Day in Washington DC. The official recognition by the Mayor of DC, announced on the sixth anniversary of ”The Lab”, follows:

Affinity Lab Day

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Going for the gold in green development

It’s not easy being green. Greenbridge, a 104,000 s.f. urban infill community in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is planned to be the state’s first mixed-use development to be LEED Gold certified by the US Green Building Council, no small feat considering the first LEED certified multi-unit residential ever was announced less than a year ago.

The vision starts with the six families that make up the development team. They shared the cradle-to-cradle

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El Paso, Texas is a big city (pop. 600,000) without much buzz outside of UTEP, and even worse, it had a less than envious reputation, according to one local representative, “City leaders were faced with a challenge: to get a poor city of overweight, sedentary people moving when there weren’t any parks or [bicycle] lanes. A national magazine declared the city one of the four fattest in the US, and that really got everyone’s attention.”

Welcome Ciclovia! Starting this month, the City will

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Durham turns the corner from industrial to information economy

Yesterday’s entry profiled how a French town evolved from the industrial age to the information age. Today’s entry profiles how a small American city is doing the same while respecting the history that put it on the map.

Just as the city of Robaix, France saw the transformation of its outdated textile factories into modern uses, Durham, North Carolina’s downtown took a major economic turn upward when the first tobacco factory

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How a French town modernized and kept its heritage

Roubaix is a typical small city in Northern France that thrived in the industrial age from the 19th Century through most of the 20th Century, specializing in textiles. However, that economy crashed in the 1970s as the economy rapidly and mercilessly transitioned to the global information age. How did the city evolve?

The city still has a reputation for fashion and fabrics, but has diversified. For one, they transformed one of their

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For all that time you invest in helping choose the next American Idol, popularizing a book on Amazon via a review, or educating the world by updating Wikipedia entries, what’s your reward?  Many of us do it because we feel like we’re making a difference in something that strikes an emotional chord.  Well, what if we strengthened that emotional chord, greatly augmented the community difference you’d make, and financially compensated your valuable time as well?

That’s what a beta community

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KC revitalizing its historic music district with some jazzy style

Baseball and jazz - two distinctly American traditions that have defined the history and now revitalization of Kansas City’s 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District.

The City recently invested $24 million to build new museums that preserve both the legacy of its charter member of the Negro National League in 1920, the Kansas City Monarchs (the longest running franchise in the Negro Leagues’ history) and its reputation as a

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Development industry says, “Building green is here to stay”

Last week the leading real estate developers around the world gathered at the ULI’s Developing Green: Integrating Sustainability with Success conference to better understand the future of green building. Their
summation? Not only is green building here to stay (as this official conference summary is titled), but it’s fast becoming a standard, and that’s a good thing considering 40% of the carbon gas emissions released in the U.S.

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Face-face social networking on the rise in condos

We all know emerging populations are migrating to social networking websites by the millions, so it was a matter of time before this manifested in the built environment, as hinted at in an earlier entry here.

Based on the recent NY Times article, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, new condos in the city come with bricks-and-mortar social networking amenities as standard equipment. Instead of virtual chat lounges, discussion boards and

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A national model for arts as economic development

How do you attract artists into a neighborhood/district, then keep them from being gentrified out of the area later? You may want to look at the Paducah Artist Relocation Program (mentioned here a couple of times before) - that far and away provides one of the best programs I’ve seen to turn artists into permanent building owners.

Based in the small town of Paducah, Kentucky (pop. 27,000), implemented in August of 2000, and now having

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