The atrium lofts that helped transform a city

The development firm Urban Splash’s pioneering founder, Tom Bloxham was profiled in the previous entry, so now it’s fitting to present one of his signature projects that initiated the loft movement in Manchester, England. It sparked a transition from a built environment designed for the industrial economy, to a knowledge-based one.

Constructed before 1904 as a major department store (Affleck & Brown), the Smithfield Buildings, a group of nine

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Urban Splash - hard to imagine a cooler developer

The cities in northwest England, namely Liverpool and Manchester, weren’t transitioning very gracefully from the industrial era. Enter Tom Bloxham, founder of the wildly progressive development company, Urban Splash in 1993, who all but single-handedly invented loft living in those cities. The unique story of how Urban Splash came to be, however, is a pretty typical one for the kind of in-demand developer he is today… he had no initial

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The sounds of high urban quality of life

There’s endless research on what makes a city look good, but what about what makes a city sound good? Is there a body of research that complements the visuals of well-designed streets and buildings with how to create a more enlightened experience by what is heard?

Five universities jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK may very well be the first to provide that. Their Positive Soundscapes project aims to

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In science, the ‘edge of chaos’ is the region between order and complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal - where innovation and survival is most likely to take place. Then there is death or inanimate, where things are ‘frozen’.

The City of Littleton, Colorado, the founder of economic gardening, has pioneered research on the edge of chaos as it applies to cities and the three phases of life, to which organizations and economies naturally apply.

Frozen phase: “No

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How does your city stack up among ‘America’s Most Romantic’?

Some cities have that intangible quality that sets them apart. I think a large factor in creating that essence is how much romance it inspires. The folks at Tango Magazine: Smart Talk About Love via Reader’s Digest spent a compelling amount of time looking into this in their write-up, America’s Most Romantic Cities.

They singled out New York, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco as the most romantic, but better yet, they provided

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A third place to spark community a small town

A few years ago 32-year old Melanie DiPasquale felt there was something missing in her small town of Brunswick, Maryland, pop. 5000, something very familiar to the typical creative… a third place where people in the community could get together spontaneously.

At that same time she spotted a for sale sign on a church built in 1910 that had been abandoned for ten years. Obviously, the church carried with it a lot of stories for many of the

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Stockholm, Sweden’s eco-city

There’s endless talk about building eco cities that don’t seem to meet reality, so it’s nice to see one that’s actually built. Developed on a 500-acre former industrial and harbor brownfield site, Hammarby Sjostad is a contemporary green, carbon-neutral-oriented neighborhood. Hammarby provides homes almost 10,000 residents with an additional 9000 homes and 10,000 jobs coming by 2015.

One key characteristic that is all too often ignored amid talk about eco

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The first beta community meeting in Syracuse

What kind of space do artists and musicians want in the city of Syracuse?  The simplest way to find out is to ask them, which is what developer Rick Destito formally began doing Tuesday night last week on the first floor of his 5-story, 65,000 s.f. warehouse (pictured), which Rick (brown shirt, hand in motion) is committed to transforming into an artist/musician live-work community (see rendering here).

Here are a few key discussion points from

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Way back in November 2005 we published the projected vision of the new Del Mar Station Transit Village in Pasadena. Well, it’s time to show you the built result, and it’s inspiring to see it not only match the rendering, but look even better.

The 4.2 acre development hosts 346 apartments (though only 21 are affordable), 20,000 s.f. of retail, and 1200 underground parking spaces (ironically, more than three times the number of living units).  600 of those spaces are for the residents at

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What’s out: Protests demonstrating what you don’t want.
What’s in:  Crowdsourcing what you do want.

One perfect example of that is Park(ing) Day, when people who are fed up too many parking spaces and too few third places simply build their own third place on one day each year - on a parking space.

It was started two years ago by Rebar, a collaborative group of creatives (surprised?) in San Francisco. It is now sponsored nationally by the Trust for Public Land (TPL). Participating

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Lessons on how to spark an indie rock scene

Rule #1. It has little to do with intentionally creating a music scene, especially genre-oriented. Musicians are fiercely independent - they’ll go where they’re personally inspired, not where city bureaucrats are trying to engineer it. Besides, once they’re successful they no doubt enjoy being big fish in little ponds (ie REM in Athens, GA) rather than vice versa, so don’t expect them to move to the equivalent of a Hollywood for musicians. There

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If you’re trying to convince city and business leaders in your city to plan a more creative, people-oriented destination for current and future generations, it sure wouldn’t hurt to have them watch Contested Streets, a new film produced by Transportation Alternatives.

You can watch a few minutes of the 57-minute production here on YouTube, and I must say that the one second of footage at the 2:54 mark is almost surreal - why can’t more cities have scenes like that.  It should be no

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The current financial model for real estate investment is pretty depressing for the creative-minded, where an overwhelming majority of real estate investment capital is reserved for object-oriented buildings at least a block in scale (ie office parks, strip malls, towers, subdivisions...)

However, just as YouTube is slowly redefining television and wikipedia has rendered encyclopedias obsolete via crowdsourcing, just wait until $ are applied to this customer-driven phenomenon then used in

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‘The happiest people in the world’

...live in Copenhagen, Denmark, say the polls. Continuing our series of looking at European cities as resources for cool, here are more things about this Danish city you may not be aware of:

- As stated previously, 62.5% of its employees are in knowledge-based jobs, the highest in Europe.
- 32.5% of its residents have an academic degree, more than 80% speak English (and speak it well!).
- It is known as Europe’s leading biotech and medical research

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Cities making efforts to promote people over cars

Succeeding generations really do want more pedestrian-oriented downtowns, and cities are starting to recognize that, such as London with its auto congestion pricing.

In 2003, Mayor Ken Livingstone enacted a congestion charge of $10 per day for auto usage within the central city. Congestion is down 25%, and so is air pollution. After an initial drop of 7% in retail sales, it has since not affected the city’s economy, and its popularity has

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The quintessential internet city? Tallinn, Estonia

Where?!!! That’s probably a fairly common reaction. Located south of Finland and bordering west of Russia, this fast-growing city of 400,000 enjoy life on the fast lane as far as the internet goes, but it’s key to success is being able to maintain life its enviable slow city, slow food culture.

Summarizing Tallinn’s profile in Spiegel as part of its Coolest Cities story:

The internet is essentially free throughout what is known as the

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One of the only authentic trendy stores you’ll find

First of all, authentic trendiness is practically an oxymoron, which is why you probably never heard the term. While authentic refers to being true to one self, trendy tends to follow what others think is hot. However, one store in Manhattan (surprise) actually intertwines the two quite effectively - at the 350 s.f. Grand Opening.

Since trendy stores by nature go out of fashion sooner or later, Grand Opening has taken it upon itself to

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Celebrating the microbreweries

In continuing our previous story on the authentic value of microbreweries, thanks to the producers of the documentary, America Beer, here’s a list of 38 of the U.S.’s top microbreweries that they visited in 40 days, followed by their abridged notes on what made each of them unique:

1. Brooklyn Brewery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY - Black Chocolate Stout
2. McNeill’s Brewery, Brattleboro, VT - In a former firehouse and police station
3. Long Trail Brewing

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Beer - Going local

You can’t really have a true third place for the creative class without serving beer, and it’s not authentic unless it’s brewed right on the spot. So here’s to the full-flavored beers of the microbreweries that have thrived “in the face of the fizzy yellow stuff” that have dominated the mainstream and every national supermarket.

Things looked bleak by the end of the 1970s for local craft brewers, when corporate consolidation left the U.S. with less than 50 breweries.

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