Micro-housing affordable to buyers, profitable to developers

There is not a desirable city that exists that doesn’t have a lack of attainably-priced housing, and it’s been covered pretty extensively. Smaller homes have been one of the most logical answers, and developers are starting to agree to the point investors have termed the smallest end of these offerings…

Microhousing is defined as very small one-two bedroom units, 300 to 500 square feet, with an emphasis on shared amenities like

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A ‘Google Maps for pedestrians’

Say you live in a walkable city and want walking directions as opposed to driving directions to a destination across town. You’re in luck if you live in London and perhaps soon in Boston, thanks to Walkit, a Mapquest for people on foot.

Check out the map above - notice how the suggested walking route cuts right through several parks and with no regard for one-way streets.  It even calculates calories and CO2 saved based on walking speed and compared to other

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CNU’s placemaking 2008 ‘Charter Awards’ announced

If you want to know which New Urbanism projects New Urbanism architects were most inspired by in 2008, check out the Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU) annual Charter Award winners.

While these fall on the opposite spectrum from crowdsourcing and tend to be more baby boomer/upscale, they still provide important design lessons learned. Here are ten of the fifteen winners that are more urban:

Region, Metropolis, City, Town Scale: …

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Continuing our look at the contemporary Remixing Cities: Strategy 2.0 paper profiled in the previous entry, author Charles Leadbetter defines city problems as two different kinds:

Clocks - Manufacturing or fixing clocks is complicated, focusing on hardware and professional skills, with measurable inputs and outputs using tried and true tools. Clock problems include increasing the supply of affordable housing, improving mass transit or implementing bike sharing programs.

Clouds - They are

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If there’s one research document to read to better understand how crowdsourcing can be applied to cities publicly, peruse Remixing Cities: Strategy for the City 2.0, published by CEOs for Cities.  As you can see on the cover and the paper’s official description, “explore how co-creation and innovation can transform public services and unleash the talents of all citizens”, it’s based on the principles of crowdsourcing.

The author, Charles Leadbeater, advises companies, cities and governments

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Gen Xers get credit for rise of walkable urbanism

Who is sourcing the growing popularity in walkable urban areas and city downtowns?

Chris Leinberger is an industry leader in defining financial models for urban developments and the author of The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream. He’s also a baby boomer, which is significant in his answer to the Smart City Radio interview question, ”Why is there pent up demand for walkable urbanism?”

“It’s basically being driven by

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Pecha Kucha Night - ‘Speed art & chit chat’ for creatives

In 2003, two employees of Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) in Tokyo felt there was a profound need for a place that young creatives could socialize, network and present their work publicly. Thus was born Pecha Kucha Night, which has since spread to 103 cities around the world.

Each month a group of designers, creatives, artists meet in, well, a creative space to view peer presentations of their work. Ah, but what makes it all so

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‘Crashed Ice’ brings cultural identity to northern cities

Cities love having an event followed by the sentence, “Only in ____”, even if it’s just for that year. It provides them with a unique cultural identity that sets them apart from every city in the world, such as the Running of the Bulls, only in Pamplona.

Speaking of which, who knows if that was part of the inspiration behind Crashed Ice, where four gutsy padded-up skaters fight through elements of roller derby, hockey and the

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Establishing a music scene 101

Every district wants a music scene, but not every district has one. Creative class author Richard Florida, a music fan to the nth degree, is spending a lot of research time providing the answers why, the first findings of which can be found in his recent report, Music Clusters: A Preliminary Analysis.

First of all, one needs to understand that only this with music as primary employment are defined in this study, not self-employed musicians, secondary

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‘The 50 Greenest Cities in the U.S.’

Sure, it’s yet another green city list, but we try to cover ones that have something to add. The last one we covered, Best Green Cities in America, provided a top ten ranking of smaller cities that seemed to best measure green consciousness per capita.

This list, Popular Science’s (U.S.) America’s 50 Greenest Cities covers cities with populations over 100,000 using the following green criteria:

Electricity from renewable energy - 10 points.

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Work-life balance city

Continuing our happiness theme from the previous entry, here’s one way to look at work-life balance happiness:

“In their interviews and surveys, Nash and Stevenson learned that successful professionals who were also happy had found ways to ‘switch and link’ - to switch the focus of their full attention with lightning speed among activities and people in different realms.

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When you boil it down to the basic elements, the metrics of a place’s success answers the question, ‘Are the people happy?’ To some researchers, this is more science than art, as explained in Air Canada’s enRoute article, The Happy City.  City mayors are making sweeping changes, most of which center on replacing cars with grand public third places.

University of British Columbia economics professor John Helliwell, who studies happiness and social connections, states that frequency of

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Beach in the city

Paris’ Mayor Bertrand Delanoë wanted to make summer vacation accessible to people unable to afford leave town, so he brought the vacation to them.  Voila!  Paris Plage (Paris Beach).

Since 2002, three million people sun themselves along a two-mile stretch along the Seine between late July and August.  An expressway is temporarily replaced with two tons of sand, grass, wood decks, lounge chairs and palm trees, creating a pedestrian-only paradise in the heart of a

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Zero carbon, zero car city in Abu Dhabi

The list is impressive for Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s grand experiment (ground breaking was last week) in building a truly sustainable city with:

Zero cars
Zero carbon emissions
Zero waste (converted to energy)
100% renewable energy
70% reduction in energy demand
80% water recycled
water production reduced by 75%

It’s the ultimate living laboratory, as the country is investing $15 billion in new energy technologies. Keep in mind this is not some

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I get asked that a lot.

It’s not easy to explain in words, so here’s a visual map (larger one here) that can help provide a big picture answer. CoolTown Beta Communities is the implementation entity of CoolTown Studios, this ‘weekdaily’ newsite blog. The blog itself (and only the blog!) is a free public service (including all 1200+ archived entries) toward building better places to live/work/play. We’re also establishing a joint venture with a change management and viral marketing firm to

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The tagline for this blog, ‘Crowdsourcing cool places for creatives’ is essentially the same thing as crowdsourced placemaking. Now what exactly is crowdsourced placemaking?

Crowdsourcing - “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” Alternatively, “the application of open source principles to fields outside of software.” Definitions are from

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Alternate titles: Library 2.0, Not your father’s library, Redefining the library…

Based on Project for Public Spaces’ How to Make Your Library Great: 14 lessons from local libraries all over the continent, here are the unique ones that will attract creatives:

1. The contemporary library is no longer a repository for books, nor even just a community center, but also an edutainment center as well.  In other words, it doesn’t always have to be so quiet.

2. They act as a town square, hosting

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Developer sets benchmark for change in Milwaukee

When the founders of North Avenue Community Development Corporation in Milwaukee wanted to see change in their economically-challenged North Avenue neighborhood, they realized it was up to them to solve it entrepreneurially and build the change they wanted to see.

Thus, they developed the $4.8 million Toussaint Square, a new three-story building integreted with a renovated mixed-use building providing 24 affordable homes to retain local

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Visual map of the beta community process in action

A picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe a diagram is worth at least 500. For those of you who have read about beta communities on this site, but don’t quite understand how they work, maybe this visual map will help.

First of all, it’s a snapshot of an actual project underway - the Elements green vegetarian restaurant and education center in Washington DC.

Notice where one starts! on the path. As each step is completed, the path

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Third places, events and scenes oh my...

If you’re looking to establish a beta community to crowdsource a natural cultural district (kudos to those of you who don’t have to click on the words to know what’s being talked about here), it starts with third places, events and scenes.

Third places. Most of you know what third places are - where you feel comfortable hanging out when you’re not at home or at work. A community starts with a third place so people can meet face to face, whether it’s

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Car free ‘natural cultural districts’ in the U.S.

While there are 41 entries on the list of car free places (presented in the previous entry) in the U.S., the number may be misleading. For instance, not many of us will ever hear of, say, golf-cart based Bald Head Island, North Carolina, population 173, much less ever visit it or know anyone who does.

However, many of us do live in or visit natural cultural districts, so here are the car free iterations of those you’d probably want to check

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