In surveys about where young people want to live, Shimokitazawa, a rare natural cultural district on the western side of Tokyo, is always a top choice, and known as a trendsetting place for creatives. Why? Here’s a description from a Japanese magazine, 10+1:

“The urbanism of Shimokitazawa characterized by narrow pedestrian streets (no cars) and dense commercial activity, gives the area a deep Tokyo feel. Attracted by the relaxed character and communal atmosphere of Shimokitazawa, newcomers

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By popular request, here are what I feel are the top 20 articles among the 1400 on this site, influenced by current times. This will be constantly changing, especially as I rediscover previous articles and post new ones (in bold)…

Crowdsourcing and creatives...
The creatives: rengen, cultural creatives, creative class - Identifying the core market itself.
What is crowdsourced placemaking? - The most definitive definition.
The time is now to crowdsource the places you want - Get started

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What’s the big deal with how aesthetically pleasing a place is? Well, according to the Place and Happiness Survey, it’s the most important of any quality regarding what matters to people the most. Thus, within this understanding, we present Forbes Travel’s America’s Prettiest Towns, based on the following very subjective qualities used by the judges:

- exceptional, unique urban form
- organic
- haunting beauty
- picturesque
- how the towns makes one ‘feel’
- local character and real

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September 2008 is a landmark day for anything having to do with green dance clubs.  That’s the launch month for both Club Watt in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Surya in London, both being presented as sustainable/ecological dance clubs featuring a floor that generates energy from the people dancing on top of it.

It’s been talked about since 2005 by a group now referred to as the Sustainable Dance Club, formed by a group of Dutch ecological inventors, engineers and investors using a

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The Bearden Arts Building, a crowdsourced development (restored building in front, new building in back) in the once bustling/now revitalizing H Street/Atlas District of Washington DC, has released the following triple bottom line goals, co-developed by its beta community, as a causal benchmark for any development:

Financial/Economic
The Bearden Arts Building will meet required member rates of return, serve as an appreciating investment for its homeowners, and provide a revenue source for

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One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is related to readers seeking to buy homes that fit the vibe of what this site is all about. For years, I really had no answer for them. Finally, Brent Roberts, who worked for one of the most innovative, creative developers in the world, Streuver Brothers (see triple bottom line industrial loft redevelopments here and here), decided to strike out on his own and suggested providing that very service.

Long story short, Brent committed to

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You may be noticing a lot of bicycle posts lately, reflecting a trend of low cost, low energy, low maintenance transportation as gas prices have reached a new plateau. The same is happening for housing, as cities and developers partner to build homes at price points (and thus sizes) that those in the workforce (ie from teachers to police officers) can actually afford.

San Francisco leads the way in this regard, first with attainably-priced Cubix Yerba Buena and its efficiencies, and now a

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If you’re looking for a model of a government agency that’s looking out for creatives, your first stop should be New York City’s Department of Transportation (DOT), as has been stated several times on this site. Behind every progressive organization there’s a leader, and that’s DOT Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, who not surprisingly commutes to work by bike. Kudos to Streetfilms for providing this interview that every transportation decision-maker or advocate should watch.

There’s no

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Here’s a pretty significant sign of the times - both the University of New England and Ripon College in Wisconsin are giving every single one of its freshmen a free personalized bike. They’re not cheap clunkers either, the bicycles provided at the University of New England retail for $480. Turns out cheap bikes aren’t well taken care of.

Sure, the argument is that students are paying for it somehow, but the universities are benefitting financially by avoiding the construction of costly

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What makes the Dining Hall in the Little Creatures pale ale microbrewery such a popular destination in Melbourne, Australia? It could be that it converges two kinds of places creatives crave into one they can relate to - a third place.

The Beerhouse: - In Germany, the beerhouse is the standard. Characterized by long wooden communal tables and Germany’s famous Hofbrauhaus, patrons enjoyed themselves as if they were at an indoor picnic, while dancers, singers and musicians provided a truly

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It starts out as a vastly familiar story. As the industrial economy grew and manufacturing jobs moved to the outskirts, many of Wichita, Kansas’ historic downtown buildings were boarded up, with vacancy rates up to 70%. Now an evolution to a knowledge-based economy is bringing people back to the city center, and as we know, the creatives will seek out the natural cultural districts first.

The premiere natural cultural district in Wichita (which may surprise you in that it’s the 51st

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On July 15, 2007 Paris launched the world’s largest bike sharing system with 10,000 bikes (now 20,000), inspired by the same system in Lyon, France, which inaugurated May 2005. On August 13, 2008, Washington DC launched the first bike sharing system in the U.S., albeit modestly with 100 bikes. Just about every major city is now considering a bike sharing system, so now’s a good time to have found this concise video explaining how the bike sharing system works, with some energetic motion

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The Creatives Cities Summit 2.0 was held in Detroit, Michigan, October 12-15, 2008, the sequel to the first one in Tampa in 2004, hosted by Creative Tampa Bay. The purpose? Provide models for growing a creative economy. Why Detroit? It was more a case of Detroit needing the summit more than any other city, and by that token, having the most aggressive leadership to get there - see Michigan Governor Granholm’s Cool Cities Initiative. Still, creative is better demonstrated tangibly rather than

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On one hand you have freeways being dismantled for public parks (eg Portland, Oregon’s west waterfront) and on the other you have parking spaces temporarily turned into public spaces (eg Park(ing) Day). Somewhere in between you have streetside parking for cars being replaced by an inviting, rather fun dedicated bike lane, such as the one featured in the Streetsfilm video above in Boulder, Colorado.

The big deal with dedicated bike lanes is that it actually feels like bikes are

On July 1, 2007 Helen Johnson and Josh McManus entrepreneurially initiated a three-month research and planning project focused on studying the engagement of creatives in the city with the intention of gaining a better understanding of how to retain and attract them, crucial to its transition to a post-industrial knowledge economy.

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We’re familiar with the term ‘movie going’, as in going to the movies, but what about those who want a little more socially fulfilling? Every evening in Locarno, Switzerland’s Piazza Grande, during their annual 10-day Locarno Film Festival in August, 8000 participants movies are treated to a film on a massive scale.

Combining an original art experience presented on a four-story screen, set in one of the most beautiful piazzas in Europe (especially when lit up at night, in and of itself, a

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Continuing our look at the 12 principles for crowdsourced placemaking beta communities based on Airoots/Eirut’s 12 principles of architectural participation which were in turn based on the Linux open source community…

The first six.

The last six:

7. Communicate: This is what open source is all about - the ‘sponsor’ providing the business plan and updates as if it were a co-op, and listening to their members just as well. Here’s an example from a beta community agreement in New

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What are the principles for crowdsourced placemaking? One way to determine that is to take Airoots/Eirut’s simplified 12 principles of architectural participation based on the Linux open source community (a pioneer of crowdsourcing) and apply it to crowdsourced placemaking… and more specifically beta communities. So here’s Airoots/Eirut’s 12 principles in bold, followed by a beta community application.

1. Need It: Define the project’s vision, based on what’s collectively needed in the

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That’s according to a 2007 Johnson Gardner study, based on 2006 numbers in Portland, Oregon, commissioned by Oregon Metro, as only recently reported on in this recent article, Trendy shops put a shine on home values.

Their study concludes that property values within a block and a half would be affected accordingly by the following businesses:

- Neighborhood theater - 14-30% higher property values. Some positives cited by the study include an increase in pedestrian traffic (safety) at

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Perhaps too many people buying homes they couldn’t afford wasn’t the problem behind the Wall Street collapse, but a symptom. The real problem may be that there are too many homes out on the market that people could never afford in the first place. In other words, the average U.S. American can’t afford $300,000 for a home, as is the going rate in many cities. So rather than lend out more money to buy homes people can’t afford, that banks can’t back, perhaps the real solution is addressing the

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While this site provides you 1400 vignettes on what crowdsource placemaking can create, it doesn’t provide you with the direct means to actually crowdsource these places. That’s no longer the case.

Join the CoolTown Network (see new green button in the right column) and create a new Group to start crowdsourcing the kind of place you’d like to see in your city or neighborhood. Is it a coffeehouse? A coworking site? Attainably-priced lofts? You define the vision, then start attracting

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