A transformed 1900s textile mill, Charlotte’s NC Music Factory may not be located in the heart of the city, but once you’re there, many of the locals find it has the heart of a city. Why? Because one can spend the entire day there without getting bored.

Opened in 2006, but not maturing until more recently, the 300,000-square-foot (28,000 sq m) complex accommodates audiences of 1500 indoors and 5000 outdoors, amid a creative variety of lounges, restaurants, pubs, coffee shops, with 50,000

read more…

While we have examples of the private sector crowdsourcing places and the public sector crowdsourcing ideas for placemaking, have we seen the public sector crowdsourcing ideas for places yet? The City of Birmingham, Alabama is at least hinting at it.

The Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham and the City of Birmingham partnered to create a Prize2theFuture contest to provide anyone in the world the opportunity to inspire what happens on a small city block in downtown Birmingham. It

read more…

While ‘one size fits all’ may have been the mass production model of the industrial revolution, it’s encouraging to know that the model driving the creative, information, knowledge economy of the present is based on providing what people truly want. That ‘right size’ we’re looking for is finally being provided as an option.

Rightsizing Living
Regular readers know this has been well covered in this blog, that the next gen wants smaller homes, that the housing crisis needed a correction as

read more…

Crowdsourced placemaking had been a private sector sponsored success in Bristol, CT, but what about coming from the public sector?

To many, public sector sponsored crowdsourced placemaking sounded rather impossible, with such arguments as:

- A municipality doesn’t do placemaking, or implementation, the private sector does. It’s the actual physical implementation of building real places that sets crowdsourced placemaking apart from just crowdsourcing.
- The city government is obligated to

read more…

The sons of a big-time developer in Washington DC learned enough about the real estate industry to the point they feel it’s ‘broken’. So, rather than continue the ‘Big Head’ oriented path of the real estate industry, the chose to forge a new one via the ‘Long Tail’. That is, they’re looking to crowdsource what gets built, starting with ground-floor businesses in Washington DC.

From their website: “Today, neighborhood development is dominated by large institutional companies that use Wall

read more…

We’re reaching the tipping point where our investment and tax dollars are going to start benefitting our local economies rather than private investors, with the ‘Long Tail‘ leading the way. Crowdfunding, a natural extension of crowdsourcing, emerges from the Long Tail and is coming to small businesses. It’s about time!

Cities are wising up in prioritize investing in independent businesses districts over chains. According to a BusinessWeek article, subsidies for chains are not effective. Big

read more…

As we’re witnessing in communities from the Middle East to Wall Street, people are taking it upon themselves to organize and effect lasting change on behalf of the triple bottom line (being economically, socially and environmentally beneficial). These groups aren’t advocating having swarms of people as a better structure for governance, they’re just tired of what’s known in business as the ‘Big Head‘ (represented by the red in the graph above) having too much control, such as in

read more…

Demand sparks supply, so let’s get a list of cities that want to see crowdsourced placemaking in their city, town and/or neighborhood. Then we’ll look into how we can secure grants for them, whether it’s through a new national/international nonprofit or through a local nonprofit. See this NY Times story on Bristol, CT,“You ‘Like’ It, They Build It” for an example of results, which should be a compelling story for potential funders for programs initiated by the local community.

What would the

read more…

Trendwatching.com reports that with 180,000 people moving into cities daily, a rising creative urban population they refer to as Citysumers are defining a new generation that’s more demanding, open-minded, connected, spontaneous and more try-out-prone than ever. What that means is if there ever was a time to experiment with forward-thinking placemaking, the time is now.

The current manifestation of that mentality is with ‘pop-up’ placemaking. It allow cities to try out innovative placemaking

read more…

With the Village of Hempstead, Long Island, New York, when a development team implemented crowdsourcing into the development process in 2011, the Village approved it unanimously. Not so when it wasn’t part of the process in 2007, which resulted in rejection.

In 2007, a development company presented the Village of Hempstead residents (pop. 53K), struggling economically at a medium income half of the immediate area, with 5200 construction jobs, 1200 permanent jobs and $35 million a year in new

read more…