Ah, the effectiveness of graphics, from the socially innovative folks at GOOD.

Top diagram: The number of pedestrian and biking trips, with each, uh, person representing a billion trips. That last image representing 2009 is starting to represent Manhattan.

Lower diagram: DOT (U.S. Department of Transportation) budget for pedestrian and bicycling programs. More evidence that government (and private sector) investment will follow the crowd, especially when the crowd makes itself known. The graphic above puts the crowd diagram above the government investment diagram, flipping GOOD’s version to better illustrate this. Even GOOD makes it clear that government investment is a response to the crowd.

It’s also a heckuva lot cheaper than building and maintaining roads and bridges, and also better for our deficit than importing oil and cars. There’s a good amount of collective intelligence in them crowds.

So, you’re South Africa and hosting the biggest event in the world, throwing the biggest party in the world via its Fan Fest... what kind of destination do you provide to embrace it all? That’s the Fan Walk, a 1.6 mile/2.6 km pedestrian promenade linking downtown Cape Town to its Green Point Stadium (pictured). In fact, it’s so successful, city leaders are looking to make it permanent.

You can’t ask for a more entertaining walk, or rather, experience. What’s more, it’ll be a cultural showcase of the best Cape Town and South Africa have to offer in terms of local food (braai, potije, boerewors, gourjons…) to local entertainment (from live bands to drum circles).

Now, in the spirit of crowdsourcing, with the tremendous success of the Fan Walk demonstrated by the enthusiastic crowds, should there by any surprise that the local government is now looking at making it more of a permanent feature? From a South African news site:

“If the roads are closed from the station to the stadium circle every Sunday, it would be a great tourism venue and also a new Cape Town activity. It will add value, bring life to the city on weekends and create new opportunities, mayoral committee member for social development Grant Pascoe.

“[The fan walk would most probably be a permanent feature in the future.] We need to pedestrianize it (during big events). Ratepayers’ associations and businesses are saying it, and we’ve discussed it extensively in council - how we manage major events (at Cape Town Stadium). We will have to have a management plan. My guess is that this (fan walk) is going to stick. We don’t want our public open spaces and environment to be turned into parking. It’s an exciting thing for the future,“ local ward councillor JP Smith.

You can see the planning of it in the video below, which shows the design of the Fan Walk and the Fan Park, a grand plaza along the Walk where people will be watching the games (all 64 of them) on a giant screen, not to mention a number of memorable concerts.

Thanks to Denita Acker, from Cape Town, for the reference!

Wouldn’t cities be a lot greener (literally and figuratively) with more trees and solar energy? Those are two very big ticket items, and exactly the kind of scope where purpose-driven collaborative crowdsourcing is most effective.

One Block Off the Grid tackles the solar energy Catch 22 where solar panels are too expensive to install for one home, and significantly more affordable only if produced for hundreds. They aggregate interested buyers. Notice the chart above is a long tail diagram, which represents the kind of following this site has (the emerging crowd increasingly wants more walkable communities, yet the ‘big head’ in charge only knows how to develop auto-oriented communities). This same approach can be applied to telling local developers/investors what kind of more attainably-priced housing they should build - Renaissance Downtowns is one such developer.

What about trees? The Urban Forest Map (initially only in San Francisco) lays out the first step by letting the crowd inventory all the trees in the entire city, then calculating the collective dollar savings through the number of gallons of stormwater filtered, pounds of air pollutants captured, kilowatt-hours of energy conserved and tons of carbon dioxide removed. While it’s not yet part of the program, this then provides the opportunity to allow the crowd to either aggregate demand or put their money where their collective energies and wallets are and simply crowdfund new trees in their neighborhood. If not the added physiological benefit, isn’t it worth at least the increase in property value?!

Good idea? If so, how would you participate in such crowdsourced programs?

Like anything in business, coworking is evolving. Here’s where coworking stands today, and it’s looking good:

Definition. Wikipedia’s definition has gone from a cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents to
a style of work which involves a shared working environment; the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values, and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space. Notice that coworking now refers to a style of work, a gathering of people… community, rather than a space. This transition is nicely outlined in the blog post, Redefining Coworking.

How to. Coworking used to be something you’d have to largely figure out on your own, but the same principles of coworking are resulting in a vast repository of knowledge on how to do so. The best resource by far is the Coworking Wiki, listing most every coworking space as well as valuable shared knowledge from other coworking managers. The folks at Online Universities recently produced a handy primer, Everything You Need to Start Your Own Coworking Group, which succinctly links to and describles the Coworking Google Group, wiki, blog (though rarely updated anymore, ironically, perhaps because there are so many opening up), and examples (including pricing formulas). There’s also this site’s coworking archive.

Crowdsourced, rated profiles Think Yelp! for coworking, though it’s still nascent. Post your own, rate and comment on coworking spaces via the ‘coworking tag’ here at Cooltown Places.

Coworking culture. Web Worker Daily provides one of the best sources for stories on coworking trends, from civic regeneration/pop-up coworking spaces to corporate coworking to daycare. They’ve summarized a year’s worth of these articles at Coworking 101: A Brief History, and tagged them all here.

World access. Like a gym membership, if you’re a local coworking member, you can now visit participating coworking spaces around the world using an international passport known as a CoworkingVisa. That comes from the sense of community extending from within to among coworking communities.

Photo: Co+hoots coworking space in Phoenix, Arizona

It’s no longer cool to be in a mobile device as much as it is to be on a mobile device.

To understand this evolution from (auto)mobile to mobile (device), it may help to quote someone who is playing a large role in it…

At the All Things Digital ‘D8’ conference on June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple (now the second largest company based on market value next to Exxon) talked about the passing of the torch from the PC (desktop to laptop) to mobile devices, ironically using the auto industry as an analogy…

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

However, just as computers are becoming more mobile, from desktops to mobile devices, the emerging generations that embrace this new mobile culture is setting the stage where cars themselves are going the way of the PC as well, begging the new question, Is the Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture?. So if ‘cars’ are the new ‘trucks’, what are the new ‘cars’?

That’s right, mobile devices.

So what Jobs really means to say, is that while cars are replacing trucks, his mobile devices are replacing cars. You’re going to need a new, more humble analogy, Steve.