Since the vision of this site is ‘crowdsourcing places for creatives’, it may be beneficial to further clarify what the word ‘creatives’ means, as it relates to this site.
What is this site’s definition of creatives?
It’s stated in detail here, but it is essentially the cultural creatives, creative class and the renaissance generation (rengens), all of which have their own self-titled books. In a nutshell, it includes anyone willing to invest in making a difference (cultural creatives) and/or
Given the shift to more pedestrian-oriented built environments, what kind of transportation can we expect to see? We know the Segway isn’t going to be a model for transportation - too heavy, clunky and where do you park the thing? Stackable cars are pretty nifty, but a decade away at the soonest. So then, how about the YikeBike?
Think of it as a cleaner, smaller, lighter, quieter, more portable moped
It’s a little ahead of it’s time (in other words, it has a $4450 price tag), though it’s
Onno Sminia and Louis Pierre Geerinckx represent what we need more of. The two Dutch industrial designers simply felt there was a better way to move within their urban neighborhood without having to depend on their parents, renting a moving truck and/or finding parking, much less do it on any kind of regular basis. So they innovated and built their own solution.
The solution? A ‘moving bike’, small enough to traverse most any place a bike can, yet big enough to haul a couch. They then
What happens when a virtual world becomes real? What happens when a digital community becomes a physical one? In yet another sign of things to come, that’s what happened to the online realm of Instructables, “a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others,“... it became the Instructables Restaurant. Or in this site’s terms, the Instructables crowd is the beta community for crowdsourcing their own
Many of Google’s HQ employees in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, California fit the creatives vibe. So it’s encouraging, though probably not surprising, that the company is prompting the City to invest in sustainable development and a vibrant community in the area surrounding its campus. In other words, Google is looking out for its employees beyond the workplace, and it’s not only smart, it’s a sign of the times. Goodbye office park, hello urban village.
If a cell is defined as the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism, if a building were an organism, its rooms would probably be its cells (‘cellula’ is Latin for a small room). For a city though, it may be more helpful to associate cells with its blocks, fitting perhaps since a cell is often described as the building blocks of life. From the air, a city’s blocks resemble cell structure more than its buildings.
Anyway, accepting this analogy to make a point, this is what makes
If you think it’d be cool to live in a building like this, you’re probably not alone. The building plays music through its instrumental drainpipes when it rains, and is part of the a series of whimsical courtyard buildings in Dresden, Germany known as the KunsthofPassage.
However, why don’t we see more creative, humanistic buildings like this, and what can we do about it?
First, the short term bad news. The vast majority of real estate investment dollars won’t touch this kind of project
It’s official, as Mayor Bloomberg of New York City announced on February 11, 2010 that Times Square (and Herald Square) are permanently car free, almost a year after first announcing the plan. See the press release here.
Mayor Bloomberg, “In this day and age if you go around the world, all the other great cities have already tried to reduce the number of cars on their streets and convert some of the open spaces into space for other people.“
“Three-fourths (76%) of New Yorkers surveyed think
What would a car free city be like? DC residents got a taste of that when the city experienced record snowfalls in early February of nearly five feet, the most since 1898. Just about the only thing shut down were the cars. Instead, the city was alive with people in the streets like no other day.
As you can see below, the local coffeehouse was packed, and the buzz of conversation was a few notches higher than usual. Now you may be wondering, what about other cities that have significant
That essentially captures what New York’s Brooklyn Bowl is all about.
Bowling. Robert Putnam’s best-seller lamented that the social capital in the U.S. was one the decline as we were ‘bowling alone’ more often. While his measure of social capital may be misleading, maybe Brooklyn Bowl’s founders took his comments to heart, as it’d be difficult to bowl alone with a live music venue, restaurant, lounge and ongoing events present. Convergence is what creatives are used to, though not the $40-$50
Enter the government of Geneva, Switzerland and a tri-partisan 2-1 City Council vote to close 200 streets to cars. Or as Geneva’s council member Fabienne Fischer states, “It’s not really to
We all know the economy needs jobs. Not industrial economy jobs, which we’re transitioning away from, but knowledge economy jobs. But where did the Apples, Microsofts and HPs that fuel today’s economy come from? That’s right, startups.
Can you say $675 a month to rent your very own newly renovated residence in an up-and-coming neighborhood within a vibrant city? That’s affordable to someone with a $25,000/year salary.
Apparently having City support for mini-residences is a new thing, “We took a position against these kinds of units 20 years ago, but times have changed.
For any city taking transit seriously (or not seriously), the video above is a must-see if they care to relate to emerging generations and grow.
The auto industry spends $20 billion in advertising in California alone. The question posed in the video above is, what would happen if the same kind of money was spent on transit? Or perhaps a better question is, what if mass transit was not only presented as sexy as cars are, but as cool as the progressive, open-minded, creative people who use …
Why is it that the vast majority of new development is at an institutional scale, and we don’t see human-scaled fine-grained urban fabric, the kind that makes historic neighborhoods so desirable? Well, it’s mainly because the vast majority of real estate development investment dollars come from institutional investors, such as pension funds, insurance companies, Wall Street…
As you can see in the long tail diagram above, institutional investors aren’t interested in development projects
One of those ‘I wish we had one in my neighborhood’ urban destinations of creatives is the outdoor cafe walk. The Rue des Bouchers (butcher’s street, historically) - Beenhouwersstraat in Brussels, Belgium is one of the most picturesque and popular in Europe.
For several blocks, you’ll find restaurant after restaurant featuring outdoor seating. What makes this area so inviting?
- The streets are narrow and winding, so you feel like you’re in an outdoor room rather than a long corridor.
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From a creative economy point of view, are towns, cities and even regions not within a ‘mega-region’ (10 to 50 million people) not worth investing significantly in?
Pictures and music are worth more than text, so here’s a deck (generic name for a Powerpoint) sponsored by Washington DC developers (Red Dove, website coming and Gragg & Associates) to crowdsource an urban destination for creatives in Washington DC.
Stay tuned for more info on the proposed development that’ll be the first to utilize the new crowdsourced placemaking tool Bubbly, and check out the preliminary vision here.
The music was custom produced by Yoko K, who does soundscapes for
If you’re going to crowdsource places for creatives, it’s pretty clear you need to start with a core group of creatives. However, if you’re going to crowdsource the planning of urban districts for creatives, often sharing many of the same principles as the Smart Growth movement, it would be highly beneficial if everyone had a copy of the Smart Growth Manual as a reference.
Crowdsourcing a business or building is one thing, but planning urban development on a block or neighborhood level starts
It may be easier to explain via diagram why the content of wildly successful services like Facebook, Google, eBay and Amazon are sourced by crowds, yet places aren’t.
Sure, our instincts tell us diversity and crowds lead to a greater collective intelligence, as witnessed by the reliable ‘Ask the Audience’ option on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, but what about evidence?
The motivating factor behind writing entries for this blog is that I get to work directly with progressive creatives and developers to crowdsource these concepts into built reality.
So, considering the state of the economy, what are creatives’ solution in how the development of a building can become a symbol for economic growth? The following framework of a building will soon be crowdsourced in Washington DC as an answer:
- Local, independent businesses on the ground floor. Not only do local
First of all, most local bookstores simply can’t compete with the likes of Barnes & Noble and Amazon, despite their advantages supporting the local economy. However, it does have a chance if it’s more than a bookstore, adding a few revenue-generating elements. Why the focus on a bookstore? Because if there’s one business that seems doomed in today’s world, this is it, so figuring out a way to not only survive, but thrive, says a lot for many other local independent businesses. Here are some
