CoolTown Studios

Thursday, March 11, 2010

La Bellevillioise, Paris, France

‘Creatives’ as change agents, FAQ

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Creatives | (0) Comments | Link |

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

YikeBike, yike bike

‘World’s first super light electric folding bike’

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Mobility | (0) Comments | Link |

Friday, March 05, 2010

Vrachtfiets Cargo Bikes' Netherlands

The urban ‘moving bike’

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Mobility | (0) Comments | Link |

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Instructables restaurant

Instructables crowdsourced pop-up restaurant

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Retail Venue Development | (0) Comments | Link |

Friday, February 26, 2010

Castro Street, Mountain View, California

Google advocates for cool places too

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.

Check out the following letter excerpt

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Workplaces | (0) Comments | Link |

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Living city block, Lodo, Denver, Colorado

Denver’s Living City Block green model

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Green Development | Link |

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Creative building in Kunsthofpassage, Dresden, Germany

Imagine a neighborhood of creative buildings

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Design | Link |

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Car free Times Square becomes permanent

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Pedestrian Only/Carfree | Link |

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Snowpocalypse, Dupont Circle, Washington DC

Car free city for a day in Washington DC

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Pedestrian Only/Carfree | Link |

Monday, February 08, 2010

Bowling + live music + local + green

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Retail Venue Development | Link |

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Pedestrian promenade, Geneva, Switzerland

Geneva proposes 200 streets as pedestrian only

As creatives are increasingly preferring a world beyond cars in natural cultural districts that function more like Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Britannica, bureaucracies both corporate and government are largely stuck in management models of the industrial age that will slow the transition on their end.

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Pedestrian Only/Carfree | Link |

Friday, January 29, 2010

Startup coworking graph

Solution for job creation? ‘Startup coworking’

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.

Our entry Gazelles + Economic Gardening = Prosperity highlighted this very trend back in 2003. In 2007, we posted how every neighborhood needs a coworking space. Today we’re in a jobs crisis. The time is right to converge these two trends.

First, Blake

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • CoworkingEconomic Gardening | Link |

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Micro-loft at Burns Block, Vancouver, Canada

The 270 s.f. micro-loft announced in Vancouver

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.

Mini-condos on the rise in walkable urban areas, and developers in Vancouver, Canada agree, announcing thirty 270 s.f. units to be completed in March 2011.

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.

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • AttainabilityHousing & Lofts | Link |

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Los Angeles Metro mass transit campaign

Making transit as cool as cars

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 …

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Mobility | Link |

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Long tail investment

Moving the tipping point for creative places

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Investment | Link |

Friday, January 08, 2010

Rue des Bouchers (butcher's street) - Beenhouwersstraat outdoor cafe walk, Brussels, Belgium

The ‘outdoor cafe walk’ of Brussels

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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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Outdoor Cafe Districts | Link |

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Creative economy, mega-region in North America

Prospering in ‘non-Mega-Regions’ for creatives

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?

From the Prospect article, Ruse of the Creative Class, responding to the premise behind economist Richard Florida’s upcoming book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity,

In a warm-up to his next book, Florida has been arguing that the recession has so decimated many cities and regions

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Economic Gardening | Link |

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Crowdsourcing real estate development in DC

A ‘deck’ for crowdsourcing development in DC


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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Media & Resources | Link |

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Smart Growth Manual

Placemaking primer for crowdsourcing places

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • PlaceMaking | Link |

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Coase diagram of crowdsourcing, business models and costs of managing markets

Why placemaking isn’t crowdsourced… yet

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.

Based on economic models presented in crowdsourcing expert Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, the key to whether or not an entity will crowdsource is based on its management and management structure.

On the x-axis, all business models are represented, from the least

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Crowdsourcing | Link |

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Canal festival, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Diversity, crowds key to evolving communities

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?

That’s what Scott Page, professior of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics a the University of Michigan provides in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. An excerpt:

For crowds to be wise, they must be able and

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Community Building | Link |

Friday, December 04, 2009

Burnside Rocket, Portland, Oregon

The economy-building building

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Economic Gardening | Link |

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Downtown square in Brussels, Belgium

Retail district types for creatives

Providing retail for the emerging, growing, progressive creatives market doesn’t follow the same rules as provided by retail consultant Robert Gibbs in A primer on retail types and town centers. It’s a good guide for the general population, so let’s see what happens when we converge and remix it with the 19 urban development types for creatives.

First of all, for creatives, it’s no longer just retail, but retail entertainment. Second, retail no longer follows a simple ownership, product

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Retail Venue Development | Link |

Friday, November 27, 2009

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Soho, Manhattan, New York City

What future is in store for your local bookstore?

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

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Retail Venue Development | Link |

Monday, November 23, 2009

Thinking Outside the Box: A Report on Independent Merchants and the New Orleans Economy, Urban Conservancy, Civic Economics

Locals have 4x economic impact over nationals

How much of a greater impact do local retailers have on nationals? The Urban Conservancy recently completed a study with Civic Economics to answer just that, called Thinking Outside the Box: A Report on Independent Merchants and the New Orleans Economy. Keep in mind this is just economics, and not considering the cultural impact on the local neighborhood.

According to the study, when compared to leading chain competitors on a per square foot basis, local retailers:
- generate twice the annual

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Economic Gardening | Link |
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