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March 7, 2008

The CoolTown visual guide to crowdsourced placemaking

What is crowdsourced placemaking? A beta community? Creatives, VIBEs, third places, scenes, natural cultural districts...? All of that is explained in one definitive 13-page document, the CoolTown visual guide to crowdsourced placemaking and economic development, Crowdsourcing Cool Places for Creatives, published by CoolTown Beta Communities.

The table of contents:
The conflict: Cities are hitting a wall
Where creatives are attracted to
Third places, events and scenes
Identifying the problem and solution via 'clocks' and 'clouds'
What is crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing in action
How indies can compete with chains
Systems for profound change
Placemaking crowdsourcing systems in action
Appendix: CoolTown strategic map

Check out the progress of three ongoing crowdsourced beta community developments here.

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March 6, 2008

Austin music event brings in $95 million

We all know how important music and events are to local culture, but what about to the local economy? The City of Austin wanted to find out what kind of $ impact its annual SXSW (South by Southwest) music, film and interactive festival provided and got their answer: $95 million.

Conducted by Angelou Economics, the $95 million figure that the festival was calculated to have brought to Austin's local economy in 2007 was double that of estimates by the Austin Convention and Visitor's Bureau, primarily because the latter only multiplies a standard number to each attendee and doesn't take into account the added revenues businesses experience as a result of the event's buzz. It's this fine grain level of metrics, similar to those variables defining a natural cultural district, that cities need to learn to measure to truly understand the impact of creative third places, events and scenes.

SXSW in 2008 features over 1700 bands and is estimated to bring in $100 million when it runs March 7 through 16. Check out our SXSW profile from a couple of years ago.

Image source: dncliss.

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March 5, 2008

Profile of a future VIBE

To refresh your memory, a VIBE is a variegated independent business entrepreneur, the creative, evolved version of the franchise operator, that opens multiple unique, authentic businesses under different names and concepts, but with a common system of delivering high quality product and service.

Smart City Radio recently interviewed a young budding VIBE and former attorney in Pittsburgh's East End, Jamie Wallace who opened his first restaurant ever, Abay Ethiopian Cuisine. It soon became known as one of Pittsburgh Magazine's Top 25 Best Restaurants of 2005 soon after its opening in 2004. One of his primary motivations to switch careers is that he wanted his city to have a more multi-cultural heritage, which is a big deal to a creative city.

What's to say Jamie will be a VIBE? First of all, his first restaurant, with no restaurant experience, is a commercial success. Second, you can hear it in his interview, "My mindset wasn't that this has to run like every other restaurant I've read about or been in. My perspective was whether this was a technology company or a robotics company, there are certain principles that I want to apply to my business. So if you come in and you work here, the philosophy that we have, the approach we take, it's the same. It's essentially a customer service business, we're promoting culture as much as anything, we want people to have a great time, but there's a component of what I'm trying to do that would be the same regardless. So I feel like from a customer standpoint, they get that what we're there to do isn't just to turn a profit, it's for them to learn, for them to absorb this culture, have an enjoyable time, have it be educational, and touch them in a way that's different. Hopefully they get that."

Apparently they are.

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March 4, 2008

Small town absorbing growth in the center

What happens when your population doubles from 10,000 in 2000 to 20,000 today? In the case of Woodstock, Georgia, 30 miles north of Atlanta, the result will be a vibrant downtown rather than sprawl and congestion - thanks to investment in the city core.

They're off to a good start, with their downtown plan winning a regional development of excellence award followed by a national award (CNU Charter Awards). The plan consists of 340 residential units, 85,000 s.f. of retail and restaurant space, and 22,000 s.f. of office space, including some rather sophisticated mixed-use buildings (pictured).

Check out the master plan here, and note how the building types change accordingly as one walks away from the downtown, with commercial surrounded by mixed-use in the core, followed by multi-family housing, then townhouses, and finally small-lot single-family and courtyard homes, all within a pedestrian-oriented urban fabric.

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March 3, 2008

Finally, a one-stop-shop for green building materials

If you wanted a resource for green building materials you had more resources than ethnic restaurants in Manhattan. At long last, there's Ecolect, whose mission is "to be the largest, freely accessible sustainable materials library in the world."

In 2005, RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) graduates Joe Gebbia and Matt Grigsby felt the same way so many of us do about finding sustainable materials - it's confusing, uninspiring and sometimes all but impossible. However, being the creatives that they are, they decided to do something about it and created established a service, fronted by a gorgeous website that solved this long-running black hole of service in the marketplace. Ecology stems from the combination of 'ecology' and 'intellect'.

The graphic-oriented site includes user-uploaded pictures of the material in use, user reviews and tagging to help cross-indexing, as well as detailed descriptions and a blog.

Two related qualities of the site that are way too overlooked, but are extremely important components of what makes or breaks a site - it's easy-to-use and beautiful. It's no surprise they tapped into their colleagues at RISD when designing the site - see what access to a creative community can do?

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