Here are the health-oriented town features that investors are implementing in the CoolTown model.

1. Genuine walkability.  I mean ‘genuine’ in that people will actually want to walk to destinations, rather than it being a theoretical possibility.  I see the word often abused as such.  Few people enjoy walking across parking lots, especially at night.
2. Enough fast food joints!  If you read the book Fast Food Nation you may never eat at one again.  You’ll see a lot more local businesses that

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What’s a typical week in a health-oriented town?There really is such a thing, in my opinion.  Once I got ‘urban dress/walking shoes’, I found myself getting twice as much exercise.

Go to Nike and look up “prestos”.  My shoe expert of a friend recommended I get these when I asked him if there was such a thing as shoes I could go to a meeting with, and run in.  Well, for my sake, these shoes are just that!  Not only do I wear these to business meetings, but I ran a ten mile race in them too! 

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How do you know you’re in a healthy town?  Just walk around and look.  For some reason, the people at suburban Walmarts just don’t seem nearly as fit as those strolling through city downtowns.

Here’s my list of choices in a typical week:  Less than one block away:  Pick-up basketball games, throwing a frisbee, running up and down stairs, jogging to the grocery or drugstore.  Just a few blocks away:  Walking to the subway, yoga, salsa dancing, jogging to my gym and more pick-up basketball (or

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This week The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is sponsoring The Shape We’re In, focusing on why nearly two-thirds of Americans are out of shape.

The series kicks off with Experts plotting America’s new diet: Less sprawl, less fat, less frenzy. From the article:  “Right now, 75 percent of all trips less than a mile are taken by car. About 25 percent of people are physically active. Another 50 percent do a little activity. And 25 percent do virtually nothing.“

Here’s my take on it.  If you’ve

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For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown.  Here’s how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:

1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it’s the cultural creatives.  Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize.  Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the free agents.  This is the

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Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.

When we think of ‘friends’, we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with.  However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs.  Either way, they typically aren’t very diverse.

I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques.  Rather than asking the people in your

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Actually, the verdict isn’t in yet, but the way I’m hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday’s blog).  Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go.  June 3rd’s our first happy hour, so I’ll let you know then how it went.  Update: How it went!

As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that’s a strength of where

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There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul.  Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.

Here’s my recipe to get to know your neighbors:

1. As painful as it is for some of us, you’re going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them.  This forms the ‘neighborhood core’.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most

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It’s something many of us secretly ask ourselves, and there’s even a book written about it.  Is it possible to create a sense of community where none existed?  History says yes, and hopefully we can use that to build better communities in the very near future.

This week I’ll present places I’ve experienced that are known to have a strong sense of community, and how we plan to integrate that into CoolTowns.  I’ll start with Hawaii, since it’s regarded by its residents as having an incredible

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Here’s the experience arts & entertainment vision an investment collaborative will be implementing in a few lucky cities around the country.

1. To have an onsite residency of artists, musicians, video producers, entertainers and entrepreneurs, they will ensure a substantial amount of affordable, well-designed housing and workspace.
2. To catalyze ongoing performances, practices, dances and major live events, they will provide ‘stages’ via a piazza, a 30,000 sf community center/dance/concert

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