Would you believe that’s a city campaign slogan?  Excelsior, Minnesota.

“We’re just against the proliferation of sameness,“ said Linda Murrell, the city’s Chamber of Commerce director.  Not surprisingly, the first ads were geared to a younger audience.  Also, downtown Excelsior activity is reported to have increased noticeably as several entrepreneurs are now interested in locating there.

Sure, you say, but Excelsior is a town of only 3000 people. Read on…

Buoyed by strong resident support,

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If you believe that what goes around comes around, you may think twice about shopping at a big box.  A CoolTown’s ‘coolness’ stems from being expressive of the people who live, work, play and employ there, not from a corporation on the other side of the country looking to mass produce its product.

A recent study tracked eight locally owned businesses and a major big box retailer in Maine.  The results:

Revenue spent within the state:
Local businesses: 53.3% (44.6% spent within the immediate

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Continuing this week’s focus on the CoolTown Program...

Phase II:  Building the Physical Community

Successful talent attraction comes down to providing three key elements:  Entertainment, jobs and affordability, in that order.  Fulfilling just one, or even two elements won’t make it happen.  All three must be brought together, and that requires building a CoolTown.

Why is entertainment (& arts) first?  Most young professionals won’t take a dream job if it were in a small farm town,

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Continuing this week’s focus on the CoolTown Program...

OK, we’re committed to becoming a CoolTown.  What are the next steps?

Phase I:  Building the Human Community

The first phase is building the community of people that are not only going to lead the effort of becoming a CoolTown, but who will actually live, work and grow new businesses there.  This CoolTown Market Creation program envisions a five-step process:

1. The CoolTown 100 - We’ll establish a collaborative of the most

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Continuing this week’s focus on the CoolTown Program...

Do businesses believe in CoolTowns?  Absolutely, as long as CoolTowns attract creative talent.  The world’s largest companies understand this: 

“Keep your tax incentives and highway interchanges, we will go where the highly-skilled people are” - Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in a presentation to the National Governors Association in 2002.  It shouldn’t be a coincidence that HP’s slogan is “Invent”, nor that HP has a tech-oriented

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Continuing this week’s focus on the CoolTown Program...

Why isn’t my city attracting growth, excitement and prosperity like Austin?

Does your city produce and retain talent?  Major universities produce talent.  A creative city retains it.  The tipping point to prosperity occurs when the two combine to form a formidable one-two punch:

1. Talent-Producing Universities
The SF Bay Area has Stanford; Cambridge has Harvard and MI; Austin has the 49,000 student University of Texas and

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A great vision doesn’t really matter if it can’t be implemented.  Implementation doesn’t mean much if it no one cared for the vision.

The key to the CoolTown Program is to combine a great vision with the financial capacity to implement it.  That means letting the people who will live/work in the community design it, and finding investors who will finance it.

The program summary, which is downloadable, begins:

“The San Francisco Bay Area, Denver and Charlotte made attracting young

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So what does it take to build a place where people quickly realize that vibrant pedestrian life is more appealing and healthier than streets filled with moving vehicles, or a sterile parking lot?

1a. You need a progressive government that’s willing to enable legislation to eliminate minimum parking requirements.  If the people don’t want all that parking, the government shouldn’t require themselves to spend money to supply it.

1b. You also need, at the same time, a progressive private sector

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Yesterday’s blog diagrammed the concept of hiding cars on a neighborhood scale.  Today we show you a real such neighborhood.

Uptown District is a relatively new urban village in San Diego that creates a pedestrian-oriented destination and economic model for success, aided by its progressive parking layout.

1. The parking in the retail area of Uptown (right of photo) is located mid-block - that is, all the parking is behind buildings.  The only building facing a parking lot is a Ralph’s

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Yesterday’s blog demonstrated how to hide 17 cars.  But what about 500 cars?

Town planners Dover Kohl illustrate how to do this, which is a textbook method of parking in the New Urbanism movement:

1. Parking is placed behind all the buildings, forming a parking core in the middle of the blocks.  Thus, pedestrians only see people-filled streetscapes and streetfronts (ideally a paseo with no cars at all), not a parking lot/garage.

2. The entire site is built upon an underground parking

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