The development firm Urban Splash’s pioneering founder, Tom Bloxham was profiled in the previous entry, so now it’s fitting to present one of his signature projects that initiated the loft movement in Manchester, England. It sparked a transition from a built environment designed for the industrial economy, to a knowledge-based one.

Constructed before 1904 as a major department store (Affleck & Brown), the Smithfield Buildings, a group of nine buildings covering a full city block in

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The cities in northwest England, namely Liverpool and Manchester, weren’t transitioning very gracefully from the industrial era. Enter Tom Bloxham, founder of the wildly progressive development company, Urban Splash in 1993, who all but single-handedly invented loft living in those cities. The unique story of how Urban Splash came to be, however, is a pretty typical one for the kind of in-demand developer he is today… he had no initial intention whatsoever of being a developer.

Tom began

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There’s endless research on what makes a city look good, but what about what makes a city sound good? Is there a body of research that complements the visuals of well-designed streets and buildings with how to create a more enlightened experience by what is heard?

Five universities jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK may very well be the first to provide that. Their Positive Soundscapes project aims to “move away from a focus on negative noise

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In science, the ‘edge of chaos’ is the region between order and complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal - where innovation and survival is most likely to take place. Then there is death or inanimate, where things are ‘frozen’.

The City of Littleton, Colorado, the founder of economic gardening, has pioneered research on the edge of chaos as it applies to cities and the three phases of life, to which organizations and economies naturally apply.

Frozen phase: “No

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Some cities have that intangible quality that sets them apart. I think a large factor in creating that essence is how much romance it inspires. The folks at Tango Magazine: Smart Talk About Love via Reader’s Digest spent a compelling amount of time looking into this in their write-up, America’s Most Romantic Cities.

They singled out New York, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco as the most romantic, but better yet, they provided insight on where to…

Meet: On the beach in Miami at the Nikki

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A few years ago 32-year old Melanie DiPasquale felt there was something missing in her small town of Brunswick, Maryland, pop. 5000, something very familiar to the typical creative… a third place where people in the community could get together spontaneously.

At that same time she spotted a for sale sign on a church built in 1910 that had been abandoned for ten years. Obviously, the church carried with it a lot of stories for many of the locals, so it seemed natural to restore it into a

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There’s endless talk about building eco cities that don’t seem to meet reality, so it’s nice to see one that’s actually built. Developed on a 500-acre former industrial and harbor brownfield site, Hammarby Sjostad is a contemporary green, carbon-neutral-oriented neighborhood. Hammarby provides homes almost 10,000 residents with an additional 9000 homes and 10,000 jobs coming by 2015.

One key characteristic that is all too often ignored amid talk about eco cities (which are ironically planned

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What kind of space do artists and musicians want in the city of Syracuse?  The simplest way to find out is to ask them, which is what developer Rick Destito formally began doing Tuesday night last week on the first floor of his 5-story, 65,000 s.f. warehouse (pictured), which Rick (brown shirt, hand in motion) is committed to transforming into an artist/musician live-work community (see rendering here).

Here are a few key discussion points from the beta community meeting:

The status of the

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Way back in November 2005 we published the projected vision of the new Del Mar Station Transit Village in Pasadena. Well, it’s time to show you the built result, and it’s inspiring to see it not only match the rendering, but look even better.

The 4.2 acre development hosts 346 apartments (though only 21 are affordable), 20,000 s.f. of retail, and 1200 underground parking spaces (ironically, more than three times the number of living units).  600 of those spaces are for the residents at 1.75

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What’s out: Protests demonstrating what you don’t want.
What’s in:  Crowdsourcing what you do want.

One perfect example of that is Park(ing) Day, when people who are fed up too many parking spaces and too few third places simply build their own third place on one day each year - on a parking space.

It was started two years ago by Rebar, a collaborative group of creatives (surprised?) in San Francisco. It is now sponsored nationally by the Trust for Public Land (TPL). Participating cities

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