When it comes to industrial design, Milan, Italy is a world capital, leaders in fashion and architecture and home to Alfa Romeo and Fiera Milano, the largest trade fair complex in the world. There is no product
design equivalent in the U.S., but Cleveland, Ohio is poising itself to take on that mantle. What’s the point? For one, design is found to be correlated to economic growth. If you’re wondering how industrial design makes an impact, think of Apple and their influence.

In the heart of

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Today’s entry is part of my favorite series on this site, ‘Reader Experiences‘. Profiling Vancouver in this story is Luke Graven from Portland, Oregon.

“There has been much written about Vancouver, Canada being a great city.  This British Columbian city has been ranked the number one city in a row by the Economist magazine survey. Here are 5 reasons why it ranks high from a CoolTown Prospective…

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The signs are there:
- In a CoolTown retail study, 44% of the downtown businesses in five of the most progressive college towns are restaurants.
- According to the article,
Restaurants popular as a draw for shopping centers, 20 years ago restaurants made up 10 to 15% of the tenancy in Dallas commercial centers, but today that number is closer to 25 to 50%, with restaurants now often serving as the anchor.
- The first two of four phases for neighborhood revitalization today starts with

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The median home price in San Francisco is $749,000, so being able to buy anything new at a third of that price is noteworthy, especially if it’s in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city.

Enter Cubix Yerba Buena in SoMa (South of Market), an eight-story building of 98 condos starting at $279,000. The key to affordability is not in government subsidies, but in size - each of the condominiums range from 250 to 350 s.f. It’s the U.S. version of the UK’s iPad, or the housing

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Project for Public Spaces presents its Top 12 public squares in the U.S. and Canada, listed below with a personal critique:

1. Jackson Square, New Orleans, LA (lower image) - You can’t go wrong if you’re an urban square in the middle of one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the U.S., the French Quarter.
2. Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY - Manhattan’s (and some say the U.S.‘s) central square, and probably the most featured plaza in movies, continues to get bigger and more

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It’s pretty safe to say this is the video preview of the crowdsourcing book, considering the author is Jeff Howe, the person who coined the term crowdsourcing in the first place - via this 2006 article in Wired Magazine. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business premieres on Tuesday, August 26, 2008.

Jeff’s definition: “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an

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As they say, the more things change the more they stay the same. Streetcars ruled downtowns in the early 20th century. Then cars happened. Then a backlash against suburbia happened. Then rising gas prices happened. Now here we are with 40 U.S. cities looking to streetcars once again as a compelling economic development strategy, nicely reported in the NY Times’ Downtowns Across the U.S. See Streetcars in Their Future.

You can read about their myriad economic benefits in a past entry, Romance

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In the 1960s Holladay (within the Salt Lake City metropolitan area) made dubious history by being the first city in Utah to build a shopping mall. In 2008 it’s making history again, albeit a bit more noble, by transforming the mall into a walkable neighborhood.

Not only is the developer, General Growth Properties, redeveloping the 57-acre Cottonwood Mall site into a neighborhood, but as a focal point, gathering place and town center for the Holladay community of 14,000. To be known as

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$4/gallon has had quite a snowball effect, and one of the rewards for pedestrians outside of car-free days and cities going glorious bonkers to build bike lanes is Google has finally offered walking directions as an option.

The maps above show the same starting and arriving points, but the one on the left is for driving directions and since July 22, 2008 there’s one on the right for walking directions. It’s almost amusing how logical the path becomes. Google says they’ll try to find you a

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Continuing our look at the best cities that are remixing, reinventing themselves, according to Best Towns 2008 from Outside magazine, here are five more, plus a number of honorable mentions:

Ithaca, New York - Conscientious innovation isn’t far off when you have Cornell University and Ithaca College as residents, and a median age of 22. The town is experiencing a green movement spearheaded by a new ecovillage, and the downtown is finally legitimizing the pedestrian-only district laid out a

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We’ve seen endless list of best places to live, work, walkable etc. etc., but here’s one that looks at the best cities that are remixing, reinventing themselves - Best Towns 2008 from Outside magazine.

Washington DC - Recently revitalized Adams Morgan, U Street, and Chinatown are attracting creatives in droves, recent mayors have brought strong leadership, and DC just introduced the first bike sharing system in the U.S. Plus the newly formed CreativesDC social network!
Chattanooga, TN - The

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For a city with such a reputation for bureaucracy, it’s perhaps a sign of the new times that Washington DC is the first city in the U.S. to have a modern, city-wide bike sharing program, open for use as of August 13, 2008. It’s the same system used in Barcelona, and inspired by the 20,000 bike/1400-station phenomenon in Paris.

Ok, so the SmartBikeDC program at 120 bikes and 10 stations pales by comparison to Paris, but that’s 120 bikes/10 stations more than any other bike sharing system in

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You’ve heard about White Nights/Nuit Blanche and Long Night at the Museums in the previous entry, the all-night arts and culture festivals spreading around the world. The U.S. is ramping up with their own versions, with Chicago’s Looptopia May 2008, Sleepless Night in Miami November 2008, and Glow in Santa Monica July 2008.

Check out the video of Glow above, hosting interactive artful experiences in the historic pier district, like a kaleidoscope that reads your emotions; 950 glow sticks

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What do Paris, Toronto, Copenhagen, Madrid, Malta, Montreal, Sao Paulo, Lima, Santa Monica, Chicago, Miami Beach and six cities in the UK have in common? They all host an all night art and cultural festival known as Nuit Blanche (White Night), which lasts from sundown until sunrise on the first Saturday and Sunday in October. While Paris kicked off the Nuit Blanche series in 2002, they were inspired by the ‘Lange Nacht der Museen’ (Long Night of Museums) held in Berlin, Germany since 1997,

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Thanks to Streetfilms!

August 9, 2008 will go down in history as the beginning of Manhattan’s transformation in becoming a truly pedestrian-oriented city. Through their Summer Streets program, they held the first of three street closings to cars along seven miles through the heart of the city. How’d it go? Read the quotes below from participants (shown in the film) below and decide for yourself! Once again, any city that has a DOT (Dept. of Transportation) like New York City will be

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Tomorrow marks the first day of NYC’s Summer Streets program when 7 miles of downtown Manhattan are completely closed to cars for six hours. Check out the official PSA above, edited by Streetfilms. Check out this map for other streets that will be closed on the Saturdays of August 9, 16, 23 between 7am - 1pm.

Motivated by NY’s program, Seattle will have Car-Free Sundays during the afternoons in three different neighborhoods at a time on August 24, 31 and September 7. The buy-in by

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This is an alternative for a growing number of people bored with ‘So what bar are we going to tonight?‘

First of all, a couple of definitions. Mixed-use is a placemaking/real estate development term for combining uses in a building (residential over retail), which also applies to neighborhoods (walkable) and businesses (bookstore coffeehouse bar lounge theater). Mashup refers to the combining of songs, videos, and web application features into a new and distinct product.

Thus, what happens

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In keeping with the spirit of the previous entry, The Dining Room Takes to the Street, here’s how to start your own informal public dining culture with the Permanent Breakfast.

Founded in Austria, the purpose of the Permanent Breakfast is to promote public areas and places via spontaneous gatherings for breakfast. The very first breakfast was held in Vienna on May 1, 1996 among five people, and has since spread throughout the world thanks to its formal program with the basic rule:

One person

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In one of the best NY Times articles ever published as it relates to what this site is all about, writer Penelope Green pens the phenomenon of creatives in New York City spontaneously crafting their own public spaces in The Dining Room Takes to the Streets. The photographs alone that are associated with the article are a must see, and some of the quotes are priceless.

Referred to as ‘invisible theater’, here are some examples of New Yorkers making their own urban gathering places (clockwise

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If you think being advertised to is worth free zero-carbon rides through town, then EcoCabs is just for you. Rapidly spreading throughout Europe and North America, this Dublin-based shuttle service relies on pedal power with electric-battery assist. Passengers say the ride is surprisingly smooth with some acceleration kick. Some of the vitals:

Launched: April, 2008
Maximum number of passengers: 3
Top speed: 7 mph/12 km/h
Where: Dublin, Ireland, Toronto, Canada; New York, Chicago, Detroit,

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The previous entry profiled the Architect magazine story, The Next Coffeehouse, and there’s one that truly stood out to me as something that a creative would say, “You know, I’d actually really want to work there.“

Designed by STUDIOS Architecture, their Modular Community Kitchen concept is the spatial inverse of the piazza, with a 60’ communal table serving as the ‘town square’. Greg Keffer, principal, provided some insight in this CoolTown interview:

Do you think the market is ready for

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