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 perspective:

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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 version

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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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