There’s no question what the first green business incubator is - it’s the Environmental Business Cluster in San Jose in 1994, christened by then Vice President Al Gore and still going strong. However, as you can see by its website (and the fact it started in a suburban office park with cubicles, though now located downtown), it’s not a coworking site. Btw, check out its graduate list of companies - I helped found the firm called Global Opportunity Villages in that incubator - a bit too

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Visitors to historic districts in older cities around the world will often come across majestic public spaces, but it’s rarer in the U.S. because it’s such a relatively young country. One of the few examples of such places, one may be surprised to know, is in Cleveland, Ohio, known as the Old Arcade and is even said to be modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy.

The first arcades were built in Paris in the early 1800s as reflection of the industrial age, offering a

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We’ve had public art cows in Chicago, fish in Baltimore, pandas in Washington DC... at long last we have something more permanent and actually practical - public art bike racks.

Cities across the U.S. from Louisville, Kentucky (pictured left) to Austin, Texas to Sioux Falls, S.D are paying artists to sculpt more creative destinations for people to park their bikes. Longmont, Colorado and Portland, Oregon are also participating. Regular racks cost from $200 to $500, and artists are paid $2000

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If there was ever a concise, sticky way to explain the crowdsourced placemaking process, it’s the 1:9:90 rule. Here it is:

- 1 will create or contribute something.
- 9 will rate, edit or vote on it.
- 90 will use the result.

Explaining in more detail…

- 1 will create or contribute something. These are the ‘supercontributors’, and as is evident here, represent only 1% of the community.  Keep in mind that this isn’t 1% of the population, but 1% of an identifiable crowdsourcing community, like

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On the one hand you have authentic cultural destinations grown naturally, referred to as natural cultural districts (NCD)(image on the left), which attract creatives. On the other hand, you have developments that attempt to become such cultural destinations in one fell swoop, referred to on this site as corporate cultural districts (CCD)(image on the right). However, they tend to attract tourists and corporate employees with higher salaries than creatives. Here are the objective differences

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On the one hand you have the good ol’ boys network. On the other hand, you have diversity. Obviously, the title of this entry hints at the answer, but it’s not that simple. Here’s a story from Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business that illustrates this:

The founders of Marketocracy established an online stock market that allowed its members to use ‘monopoly money’ to make trades. The top 100 performers, known as the Marketocracy Masters 100, formed the

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If self assessment of your own body, fitness, energy, and overall well-being matters, then Burlington, Vermont is the healthiest city in the U.S.. This is according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, mentioned in news sources throughout the country, from CNN to the Associated Press. However, other sources claim Lincoln, Nebraska takes the top spot, though if you look at the map below, Burlington makes sense. Boulder, Colorado is also up there.

Burlington and

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So, what does a creative economy strategic report for a city look like? One example is Creative New York, now a few years old (December 2005), published by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy organization focused on the well being of New York City’s low-income and working class.  Being that this is an implementation-oriented site, let’s cut right to their recommendations on what NYC should do to grow its creative sector.

Create a centralized coordinating body modeled after

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It’s that time of year again, to profile the apartments that best invigorate their homes through color, in Apartment Therapy’s annual Fall Colors Contest.

Shown here are the ‘Final Four‘ contestants, using kitchens for comparison. Here’s the inspiration and color tips from each of them:

The East (top image) - “After living with white walls for one year we painted a bedroom wall red and quickly realized the rest of the house needed color. Don’t be afraid to use bold colors that make a

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There’s an emerging market for green housing and transportation, and in the Bay Area, California, both the private and public sectors are taking leads to accommodate them.

At The Uptown apartments in Oakland, developer Forest City Enterprises offers home buyers free annual membership ($25) to the car-sharing service Zipcar, free annual public transit passes and access to bikes. Developer Rick Holliday offers a free bike with every unit at his Pacific Cannery Lofts development, plus a bike

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How does one apply a successful crowdsourcing model to placemaking?

In the previous entry, we profiled Threadless, a $20 million t-shirt company that crowdsources its designs. We talked about how the benefits are similar for t-shirts and placemaking (we’ll use housing as an example), but how does that serve as a framework in crowdsourcing cool housing for creatives?

First, you have to even the playing field. Shirts are mass produced and creative buildings (that’s all we’re talking about

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What do t-shirts have to do with creating places? Since we were recently on the subject of t-shirts that expressed the love of certain places, it’s a good segue to profile a crowdsourced t-shirt company that’s a favorite of creatives.

In 2000, student Jake Nickell was feeling the priceless euphoria of having won a t-shirt design competition. Why not let others in on the emotional high? He presented the idea for a t-shirt company based on such a competition to future partner Jacob DeHart,

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What does the new U.S. administration have to do with creatives? A lot, according to Joel Kotkin, author of the best-sellers The City: A Global History and The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape, and finishing a book on the American future. In his Forbes article, The Triumph of the Creative Class, Joel states,

“Obama’s triumph reflects a decisive shift in the economic center of gravity away from military contractors, manufacturers, agribusiness,

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It’s a familiar scene - you find housing you can afford near a mass transit line on the outskirts of a city, and the reason it’s affordable is because few people will visit you. There’s no there, there.  For decades, Collingswood, New Jersey, neighborhood of 15,000 just outside of Camden, was just that. It suffered massive downtown vacancies like most other cities, even though it was served by a major transit line to Philadelphia.  It hasn’t helped that many are still averse to living or

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When artist and avid cyclist David Byrne, former lead singer for the band Talking Heads, was asked by the New York City Department of Transportation (no surprise) to help judge a bike rack design contest for New York City, he was so enthusiastic about the opportunity that he submitted his own designs.

With his design prowess and public exposure* however, NYC DOT felt it only fair to distinguish his submissions from the rest. Alas, these particular bike racks will be up for only a year, after

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This site is by no means a political platform, so understanding that, one had to be there in the streets of downtowns across the U.S. after the final voting results to understand that this was more than just another election. The joyous dancing, the spirited cheering and chanting, the intense hugging, the endless laughter and tears, a generosity of love in the air… you’d think you were either in Berlin when the Wall had just fallen, or for sports fans, your country had just won the World …

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No one in their creative right mind (no pun intended) would wear a tourist souvenir t-shirt displaying their city name, but what if you really did want to display your love for your own unique, authentic neighborhood? If you live in Queens, New York, the answer for many is to buy a shirt from local artist Ciara Elend’s Queensbound collection. Think of it as when you wear your ol’ college alma mater, except it’s in real time and anything but generic.

What inspired Ciara to create the

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Presently, few visitors venture north of Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station into what is known as Charles North, a 100-acre arts and entertainment district characterized by boarded up buildings. On October 30, 2008, Mayor Sheila Dixon (pictured) unveiled the Charles North Vision Plan to transform the area into more of a knowledge economy oriented natural cultural district (local businesses, human-scaled buildings, multiple developers) rather than the typical industrial economy corporate

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