I think we have definitely hit the pedestrian walk tipping point. First Wired Magazine publishes It’s Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars, then San Francisco’s mayor announces the possibility of closing the city’s main thoroughfare to cars. Now New York City Mayor Bloomberg announces on February 26, 2009 that Times Square and Herald Square will go completely vehicle-free, along with 36 blocks of Broadway adding a pedestrian promenade and bike lane while leaving a reduced number of car

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Fitting with the previous entry, ‘People over cars’ begins to hit mainstream media, the City of San Francisco revealed that they’re considering closing the busiest street in the city to cars.

Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the success of its summer Sunday Streets where miles of downtown streets were opened only for pedestrians and bicyclists, which were all the rage in major cities last year.

Perhaps it’s a realization that U.S. cities need to better compete with

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“It’s Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars” isn’t a headline you’ll be seeing in the Wall Street Journal anytime soon, but it is a headline this month on Wired Magazine’s site, which is often an indicator that we’ve hit the tipping point from concept to reality. Wired is where the concepts of crowdsourcing and the Long Tail were first introduced, which are now becoming fundamental business models for sustained growth, as well as for developing creative cities.  The next domino to fall

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What better way to understand how the world’s transit systems compare than to display it graphically in one image, thanks to GOOD Magazine, which is a periodical about exactly what you’d think it’d be about.

In the graphic above, the trains represent the total system track length, and the people symbolize the total ridership. Click here for a much larger version of the graphic, though it may go right off your browser window.

The one thing you’ll notice right away is that apparently, riding

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One can look at the economic downturn as a depression, or one giant market correction.  We simply have way too much retail - take a look at the chart below.  Amazing isn’t it?  The message may be clear that the era of big boxes and shopping malls has peaked, but the question is, what’s the next generation of more sustainable retail going to look like?

For starters, look at the top shopping districts around the world that have stood the test of time, and you’ll often find pedestrian-only

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There seems to be some fairly strong evidence that the price of an average home is higher than what the average person can afford. However, this isn’t the case around Toronto, Canada if you’re buying a home from Options for Homes, a nonprofit that’s already built 1500 attainably-priced homes for people with household salaries as low as $32,000… without government subsidy.

How are they doing it?

Lowering the cost of land - Options for Homes may spend $10,000 per unit on land otherwise costing

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Who would have thought we’d be seeing ads like these from Fortune 500 companies envisioning a more sustainable, yet creative culture and economy?...

“Remember the Joneses and all their stuff? And how people were always trying to keep up? Well some of us woke up instead. We no longer want big and flashy. We want real, true and honest.“

[Through recessions…]“...people start enjoying the small things in life. A home-cooked meal. Time with loved ones. Appreciating the things we do have, the

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President Obama, from the Fort Myers town hall meeting on February 10, 2009:

“Well the eh…we have target billions of dollar at infrastructure spending. And states all across the country are going through what Florida is going through.  There was a study done by the American Association of Engineers… that might not be the exact title, but engineers from all across the country… we get a D in infrastructure all across the country… This should be a wake-up call for us.

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It’s not easy to resist gentrification, but at least the City of Boston is trying via their Artist Space Initiative within their economic development agency.

Their mission is to develop spaces that:
- are permanently dedicated to artists through deed restrictions;
- are located in buffer zones between industrial and residential neighborhoods in locations that do not support traditional family housing;
- offer live/work spaces or work-only spaces for rent and for purchase at a variety of

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Over 1400 entries later, I thought it’d be interesting to post what the collective content is on this site, as illustrated by the tag cloud above. Click here for a larger image.

While it’s not surprising to see ‘creatives’, ‘creative’ and ‘placemaking’ among the most popular tags given that it’s in the site’s tagline, ‘public’ sure seems to have a lot of unexpected exposure. The ‘public’ that’s used in this site often refers to the public gathering places and spaces that bring people