With a population over 100,000 and a greater population of half a million, Lafayette, Louisiana is a little known small town creative mecca whose residents probably want to keep it that way. What’s their secret? The city’s aptly named Independent sheds some light in their cover story, Cool town. Lafayette is becoming a magnet for the creative class. Here’s why.
Economically, they’re successfully transitioning from the industrial age (oil) to the knowledge age (health care, tourism).
Today’s ‘Crowdsourced placemaking in progress’: Creative coworking space is brought to you by the people behind the Artisphere, a 55,000 s.f. ‘arts space for everyone’ located in Rosslyn, Arlington County, Virginia. Think ‘arts center on steroids.‘
Within the Artisphere, the CoZone (future crowdsourcing website coming soon) will be a smallish but rather prolific coworking space that will be crowdsourced. The opening, along with the Artisphere, is scheduled for 10/10/10 (clever marketing …
What does well-being have to do with the economy have to do with the creative industries? For the purposes of this entry, let’s use Gallup’s well-being that measures life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment and basic access (definitions of each here); GDP for the economy; and the creative class for the creative industries.
Since the vision of this site is ‘crowdsourcing places for creatives’, it may be beneficial to further clarify what the word ‘creatives’ means, as it relates to this site.
What is this site’s definition of creatives?
It’s stated in detail here, but it is essentially the cultural creatives, creative class and the renaissance generation (rengens), all of which have their own self-titled books. In a nutshell, it includes anyone willing to invest in making a difference (cultural creatives) and/or
Given the shift to more pedestrian-oriented built environments, what kind of transportation can we expect to see? We know the Segway isn’t going to be a model for transportation - too heavy, clunky and where do you park the thing? Stackable cars are pretty nifty, but a decade away at the soonest. So then, how about the YikeBike?
Think of it as a cleaner, smaller, lighter, quieter, more portable moped
It’s a little ahead of it’s time (in other words, it has a $4450 price tag), though it’s
Onno Sminia and Louis Pierre Geerinckx represent what we need more of. The two Dutch industrial designers simply felt there was a better way to move within their urban neighborhood without having to depend on their parents, renting a moving truck and/or finding parking, much less do it on any kind of regular basis. So they innovated and built their own solution.
The solution? A ‘moving bike’, small enough to traverse most any place a bike can, yet big enough to haul a couch. They then
What happens when a virtual world becomes real? What happens when a digital community becomes a physical one? In yet another sign of things to come, that’s what happened to the online realm of Instructables, “a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others,“... it became the Instructables Restaurant. Or in this site’s terms, the Instructables crowd is the beta community for crowdsourcing their own
