When communities that want change in their built environment have the leadership, but not the funding, that’s where the AIA (American Institute of Architects) SDAT (Sustainable Design Assessment Team) comes in. The AIA sponsors several SDATs each year, supported by a voluntary team professionals carefully selected to fit the community’s needs and values.

The first 2009 recipient is the 130-acre neighborhood of East Bayside in Portland, Maine, with about 2500 residents, a fifth of which are

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Sure, our instincts tell us diversity and crowds lead to a greater collective intelligence, as witnessed by the reliable ‘Ask the Audience’ option on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, but what about evidence?

That’s what Scott Page, professior of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics a the University of Michigan provides in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. An excerpt:

“For crowds to be wise, they must be able and

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There’s little doubt that there’s no more effective way to understand the placemaking of a city other than simply being there, experiencing the streets, squares, parks, buildings and pedestrians firsthand.  Photos and videos don’t do it justice.  However, just the same, simply being there is only half the story itself.  If you truly want to experience the places of a city, you’ll need to experience the culture, and that means connecting with the people who live there.  It’s the only way I was

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It’s a fairly common phenomenon, when things are bad, people seek camaraderie. When things become difficult across an entire city or economy, people seek a sense of community.

So, how does that translate to our own cities and neighborhoods? A renewed, and perhaps, more authentic interest in contributing to both public gathering places and local venues, specifically third places. Not only that, but crowdsourcing is a natural community-building methodology for doing so. Project for Public

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What better way to follow How Facebook can help build better places than with this story from Newcastle, Australia. Founder Marcus Westbury:

“Our project Renew Newcastle—in Newcastle, Australia—began life as a facebook group. Before we ever had a meeting, or an organisation, or a group we went to facebook to see if we could find people who were interested in supporting a scheme to revive the CBD through small scale, and temporary arts and cultural activity.

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Yes, it’s no coincidence that the founders of Facebook are of the Millennial/Gen Y generation and that their most loyal followers are largely the same.  However, that’s now expanding, and it’s more of a sign of things to come than a fad (unless they sell out like MySpace).  So it may be worth taking the time to understand how it can benefit your community, build better places.  It can… tremendously.  Even if Facebook eventually goes away, social networking is only going to grow.

One way to

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Inspired after listening to Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank speak last night.

If you’re a regular reader and haven’t heard of Muhammad Yunus, you probably should. He essentially invented a way to crowdsource a banking system and a local economy in the poorest regions of the world. Now if you can do that, what’s stopping you in achieving anything less difficult or heroic?

It started with poor women in Bangladesh who couldn’t receive loans. Why? Because to

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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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First, the definition of bilingual - communicating in two languages fluently, or to further define language, communicating in two different methods of exchanging information fluently. Second, the definition of social network - is the organic gathering of individuals into specific groups; or from wikipedia, “a social structure made of nodes (generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas…“ This can be

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First of all, what’s a viral loop? Viral comes from viral marketing - using pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or sales. A loop occurs when a person is invited to a social network, accepts the invitation, then either:
1. invites others themselves or;
2. creates their own social network.

Pictured above is a series of these viral loops, called a viral loop network. Viral loops and their networks have long been happening in the physical world (e.g. tupperware

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