Last night, 14 people - Lisa, Angela, Christian, Mike, Sarah, Joey, Justin, Ayari, Raj, Ritu, Heather, Robert, myself and business owner/VIBE Linda - met over pizza, beer and wine to discuss, as a beta community, what Washington DC’s next cafe/bar/coffeehouse should be. It was the first ever VIBE beta community, as well as DC’s first beta community. Two hours later we had laid out the foundation for what very well may be the coolest, most innovative venue in Washington DC.

You’d actually

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Reader Q&A: “Can you give sources for your photos? I always love ‘em and want to follow up.“

Let’s do one better. Why don’t we all pool our most inspiring photos, the ones that inspire us to say, “Wow, I wish that was in my neighborhood!“. There’s no better source for this of course than Flickr, and coincidentally, we’ve just set up a group photo pool called Cool Places right here.

If you’re not a Flickr user, it’s quick, free and painless to sign up.  If you are a Flickr member, just

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Beta community designs a neighborhood their way in Germany

We recently answered the question How can a City establish a ‘beta community’ to attract the creative class? with an outlined process. We follow that with a living example, Vauban in Freiburg, Germany..

In the 1970s the City of Freiburg in Germany became known for its progressive mindset, much like Berkelely, CA. With that kind of creative foundation, when a 94-acre army base closed in 1991 it was a natural step for the surrounding

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There’s a key neighborhood street block in your downtown that could be the catalyst and benchmark for inspired urban design and investment to attract the next generation of downtown residents and tenants.  Is there a way then, that these emerging populations in your could city get together to design and develop their own neighborhood, buildings, workplaces, third places and homes at attainable prices?  They can via a beta community (evolved from crowdsourcing), a progressive community of

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A little help establishing a sense of community where there is little

It’s not uncommon for many of the residents of a neighborhood not to know one another, much less do anything together.  However, what if they’d like to change that?  Not through homeowner associations, which focus more on what you can’t do than what you can.  Think nonprofit organization - this New Urban News article looks at the Seaside Institute’s New Institutes Program which helps communities establish a nonprofit to

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The bad news is, once a place is on an irreversible track towards being uncool, you can bet the creatives will flee.  The good news is, it works vice versa.

We all know the familiar pattern of risk-taking artists moving into an undesirable neighborhood, attracting the cool risk-taking indie venues, coffeehouses, restaurants and workplaces and infusing it with desire, which then attracts the risk-averse executive-types who then attract the risk-averse chains (ie Starbucks, McD’s, Gap, etc.) 

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That’s the official sign you’ll see in sixty-eight cities across 28 states (and counting).  Why?

Based in part on economist Richard Florida’s research documenting how diversity generates jobs, isolated smaller cities and towns are realizing they need to work harder than metropolitan areas in attracting a diverse talent pool.

From the sponsoring organization, “The Partnership for Working Toward Inclusive Communities, an effort led by the National League of Cities, unites city leaders who are

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Building community among main street business owners

Few elements define the character of a neighborhood better than the main street downtown.  The architecture; percentage of independents vs chains; entertainment; emphasis on culture and art say a lot about the what the neighborhood and people are about.  For one, it’s a reason why they’ve moved there, or haven’t moved away from.

One major ingredient for a successful downtown, especially a lasting one with a strong sense of community, is

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The physics of relationships… in cooltowns

I’m delving into sensitive material here, but since the heart of community and business is fundamentally made up of one-one relationships between people...

An Oxford graduate, Richard Ecob conducted a study that modeled a community of daters to a ‘community of atoms’, since they exhibited similar physics (hey, don’t shoot the messenger.)  If you’ve seen What The #$*! Do We Know?!, it wouldn’t seem too far-fetched.

The study’s final word if you want

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New Orleans’ French Quarter spared

Considered one of the most beautiful (and active, being a focal point for Mardi Gras) neighborhoods in the country, many feared the destruction of the historic French Quarter after Katrina.  Thankfully sitting on the highest ground in New Orleans, the community rose above the flooding.

As covered in this popular AP story, the neighborhoods’ residents, many of whom are the working poor living above the restaurants and bars that cater to the more affluent,

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Redefining communal living

Communal living to the previous generation meant that you had to take turns cooking for all the residents in your community every Sunday at a common hall.  The fact that you had to do anything in the name of community kind of melted the concept in my book.

The folks at Youth Intelligence, a market research firm focusing on Gen X and Y trends, has noticed a few real estate trends that are redefining what communal living is:

- At The Orion in NYC, the laundry room

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You know there’s a strong sense of community when…

...the walls at the neighborhood supermarket are plastered with personal classified ads and event flyers for local events.  This is one of the best examples I’ve seen, at the Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier, VT.  The fact that it’s a co-op is another tell-tale sign of a strong sense of community.

One thing that surprises me is that while there’s a number of online classified ad services and event listings for cities and towns, it

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Some people in Detroit got tired of seeing more strip malls, subdivisions and parking.  So, they formed their own group to voice their opinions and establish a new vision and direction for their future in Detroit.  Now with the help of

Town Studios, they’re establishing a beta community to help design, build and live in their own urban village!  Their motto?  Say it. Build it. Live it.

This is an image of the site where they’re going to craft their vision, and the process begins next

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Want to grow your local businesses?  Print your own money

Want to build a stronger sense of community?  Print your own money.

That’s what the people in Burlington, Vermont, and 4000 other communities worldwide (not so sure how accurate that is) are doing.  Yes, Burlington Bread is a legal currency, called slices instead of dollars, and in $1, $5, $10, and $20 denominations.  Even the City of Burlington is involved in its growth.

Circulation began in 1998, and merchant membership is around

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Why does Athens have such a strong sense of community?

The business manager of Athens Weekly News, a popular local political paper, answered this question last week while in a focus group of the community’s creative leaders - “Because nobody’s trying to get rich at this table.“ The group also agreed that many of them participate in no less than 5-7 nonprofits each, and get to know one another through those organizations’ meetings and events.

Indeed, there is no shortage of things to do in

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Last night at a presentation by renowned town planner Andres Duany for a new urban neighborhood in Rockville MD, a creative class group of visionary, future home buyers took it upon themselves to independently form a beta community.

Perhaps this community is the first of its kind, especially since it will take two years before they could move into the proposed project, if it is even approved by the city council.  Brandon, Jenny, Hyojung, Kart, Stu, Kamile, Charles, Brian, Hilary, Manny &

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We are evolving into a customer-driven economy, where customers are so well-informed that they’re actually often the best suited to design and develop their own products and services.

Linux, the computer operating system that has all but ended Microsoft’s dominance in the server market, when founder Linus Torvalds sought an alternative to closed, proprietary operating systems and began writing a new one for free, inspiring others to join him via collective volunteering, or crowdsourcing, thus

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CoolTowns good for marriages?

50% of marriages end in divorce.  Why so high?  Well, first of all, if you didn’t count people who divorced two to ten times, that rate is more like 25%.

What’s this got to do with CoolTowns?  If great marriages are about finding the right people just as much as committing to make it work, the more people we meet, the more people we have a chance of clicking with.  It’s common sense - if we’re working 60 hours a week, then going home and watching TV the rest of

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Q&A: Shouldn’t people come before buildings?

As a civic/community-building practitioner, I often observe a disconnect in how communities approach initiatives to create vibrant places. For instance, the popular place-based initiatives… with new urbanist designs often overlook the necessary visioning work on ‘softer’ issues, viewing (instead) the physical changes as the essential ingredients in community transformation. How will CoolTown integrate civic/community-building aspects within its

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Introducing CoolTown Q&A

Here’s a new CoolTown blog feature:  As CoolTown Network members were sending in questions, I thought it’d be beneficial to more people if I answered them here.  It’d be even better if others provided their own suggestions and answers at the comment link below the blog

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Connecting a virtual world to the physical

The benefits of building community virtually (via the internet) are often seriously limited without a physical venue by which the online participants can meet face to face.  The goal of CoolTowns is to provide both.

What would this look like?  Simply combine the virtual community elements in yesterday’s blog with the third places described on this web site.  Then you’ll come up with things like a “Friendster Bar” as a friend of mine would like to

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Building community - virtually

There’s an old argument that the internet is isolating people.  However, if you ask anyone in the net generation, they wouldn’t know how to meet and keep their friends otherwise.

Take something as simple group email programs.  About twenty of my college friends keep in touch this way, and we plan reunion trips every few years.  There’s no way we’d keep in touch like this without the internet.

Then there’s services like Friendster, myspace and Meet Up that

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Affinity Lab happy hour: As promised, here’s an update on my workplace’s first community building event last Tuesday, based on the aforementioned principles.  First of all, the anticipation of the happy hour created an unprecedented ‘newsroom’ buzz of activity a few hours before, and this new level of collective energy seemed to motivate productivity.  Then, with a Lab-founder sponsored display of food and mixed drinks, a rhythmic set of tunes and

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Investing in Community

For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown.  Here’s how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:

1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it’s the cultural creatives.  Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize.  Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Community Building • Investment | Link |

Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.

When we think of ‘friends’, we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with.  However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs.  Either way, they typically aren’t very diverse.

I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques.  Rather than asking the people in your

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