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

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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 CoolTown 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

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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,

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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

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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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Special Report: Update on Office Community

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

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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

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Actually, the verdict isn’t in yet, but the way I’m hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday’s blog).  Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go.  June 3rd’s our first happy hour, so I’ll let you know then how it went.  Update: How it went!

As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that’s a strength of where

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There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul.  Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.

Here’s my recipe to get to know your neighbors:

1. As painful as it is for some of us, you’re going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them.  This forms the ‘neighborhood core’.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most

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Where is that elusive sense of community?

It’s something many of us secretly ask ourselves, and there’s even a book written about it.  Is it possible to create a sense of community where none existed?  History says yes, and hopefully we can use that to build better communities in the very near future.

This week I’ll present places I’ve experienced that are known to have a strong sense of community, and how we plan to integrate that into CoolTowns.  I’ll start with Hawaii, since it’s

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I want diversity in my town! How?

At least that’s what the cultural creatives, the early adopters and today’s kids are saying.  One may need to look no futher than Jane Jacobs to find answers.

In her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which by the way, has probably prompted the renaissance of more than several cities, she says if there’s any one word that defines success for a city, it’s diversity.  To achieve it, she says you need:
1. A concentration of people.  This

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