‘An Inside Look at Europe’s Coolest Cities’

You’ve seen lots of rankings of cool cities based on opinions, but the city of Hamburg, Germany took it a little more seriously on behalf of their own cause and hired a firm to find out just which of the European cities were indeed the coolest and the best at attracting the creative class, now and in the future. Here’s their list of the top five, profiled in Spiegel,  leading European news site:

Copenhagen This beautiful, progressive city enjoys

read more…

How South Beach became popular (before it became too popular)

Today South Beach, Miami FL is no longer known as a place where you go out to see your friends, but a place to go with your friends to see and be seen, where you’re not fixated on the persons at your dining table, but at who may walk in at any moment.

However, before it become such a Hollywood-oriented mecca, how did it go from a district of decaying buildings and drug dealers in the 1970s to a place desirable by the most

read more…

If ever in Mexico City, happen upon Condesa

Words used to describe Condesa, a turn-of-the-century neighborhood in Mexico City: urban, eclectic, diverse, bohemian, chic, indie, cafe culture…

Types of people who characterize Condesa: Movie directors, novelists, soap opera writers, musicians, painters, architects, academics…

Venues you’ll find: Outdoor cafes, art galleries, exhibits, hotels w/ ipod-furnished rooms, the largest bookstore in Latin America, innovative restaurants and bars with

read more…

Pittsburgh’s creative center - South Side

As stated yesterday, every city has its creative center, and South Side, now with its own zombie walk, may very well be the Pittsburgh’s long sought source of talent for job growth in the knowledge economy.

Here’s a few of the reasons why it’s Pittsburgh’s destination for creatives:

- Home to more restaurants and bars than any other neighborhood, with up to 80 watering holes in the area. That’s a lot of conversations, the basis of economic growth

read more…

‘World’s Best Cities’ to visit (Part 2)

We continue yesterday’s entry on learning about cool places, venues and daily cultural events from the World’s Best Cities to Visit.  Please add your comments below, especially on the happening hot spots in each city.

Mexico and Central and South America:
1. Buenos Aires, Argentina - The Paris of the Pampas (plains) reinvents itself with youthful vigor
2. Oaxaca, Mexico - Where ‘bold’ and ‘authentic’ flow through the food, drink, music and

read more…

If you were looking to travel the world to discover and learn from the coolest places, venues and daily cultural events, Travel + Leisure’s compilation of the World’s Best Cities is a good place to start.  See the rankings below, and you can check out the overall top 10, each city’s score, and full profiles here.  Please add your comments below, especially on the happening hot spots in each city.

Asia:
1. Bangkok, Thailand (pictured) - The cool/hip/chic capital of Asia?
2. Chiang Mai,

read more…

While towns and cities are putting up official signs (see yesterday’s entry) to declare their inclusiveness of different people and cultures, one city neighborhood that hasn’t needed one for a while is Hillcrest, San Diego, referred as the city’s Greenwich Village.

According to urban designer and former City of San Diego planner Howard Blackson, “Hillcrest is a Richard Florida prototype.  The gay community found a home here in the late 80’s as it had cheaper rents (artist,  designers,

read more…

Yes it’s in France, and 65% of its citizens named Montpellier as the city they’d most prefer living in, even over Paris.  So what does Montpellier have that makes it so desirable?  How about what it doesn’t have…

Cars. From a North American journalist, “...the virtual absence of cars is paradise - not the sort of thing we could ever accomplish back in the real world, of course, but an unstoppable delight in this bar-filled biosphere where tables crowd into every square, flute solos seep out

read more…

Rarely are they mentioned in the same sentence, but it’s when smart growth is strategically integrated with economic development do cities see effective results.

The International Economic Development Council took the smart growth bull by the horns and produced a landmark report: Economic and Development and Smart Growth: 8 Case Studies on the Connections Between Smart Growth Development and Jobs, Wealth, and Quality of Life in Communities.

Here are the eight case studies, not all of which

read more…

Reader experience: Pedestrian-only district in Dublin

Since there are too many inspiring places for one person to absorb, it is our customer-driven fashion to let our readers show you what’s out there, and more importantly, what could be realized in your city.

Today’s reader discovery is on Temple Bar, a cultural, retail-entertainment-residential pedestrian-only (see map) district in downtown Dublin, Ireland, as experienced by Kamile Kay, a knowledge worker in Virginia and occasional

read more…

How can Times Square make room for its crowded pedestrians?

Manhattan has a definite problem with running out of space for its pedestrians amid its frenzied onslaught of auto traffic, especially in high-traffic destinations like Times Square.  So, perhaps they could take a lesson from Nanjing Road in Shanghai, China - and establish the main street for pedestrians only.

The first commercial road in Shanghai, being the busiest, most popular street in the city wasn’t enough.  Thus, a large

read more…

Checking out the SF Bay Area

Over the holiday break I revisited the San Francisco Bay Area to see what its cities had built to attract creatives and entrepreneurs in the eight years since I last lived there.

Here’s my basic assessment based on what’s under construction - the East Bay will have the greatest population gain in this group by far, San Francisco will continue to attract them as well albeit at a much slower pace, and the West Bay/Peninsula - the heart of Silicon Valley - will

read more…

Vancouver thrives by dispelling planning myths

Vancouver is often labeled as one of the most livable cities in North America, the latest honor being labeled as the world’s best city to live in by the Economic Intelligence Unit, as referenced by CNN yesterday.

What are its keys to success?  Larry Beasley, the city’s highly regarded co-director of planning, says it’s because Vancouver is counterintuitive in this Smart City Radio interview.  Here’s the myths of planning most cities follow, and

read more…

Not in the U.S.

Why not?  Count how many cars there are.  Zero.

Ironically, it’s designed by a U.S. firm, the sterling urban design firm, RTKL.  Unfortunately for the U.S., this development, called Huadi Kunshan New City, is envisioned for Kunshan, China.  So why is China so darn lucky?

Because most people in China walk rather than drive, developers are confident they can build a neighborhood de-emphasizing cars.  While this isn’t true for the average American citizen, such a neighborhood

read more…

The Pearl of Portland

The Pearl District in Portland, Oregon is one of the finest new urban redevelopments in the country, transforming a warehouse district into an artist district into a residential community.  Unfortunately, the new lofts are anything but affordable (the population doubled in the last couple of years), but the public places, streets, farmer’s market and galleries - all free to inhabit - are among the best in the city.

As the story goes, Thomas Augustine, a local gallery

read more…

The new Brooklyn

Brooklyn is no mere neighborhood in size.  The fourth largest city in the U.S. with a population of 2.5 million, it’s bigger than San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta and St. Louis combined, a statistic from this past Sunday’s New York Times focusing on the borough’s renaissance:  The New Brooklyns: The Great Awakening.  Check out Brooklyn visually from three residents’ points of view in the accompanying slide show.

How did a veritable city that was completely overshadowed by

read more…

A village of third places - in one block

The name says it all for this destination in Munich, Germany: CityQuartier F�nf H�fe, Town Center of Five Courtyards - a portal for year-round social interaction, concerts (pictured) and relaxing, rain or shine, summer or winter.

Right in the historic center of the city, this is Germany’s version of a downtown shopping mall, though with some radical differences from those found in the U.S.  In addition to the 168,000 retail s.f. of shopping

read more…

Global Austins

Global Austins are cities around the world that, like Austin, generate technology as well as talent, along with the culture, entertainment and quality of life to retain them.  The term was coined in Richard Florida’s new book, The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent.

As stated in the previous blog, the key is to understand the creative neighborhoods that catalyzed these cities and not to worship the city in its entirety, especially when it

read more…

Reader experience: What’s cool in Paris?

There are way too many cool places (here and overseas) that shouldn’t be overlooked, so it thrills me when someone’s willing to document such a destination. Here I present artist extraordinaire Laura Sanda, who experienced one of three up and coming neighborhoods in Paris featured in Budget Travel’s Nouveau Paris.

“I have a firm belief that the Metro map is tattooed somewhere in my brain, for while I cannot tell you what side my gas tank is on, I

read more…

Finally, a contemporary new town

The irony is that of the hundreds of new pedestrian-oriented towns being built, hardly any of them look remotely, well, new.  Most of them reflect the traditional styles of 1920s architecture, which is fine in the sense that much of that era produced some of the most beautiful towns in the country, but not so fine in perpetuating the myth that we can’t produce even more beautiful towns with modern design and materials?

I experienced what is perhaps a sign

read more…

If you haven’t been to Savannah…

You should.

This historic Georgia town, made pop culture famous by its prominent roles in Midnight in the Garden of Evil and Forrest Gump, has what is arguably the most beautiful squares in the country; a green, albeit slightly more auto-oriented version of Europe’s piazzas.  You instantly know where in the world you are, and that’s not very easy to do in 99.9% of our built landscape.

Not only that, but they’re also implementing a wireless downtown using

read more…

Project for Public Spaces: 20 best

One of the best resources for great public places is the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces, so when they announced their list of the 20 best North American districts, downtowns, and neighborhoods, I knew public life and entertainment would have much more weight than other lists.  They also list 20 great places abroad.

The places mentioned range from hip districts for creatives to quaint neighborhoods for retirees, but a common theme is that these places

read more…

Ann Arbor is the final stop in the CoolTown five-city tour, and while it integrates not one, but two main streets into the University of Michigan, it’s creative edge appears to be giving way to the words ‘trendy, swanky, upper class, pride, and bourgeois’, as spoken by the locally concerned who have taken an active interest in the future of the city, as well as student reviews, and would you believe an entire web site?

Ann Arbor has a lot of creative, inspired people (like Jim, Patricia,

read more…

If it wasn’t for the unrelenting, frigid winters, Burlington would be too popular for its own good.

We met with Erik, Peter, Elizabeth, Walker, John, Michele and James, and you can read about their thoughts throughout the next few blogs.  One things that stood out was that they were unanimous in saying that living in Burlington is a great place to meet people (and interesting ones at that) - if you meet one person, you’ll meet dozens more, and dozens of their friends.  I ran into three people

read more…

So of course, tonight we asked the University of Georgia students, especially the ones closest in association to the creative class...

The downtown is centralized, it has a sense of place, it’s different, it’s walkable, it has arty music scenes, a great country scene, bikes everywhere, it has a dense feel, it has people everywhere, the aesthetics are beautiful, it has diversity, a transient population, there’s a wide variety of live music throughout, it’s a liberal island, the streets and

read more…