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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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Madison, Wisconsin regularly tops the Best Places to Live list, and even Forbes’s Best Places For Business.

However, the one thing that’s most apparent when experiencing Madison is that fact that pedestrians, or people rather, take priority over anything else.  For instance:

- The main street, State Street, is only 24 feet wide, and closed to only buses, delivery trucks and taxis.  What you see at night however, is people jogging, walking and bicycling, since the buses are few and far

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Davis Square: Creative, healthy, and fun

While Harvard and MIT each have excellent town centers nearby, the neighboring students at Tufts University enjoy probably the best combination of atmosphere, entertainment and true affordability at Davis Square in Somerville, among our vists to the top four Greater Cambridge squares.

It had the most habitable square of any of the Cambride squares, where people could study, read, meet for lunch or play a game of cards.  It’s Somerville Theater is the

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Inman Square: Isolated, but homey, simple

Inman Square is for the ‘quiet creatives’, those who want a slower pace, but still be able to meet interesting people in innovative third places.  That’s significantly achieved by its location away (but not too far away) from any university or subway stop.

Inman is similar in description to Central Square as far as venues and urban design (it is for the most part a four to five block main street).  Intimate best describes Inman - the restaurants are

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The live music hangout in Cambridge, MA is in Central Square, the place to be for MIT students.  It also has one of the most popular coffee houses (1369 Coffee House), co-op markets and Economy Hardware - where Target meets Ikea meets Home Depot in a small package on your neighborhood main street.

Unfortunately, the main street here is long and continuous, 50’ wide vs. the 36’ wide streets in Harvard Square, meaning the place feels more like pedestrians are secondary to a five-lane street

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First stop on our five-city tour?

A local pub of course.  In order to know where to go, my associate and I had to ask the locals: Ben and his friend, Deborah, and Jason, followed later by George, Kara and Russ.  Although our heads were swimming with newfound facts and insights, we were able to identify four must-see places:

Harvard Square:  Although this was on our list and the most active, architecturally-rich place in Cambridge, we didn’t realize it had turned into a ‘giant shopping

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The 5-town CoolTown tour

Over the next five weeks, CoolTown Studios will be visiting five of the coolest towns in the North and Midwest in order to help shape the vision of future towns in the same area.  Which ones should they be?

Cambridge, Massachusetts - The 23rd largest economy in the world and host to Harvard and MIT, this direct neighbor to Boston has long been a mecca of nightlife, culture and entrepreneurship.

Athens, Georgia - The near legendary destination often described as the

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Silicorn Valley - What makes Fairfield, Iowa so cool for entrepreneurs?

They know entrepreneurs.  Period.  Here’s proof:

A true economic gardening environment
- 20% State Tax Credits for Iowa Investments
- $60 million available locally; $1.3 billion statewide
- State of Iowa and City of Fairfield - Pro-Economic Development
- Over $200 Million Invested in Fairfield Companies since 1990
- Headquarters City for 50 Companies

Culture and Amenities - CoolTown Entertainment
- Lively Music, Dance

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Passing through Niagara-on-the-Lake

I happened upon the quaint little town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada today, and understood why the locals talked it up so much.

While it’s not necessarily a CoolTown per se since it’s not very affordable, there’s some very cool things happening there.  I didn’t notice a single national chain on the entire main street, as all the merchants were unique Mom & Pops. 

The town was very walkable.  There seemed to be a fair amount of offices and

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The Next Small Town Boom Towns

The other side to The Next Boom Towns? story is the focus on small towns (

<1 million population).

Because of their size, they have to be much more innovative than the big cities that already have a headstart, and it shows:

#1 on the list is

Boulder, CO.  Not only does it have some of the greatest recreational amenities anywhere, but it boasts one of the best-looking (at night), most-active small town downtowns in the U.S.

#2 is Fort Collins, CO.  I’ve never been there (comments

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The Next Boom Towns?

Coincidentally enough, the magazine closest in content to Fast Company is Business 2.0 (though not nearly as innovation-focused), and their cover story this month is The Next Boom Towns?.

It has the usual high-tech big cities at the top in terms of job and population growth and median salary increase:  Raleigh-Durham, NC; San Jose, CA; Washington, DC; Austin, TX, Atlanta, GA… but of course you already knew this

What’s not factored in is, are people actually happy? 

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