By popular request, here are what I feel are the top 20 articles among the 1400 on this site, influenced by current times. This will be constantly changing, especially as I rediscover previous articles and post new ones (in bold)...

Crowdsourcing and creatives…
The creatives: rengen, cultural creatives, creative class - Identifying the core market itself.
What is crowdsourced placemaking? - The most definitive definition.
The time is now to crowdsource the places you want - Get started now.

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What’s the big deal with how aesthetically pleasing a place is? Well, according to the Place and Happiness Survey, it’s the most important of any quality regarding what matters to people the most. Thus, within this understanding, we present Forbes Travel’s America’s Prettiest Towns, based on the following very subjective qualities used by the judges:

- exceptional, unique urban form
- organic
- haunting beauty
- picturesque
- how the towns makes one ‘feel’
- local character and real charm
-

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The Creatives Cities Summit 2.0 was held in Detroit, Michigan, October 12-15, 2008, the sequel to the first one in Tampa in 2004, hosted by Creative Tampa Bay. The purpose? Provide models for growing a creative economy. Why Detroit? It was more a case of Detroit needing the summit more than any other city, and by that token, having the most aggressive leadership to get there - see Michigan Governor Granholm’s Cool Cities Initiative. Still, creative is better demonstrated tangibly rather than

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The previous entry highlighted what 600,000 people thought of 25 cities based on several well-defined criteria in Travel + Leisure/CNN’s 2008 America’s Favorite Cities guide. This entry will focus on those sub-criteria that tend to matter to creatives.

People:
Diverse: New York, San Francisco, Washington DC
Athletic/active: Denver, Austin, Portland OR

Culture:
Live music bands: New Orleans, Austin, Nashville

Shopping:
Local boutiques: New York, San Francisco, Charleston
Art galleries: New

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After a while, listening to ‘experts’ tell you which are the best cities to live, work or play in can start to sound like white noise. However, Travel + Leisure magazine along with CNN, provide a vacation from top down lists with one of the best city comparison tools around based on you; the opinions of 600,000 people. Check out their 2008 America’s Favorite Cities guide.

What’s refreshing is that there’s no emphasis on ranking a top overall city, but only by the criteria that people actually

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Continuing our look at the best cities that are remixing, reinventing themselves, according to Best Towns 2008 from Outside magazine, here are five more, plus a number of honorable mentions:

Ithaca, New York - Conscientious innovation isn’t far off when you have Cornell University and Ithaca College as residents, and a median age of 22. The town is experiencing a green movement spearheaded by a new ecovillage, and the downtown is finally legitimizing the pedestrian-only district laid out a

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We’ve seen endless list of best places to live, work, walkable etc. etc., but here’s one that looks at the best cities that are remixing, reinventing themselves - Best Towns 2008 from Outside magazine.

Washington DC - Recently revitalized Adams Morgan, U Street, and Chinatown are attracting creatives in droves, recent mayors have brought strong leadership, and DC just introduced the first bike sharing system in the U.S. Plus the newly formed CreativesDC social network!
Chattanooga, TN - The

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Yes, it’s yet another city ranking. But considering that aesthetics matters most to U.S. citizens, it might be worth a look at BusinessWeek’s Top 10 Cities for Design in America (with a population over 500,000) conducted by RMJM Architects.

10 design-related categories include number of historic buildings, the public transit system, number of green buildings, size of the creative population/economy, architectural and design awards won, and interviews with over 1000 residents. So, the

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Ok, since Fast Company Magazine’s choice for their Fast Cities 2008 U.S. City of the Year (Chicago) and Global City of the Year (London) isn’t very earth shattering news, perhaps its more intriguing to look at their list of twelve Fast Cities, which aren’t so obvious. Fast Company btw, is the business magazine for the creatives (and why I’ve read every article of every one of their 126 issues).

Beijing, China - A booming economy and arts scene - you won’t think of China the same way after

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The internet will never replace a sense of community based on face-face relationships, but it’s progressing rapidly as far as being a more effective complement to facilitate that face-face sense of community.

First you had email listservs/mailing lists where everyone receives everyone else’s messages to the group, which quickly compared to spam, followed by online message boards, but required thousands of users to make it work.

Then along came Web 2.0 with MySpace and Facebook, which

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1300+ entries later (all archived for free here or via the Archives link to the right), let me for the first time provide an update on what the Categories to the right mean:

Attainability:  All things related to living and working affordably.
Beta Communities:  These are the crowdsourcing teams that literally make places happen.
Community Building:  What brings people together?
Cool Developers:  Creative triple bottom line developers.
Cool Places:  Accounts of cities and neighborhoods.

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While not every city can be classified as a recognized global city, one can take the spirit of its characteristics and apply it to becoming a global-minded neighborhood. This is especially relevant given that diversity is linked to economic growth.

The following are the elements of a global city, followed by how a neighborhood can apply its mentality:

- International, first-name familiarity - “Paris” (pictured), not “Paris, France”. Neighborhoods that don’t need the city’s name attached

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If you want to know the metropolitan areas with the greatest number of ‘walkable urban places’, this is a respectable list. However, if you want to know the metropolitan areas that are the most walkable urban places overall, this is not the list to look at (it counts Midtown in Manhattan as ‘one’ walkable urban place, and say, Reston, Virginia as ‘one’ walkable urban place, which is questionable unto itself, and with no weighted difference to account for it being 1/30th as dense) - otherwise

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‘Augmented reality’ - Experiencing future places… live

Many of us walk down a street with a vision for what it could be in the future - a congested street of noisy cars replaced by a pedestrian walk filled with outdoor diners, an abandoned warehouse transformed into shops and lofts; a parking lot as a green building…

Thanks to the field of augmented reality, others can experience that vision too. Augmented reality is best explained by watching the video above, or this one here - it

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Locavore - local resident who tries to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius.

At first blush, the reaction may be ‘who cares’? But if attracting job-producing progressive, creative, entrepreneurial people to your city is important it may be worth noting…

- Fewer companies have created more jobs in a shorter period of time than Google. So what do they name their 4000-employee cafeteria? 150, representing that its ingredients will come from within a 150-mile radius.

-

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If you’re trying to convince city and business leaders in your city to plan a more creative, people-oriented destination for current and future generations, it sure wouldn’t hurt to have them watch Contested Streets, a new film produced by Transportation Alternatives.

You can watch a few minutes of the 57-minute production here on YouTube, and I must say that the one second of footage at the 2:54 mark is almost surreal - why can’t more cities have scenes like that.  It should be no surprise

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If you want to get creatives excited about moving to your city, well yes, you need a city for them to get excited about. But after that, you need a video that captures the emotion of the creatives who already live, work and play there… and love it.

Here’s such a video from Adams Morgan in Washington DC, probably the most diverse neighborhood in the city, and one of the most international restaurant corridors anywhere. It also profiles the members of the Affinity Lab co-workplace, which leaves

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The previous entry profiled The 30 Fastest Cities to Work, Live and Play around the world, but what makes them fast, or does being a fast city even mean? The term comes from Fast Company magazine, and is essentially a city that attracts, well, fast companies, defined as the most creative, smartest, effective, innovative and as a result, fastest growing in single and triple-bottom line impact terms.

So, what makes a Fast City? According to Fast Company it takes three ingredients, not far off

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I guess it’s not a coincidence that the architecture magazine Architect, where you’d most likely find case studies of the kinds of buildings profiled on this website, would feature this site in its pages.

The new periodical has a regular column called Screen Capture (pictured) which highlights architecture-related websites, and CoolTown is presented in its June 2007 issue here.

My favorite part was being asked about the future role of architects, especially regarding how they relate to

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“Schools aren’t preparing students for jobs of the 21st Century.“ That’s the concern of John Seely Brown, a renowned leader in organizational learning, and Doug Thomas, professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and editor of Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media.

The same could be said that our current culture and business environment isn’t preparing us for communities of the 21st Century, at least not cool towns.

Why not?  Much of our current learning - at work or at

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By far, the most effective way to inspire city and business leaders to invest in cool places is to have them visit such places in person. Unfortunately, this is where the ‘rich get richer’ rule applies, as oftentimes the cities that would benefit the most often don’t have the budget to do so.

Google is doing their part via their latest innovation, starting with the ability to fly through Berlin in 3D, via their free application, Google Earth. Not only that, they’re preparing to allow you to

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The talent and assets (or at least access to them) for building places that raise the benchmark for quality of life and economic vitality already exist in your city. If you’re skeptical, maybe this story from Mavericks at Work will make you a believer…

Entrepreneur Rob McEwen purchased what many considered a fool’s decision - a 55,000-acre gold mine with no gold. Why did he buy it? Because it went cheap, and it was adjacent to a very productive mine.

A couple of frustrating years later,

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We’ve come to the final entry in this series of Made to Stick’s Six Principles of Sticky Ideas as it relates to building cool places...

The sixth principle is Stories. How will you get people to act, to implement, the ultimate goal of any idea. You would tell a story, and not just any story, but in reading the last several entries, you’ll know it would be a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story (notice the acronym, which is a bit cheesy, but easy to remember and

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Part five in looking at Made to Stick’s Six Principles of Sticky Ideas on how to build cool places...

The fifth principle is Emotion. Why should people even care? Perhaps it may help to first state what tends to trigger people into not caring: Too many statistics, abstract explanations (90% of what’s out there), not enough emphasis on self-interest, and surprisingly, not enough emphasis on self-interest as it relates to group-interest.

Why do people care about cool town beta communities? 

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Part four in looking at Made to Stick’s Six Principles of Sticky Ideas on how to build cool places...

The fourth principle is Credibility. Why should people believe you? How do you handle the skeptics? Are you providing the details, vivid statistics, a proven example or a testable credential (try before you buy) that help people accept your ideas as truthful?

How is the cool town beta community program credible, believable, legitimate? Sure, there are telling statistics from Dr. Richard

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