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 owner inspired the name

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Understanding the target market is imperative to building places that they would embrace, or in business terms, buy or lease.  Here’s a look into a ‘year in the life’ of a Chicago family man who decided to give up their only car.

His full account is here.  Here’s an excerpt:

“...Why not just turn our car in when the lease expires and see what it’s like? If it doesn’t work out, we can go lease a new car anytime we want. Meanwhile, we’ll save a lot of money…

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Let’s face it - creative urban development is costly, much more so than in suburbia, for reasons previously explained.  Land and parking provisions are simply too expensive for the private and public sectors to handle alone - which is why public/private partnerships (PPPs) accounted for $75 billion in real estate last year - ‘creative alliances’ if you will; meeting both financial and social bottom lines.  There are ways to do it right.  Here’s a CoolTown version of ULI’s Ten Principles for

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Tired of apartment buildings, strip malls and office parks?  How about a neighborhood of lofts and offices over some cool independent coffeehouses (like yesterday’s), cafes and pubs - a whole community of these places like the ones here in SoHo, Manhattan.  And of course, oh, about ten times less expensive.

That’s the vision more and more cities and investors have in store for many of us - human-scaled, mixed-use urban buildings with lots of daylighting (ie large windows), tall ceilings and

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Do the cafes and coffeeshops in your neighborhood have stories, soul… values?

Fast Company magazine did a little informal study of company values and found that “having at least some values of two words or more pumped up returns by 16% over the S&P, companies with all one-word values lost 2%, and Berkshire Hathaway, whose core values run some 5000 words, beat the S&P by 65%.“

So here’s a suggestion and litmus test if you’re opening up a new venue - do you have your values written out,

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Corporate funding for the arts dropped 48% in the last 15 years; local government support declined 49% in the last your years - yet downtown arts are thriving.  What gives?  Apparently, the neighborhoods are.

In Philadelphia, city center art galleries, musuems, performing arts, and theaters as well as artist-inspired nightclubs and downtown restaurants have helped establish a downtown population of 88,000.  In downtown Wilmington, DE, performing arts theatres, opera, contemporary arts and the

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We know cobblestone streets aren’t the best for driving on, but that probably means just the opposite for people.  Behavioral researchers from the Oregon Research Institute are proving it’s true.

Their studies show that people who walk on cobblestone streets enjoy significant improvement in balance, measures of mobility and blood pressure.  The stones seemed to serve as a vast community of massage therapists for the feet.  The surprising result was that the study lasted only 16 weeks. 

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What a waste that a beautiful school for kids by day becomes a closed-down building at night, especially if the spaces look like the ones in the last couple of blogs.

I blogged about this almost two years ago in Schools as Third Places, and the schools as community centers idea is becoming increasingly popular.  In fact, there is such an organization by the same name that focuses on this very trend.  Their first outstanding recognition goes to the John A. Johnson Achievement Plus Elementary

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So, there was evidence given yesterday that urban, city, downtown schools are getting better.

Why? How?

Some of the school administrative reasons are as follows:
- Better managed, more results-oriented school leadership, with progressive mayors and experimentation
- The No Child Left Behind Act that revealed the achievement gap among ethnic groups, resulting in educators getting much more serious about teaching minorities.

I think a new generation of parents should be given way more credit

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Ask just about any parent-to-be why they feel compelled to eventually leave the active, pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhood they desperately want to stay in and head for the ‘burbs… “It’s the schools.  The suburban schools are simply better.“

Could they finally be wrong?

- “This is no less than one of the biggest turnaround stories of any urban school system in the United States,“ Baltimore Martin O’Malley said, in light of improved test scores in his city and across the country.

- For

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