There’s no better body of knowledge than history when identifying the right buildings, neighborhoods, cities and even countries to invest in, especially when your scope is 13,000 years. That’s what biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer Jared Diamond provided in his mind-boggling Pulitzer Prize winner, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
Not that anyone can condense 13,000 years into a 400-page into fleeting blog entries, but here are the basics as best as I can
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For those who may be overwhelmed by the eccentric, wild and entirely unconventional theme, there’s still a lot to admire about New Islington, a new $460 million, 29-acre, 1400-home urban village redevelopment within central city Manchester, England.
One of its main objectives is to be a benchmark for environmentally sustainable development, to “influence the homebuilding industry and to encourage higher standards of innovation and energy efficiency. Energy will be generated on-site and homes
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Many of us wish we could live our yoga. The founders of Sage Spa Living felt the same way, and invested in bringing it closer to reality with Stillwater, an urban residence in Helena, Montana. From their press release, “The founders have the simple vision of changing the world, one guest at a time by inspiring personal health and promoting community stewardship.
While it does cater to the high-end, it provides a progressive model for integrating health with architecture and daily living
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CNN Money describes what they see as the next real estate boom, especially for younger people**, “You know all of the 150 or so souls in the village; you see them at the market where you pick up a box of locally-grown produce once a week. You see half of them in the morning as they board the commuter train for school or work in the city; the other half are the network warriors who work from home or, on warm days, use the free Wi-Fi in the village square.“
The article cites two studies
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Automakers build fully-working computer models of the cars they’re about to build, and the same applies for thousands of the products we buy. The social networking phenomenon is growing like crazy, with MySpace alone at 68 million members. At the same time, we’re delving deeply into a customer-driven economy. It’s only a matter of time before the three intersect, and we’re already seeing a preview among the 10-20 million people actively participating in creating their own online
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There’s no shortage of rhetoric on building urban eco-villages, but not much gets pass that stage. The proposal for New Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California is one of the few that has.
Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit, a quasi-government agency formed in 1999 to establish a 75-mile commuter corridor (Cloverdale to San Francisco), took the lead with a 5.4-acre site they own at a Santa Rosa train station. The sent out an RFP (request for proposal) and awarded it to a development team that
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One reason why more of us don’t walk down the street each day and exclaim, “Wow, I’d love to live/work in that building!“, is because we’re missing adventure capitalists when it comes to real estate.
Adventure capitalist - An entrepreneur who helps other entrepreneurs financially, and often plays an active role in the company’s operations. It’s a more defined role than a venture capitalist; someone who invests in a business venture, providing capital for start-up or expansion, thus looking
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There’s no better way to present the kinds of communities, buildings and venues that the creative class, cultural creatives, influentials, and free agents want than to actually build or revitalize them. There is an emerging group of innovative developers in the CoolTown network that are willing to help cities and neighborhoods realize their vision to become compelling destinations, but the private sector finance industry has not caught up.
As a result, the most innovative developments that
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Really? So documents this Newsweek article (part of a series presented in the last entry), Wildlife: Cities Are the New Jungles...
“You can take any big city and find more species, more diverse habitats than in just about any national park or nature reserve,“ biologist Josef Reichholf, Munich Germany’s Technical University.
It’s actually the lack of bio-diversity found in extensive mono-culture, chemically treated, single-crop farms that in turn support fewer species. Cities meanwhile
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This week’s (July 3-10) Newsweek International focuses on cities, with no less than 13 full stories from the 10 fastest-growing cities to an essay by Richard Florida to how cities make a better wilderness than the countryside.
The cover story features the 10 ‘hottest cities’ above 750,000 people in each part of the world, that the United Nations recognizes as the fastest growing. However, what the report fails to say is how sustainable the growth is. Many of the cities on the list are
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Downtown Migration |
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