What we do

Cooltown Studios is the only blog exclusively focused on crowdsourced placemaking (see FAQ here), that is, sourcing crowds to create community-oriented places people love. It’s a free public service (including all 1600+ archived entries, each with a unique image) committed toward building inspiring triple-bottom-line places to live, work, learn and play.

For implementation, check out Cooltown Beta Communities, a consulting firm which applies crowdsourced placemaking to natural

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Locavore is the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year - a local resident who tries to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius.

As of December 14, 2007, there’s now a place in the U.S. for a local resident who tries to buy only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Located in the hip Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, Urban Rustic, a 1200 s.f. grocery store and cafe will be stocked primarily with that in mind. It shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the shop’s

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That’s ‘Q’ is in ‘quarter’, as in the newly renovated Gateway Quarter for Urban Living in Cincinnati’s once down-and-out Over-The-Rhine neighborhood.

The Over-The-Rhine neighborhood suffered a population loss from 40,000 to under 5000, but the 70-acre, 100-loft, indie-retail-driven Gateway Quarter looks to reverse that trend soon.

Much of the renaissance can be credited to the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC), a nonprofit developer funded by some seriously capitalized

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So where do the creatives in Seattle go to cowork when all the other options seem less than fabulous?

As of November 1st, many of them are heading over to Office Nomads, a 5000 s.f., 40-member much-larger-than-usual shared workplace in Capitol Hill, Seattle’s walkable, diverse counterculture mecca. Considering there are 20 million ‘personal businesses’ in the U.S., they’re increasingly not alone in their quest.

Founded by young entrepreneurs Jacob Sayles and Susan Evans, Nomads features:
-

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Maybe these refrains from Seattle entrepreneurs regarding office space, quoted in sound familiar…

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What does $200 million have to do with cars?  Absolutely nothing if you were in London’s famous West End shopping district on Saturday, December 1st, known as Shop West End VIP (Very Important Pedestrians).

That’s because 600 retailers on Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street were open only for pedestrians, billed as the world’s largest area ever to be dedicated to shopping for the day. Not surprisingly, many retailers reported the best sales day of the year.

That’s just the

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Gear Factory, Syracuse, NY
Developer Rick Destitio is renovating a historic 1910 five-story gear factory building into a artist-musician live-work center via a beta community now consisting of 170 of the city’s most progressive creatives. They’re now working on the floor plans for the 65,000 s.f. structure and will start taking reservations next month. If you live in Syracuse and want to be a future tenant or patron, join the effort here.

Elements, Washington DC
A VIBE-sponsored beta

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The last in this three part series interpreting Gapingvoid’s How To Be Creative tips as it relates to cool towns and beta communities...

21. Selling out is harder than it looks. Don’t water down/commercialize your ideas before you absolutely need to - you may be doing everyone a disservice. Our beta communities have a ‘Building Exterior/Interior Image Brainstorm’ where we encourage everyone to submit whatever place in the world inspires them.

22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself. In other

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Continuing our look at Gapingvoid’s tips on How To Be Creative as applied to cool towns and beta communities, from the previous entry...

11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether. Keep in mind ‘crowds’ as defined here means ‘markets’. Don’t try and stand out by attempting to build an even better place and then selling it, but avoid that model altogether and co-develop it with people who share your values and principles, and it’ll already be sold when it’s built.

12.

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You know creativity = economic growth, so how do you get more creative? Here’s an alternative look, How To Be Creative, from none other than an extremely creative resource, gapingvoid, “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. The site has a full description of the following tips, but here’s a cool town, beta community-oriented interpretation of it:

1. Ignore everybody. People often can’t handle good, original ideas for great places until you build them, so ignore them until then.

2.

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