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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That’s the headline of this week’s BusinessWeek article, reflecting the fact that subways are the ‘new hybrids’, the ultimate status symbol of being a progressive major urban city.

According to a VP at Alstom, one of the largest transit car builders in the world, “You have in some cases a prestige issue, which is more the case in young cities in need of an image. Unless funding is an issue, cities usually will spring for a subway. The tramway [light rail] has a very old image of the 19th

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Speaking of closing down streets in the two previous entries, several months ago I profiled how El Paso, Texas began blocking off several miles of major roads to cars every Sunday, allowing only cyclists and pedestrians. Believe it or not, the primary reason was that the city wanted to shed its reputation as being one of the four fattest in the U.S.

The wildly popular event is known as Ciclovia, but the original Ciclovia and inspiration come from Bogotá, Colombia in South America, with 2

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As profiled in the previous entry, Buenos Aires’ bohemian neighborhood of San Telmo becomes a pedestrian-only arts district (the Feria) on Sundays, and I thought I’d provide a photo of the crowd favorite wind-blown ‘live art’ couple I mentioned in that story.

It’s not like you see this kind of art in every neighborhood, but perhaps it’s worth looking at why San Telmo is a popular host for not only this weekly version of live art, but many others.

- The neighborhood-wide, half-mile long arts

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Six days of the week this street (Defensa) in the bohemian neighborhood of San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina is full of cars, adding to the city’s reputation as the second noisiest in the world (next to New York).

However, every Sunday it’s a remarkably different place when what seems like at least half a mile of the street is closed to auto traffic and replaced completely with people, as you can see.  In fact, there were so many people walking through the streets that it felt like they just

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Believe it or not there are still parties out there that argue against higher-density developments built around transit stations, predicting they will cause traffic congestion as a result of more housing units present.

Thankfully, research for the Transit Cooperative Research Program provides some evidence for the logic that assumes fewer auto trips will result simply because people will take transit or walk more often, and drive less. The numbers are pretty convincing proving this is the

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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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