If we can hold onto a little bit of hope that there’s some truth to the notion that right-brainers will rule this century, let’s take a look at how the six main aptitudes of right-brain-directed thinking, aka the ‘Six Senses’, can be used to advance crowdsourced placemaking.

1. Design to complement function. If there’s one thing lacking in modern streetscapes, it’s design. Everyone knows of stumbling onto a strikingly beautiful interior of a building after being misled by a less than

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While they weren’t brand new cars, Oprah did leave 4500 copies of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Dan Pink on the chairs of the graduating students she was addressing (Stanford 2008). Why?

In her words, “Pink, a former chief speechwriter for former Vice President Al Gore, presents a convincing argument that our country is entering a new era—the so-called conceptual age—during which right-brained skills such as design and storytelling will become far more crucial

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So here’s a scene… five fellow entrepreneurs having a spontaneous coworking session at someone’s home, and I decide to use the group to crowdsource the blog entry for today - here’s the result…

How crowdsourcing created a coworking opportunity in Arlington, Virginia.

Back in November 2008, I gave a presentation of the content on this site to a group of government and business leaders in Arlington (Leadership Arlington), which motivated an initiative to launch a crowdsourcing community of

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Introduced almost a year ago, the NY Plaza Program (a CoolTown Top 20 post) promised to award eight projects in any of NYC’s five boroughs by funding the redesign and redevelopment of the street into a plaza. The winners have finally been announced, and there are nine of them. Check out detailed descriptions of the winners on the this New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) web page.

Brooklyn
1. Fulton Street & Marcy Avenue - Street narrowing to create 8000 s.f. of new

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What are the most walkable neighborhoods in the U.S., objectively speaking?  Walk Score presents their Walkers’ Paradise of the 138 most walkable neighborhoods in the U.S., based on the number of surrounding retail businesses and amenities as calculated by its google-run system.

Nineteen of the top 27 are in New York City, 33 of the top 50.  San Francisco is second with six in the top 50.  Here’s the top 10, followed by the most walkable neighborhood in each of the other cities in the top

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While Fast Company magazine crowned Seattle in their annual Fast Cities 2009 series, they listed twelve other cities that need to be recognized for their individual innovations.

Chicago - Last year’s winner, it’s I-Go Car Sharing program ties public car sharing to its transit system with one ‘Smart Card’.
Cleveland, Ohio - Their Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland initiative seeks to reclaim abandoned suburban lots back to nature.
Tucson, Arizona - It’s Healthy Tucson Initiative will

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Each year Fast Company magazine lists their favorite cities as far as generating “smarts, foresight, social consciousness, and creative ferment”. Seattle, Washington tops the list their Fast Cities 2009 this year (Chicago and London were #1 last year), while Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Tucson in the U.S.; Taipei, Taiwan; Vancouver, Canada; and Malmo, Sweden were singled out for their innovations.

What’s the sign of a great city?  Check out

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Cleveland, Ohio’s Historic Warehouse District is a model example of shifting from the declining industrial, manufacturing economy to the high-growth, economically sustainable knowledge economy.

The district is Cleveland’s first neighborhood and downtown’s oldest commercial center, an industrial center from the late 1800s through the middle of the 1900s until manufacturing declined across the country and businesses left. As is common, artists began inhabiting the buildings in the early 1980s,

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