Many of Google’s HQ employees in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, California fit the creatives vibe. So it’s encouraging, though probably not surprising, that the company is prompting the City to invest in sustainable development and a vibrant community in the area surrounding its campus. In other words, Google is looking out for its employees beyond the workplace, and it’s not only smart, it’s a sign of the times. Goodbye office park, hello urban village.

Check out the following letter excerpt

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If a cell is defined as the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism, if a building were an organism, its rooms would probably be its cells (‘cellula’ is Latin for a small room). For a city though, it may be more helpful to associate cells with its blocks, fitting perhaps since a cell is often described as the building blocks of life. From the air, a city’s blocks resemble cell structure more than its buildings.

Anyway, accepting this analogy to make a point, this is what makes

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If you think it’d be cool to live in a building like this, you’re probably not alone. The building plays music through its instrumental drainpipes when it rains, and is part of the a series of whimsical courtyard buildings in Dresden, Germany known as the KunsthofPassage.

However, why don’t we see more creative, humanistic buildings like this, and what can we do about it?

First, the short term bad news. The vast majority of real estate investment dollars won’t touch this kind of project

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It’s official, as Mayor Bloomberg of New York City announced on February 11, 2010 that Times Square (and Herald Square) are permanently car free, almost a year after first announcing the plan. See the press release here.

Mayor Bloomberg, “In this day and age if you go around the world, all the other great cities have already tried to reduce the number of cars on their streets and convert some of the open spaces into space for other people.“

“Three-fourths (76%) of New Yorkers surveyed think

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What would a car free city be like? DC residents got a taste of that when the city experienced record snowfalls in early February of nearly five feet, the most since 1898. Just about the only thing shut down were the cars. Instead, the city was alive with people in the streets like no other day.

As you can see below, the local coffeehouse was packed, and the buzz of conversation was a few notches higher than usual. Now you may be wondering, what about other cities that have significant

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That essentially captures what New York’s Brooklyn Bowl is all about.

Bowling. Robert Putnam’s best-seller lamented that the social capital in the U.S. was one the decline as we were ‘bowling alone’ more often. While his measure of social capital may be misleading, maybe Brooklyn Bowl’s founders took his comments to heart, as it’d be difficult to bowl alone with a live music venue, restaurant, lounge and ongoing events present. Convergence is what creatives are used to, though not the $40-$50

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As creatives are increasingly preferring a world beyond cars in natural cultural districts that function more like Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Britannica, bureaucracies both corporate and government are largely stuck in management models of the industrial age that will slow the transition on their end.

Enter the government of Geneva, Switzerland and a tri-partisan 2-1 City Council vote to close 200 streets to cars. Or as Geneva’s council member Fabienne Fischer states, “It’s not really to

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