Here’s a ‘looking at the bright side’ perspective for iPhone users in New York City and San Francisco that don’t like cars: The worse your iPhone reception, the more likely you’ll have a pedestrian-only plaza.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, it’s so widely known that New York City and San Francisco have spotty iPhone reception that Stephen Cobert on the Cobert Report, based in New York, joked that the one thing the iPad and iPhone have in common is that you can’t make phone calls on

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One of the most dangerous cities for pedestrians will soon become one of the safest.

Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif commissioned the country’s housing ministry in the fall of 2009 to choose an international firm via competition that to work with a local one in planning the transformation of a noisy, car-congested downtown (where residents refer to crossing streets as a sport, or for nostalgists, a video game) into a pedestrian-only district. See rendering of their proposal above. The

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The first thought may be when looking at this photo may be, ‘So what, it’s a Safeway!‘ But there’s more to the story here from both a placemaking and local independent retail point of view. It’s about a shifting of priorities for large companies, prioritizing people and community over cars and product.

Placemaking: What used to be on this site was your typical single story Safeway with a large surface parking lot in front of it, like you see in suburbia. The problem was, this is located in

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What will our cities look like in 2030 when we’ve run out of oil? The Our Cities Ourselves exhibition (June 24-Sept 11, 2010), a program of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy provides an intriguing answer to that question by matching ten of the world’s top urban designers with ten of the world’s most dynamic cities. The general theme? From the exhibition…

“In the middle of the 20th century, cities across the U.S. were redesigned to accommodate the car. As people

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What are the coolest, discovered or undiscovered places locally and around the world that will inspire what our neighborhood and cities will look like in the near future? The answer partly lies in our collective experiences. Under development for a year now, a site for crowdsourcing the best of those experiences is finally up at Cooltown Places. See the Cooltown Places button at the top right of this site.

The mission? “Crowdsource a library of favorite places from around the world to inspire

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That’s the growing sentiment among Gen Yers, those in their teens and twenties, as evidenced by the graph above, provided in the Advertising Age article, Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture?

Some may argue that many states raised the minimum age for driver’s licenses, but as you can see above, the claim doesn’t hold true for those 18 and 19. Others cite the economic downturn for the drop in numbers, but in many ways, the downturn marks the difficulty in a massive shift

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In the industrial economy people worked in factories. In the services/information economy people worked in office parks. In the creative economy, people are working in downtowns. Rod Stevens of Spinnaker Strategies summarizes this trend quite nicely in The New Urban Workplace.

He mentions the suburbia to city downtown shift of Microsoft and Expedia in Seattle, American Eagle in Pittsburgh, AT&T in Atlanta, and Target in Minneapolis. He also highlights how these companies are recycling

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It’s not the first bike sharing system in the U.S. (which is SmartBike in Washington DC with 120 bikes and 10 stations), but the B-Cycle bike sharing program in Denver with 400 bikes and 40 stations was the largest at its April 22, 2010 launch (Nice Ride with 1000 bikes and 75 stations in Minneapolis now owns that distinction as of June 10, 2010) and definitely the most tech relevant. It’s also the first one designed and developed in the U.S.

What makes B-Cycle so unique?

- Three innovative

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We all know there’s no way someone’s city ranking is going to communicate which city is ‘the best’. However, it may be helpful to provide a series of them, based on a diversity of criteria, that starts to give us at least a sense of which cities tend to be more appealing to cultural creatives and those in the creative workforce.

Here’s a look at some of these recent rankings…

Fast Cities 2010
Link. Fast Company magazine’s annual take on which cities are ‘blending the best and boldest ideas

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Now there’s a term you don’t hear very often, but you’re going to. Transparent real estate development. It’s a necessary first step towards open source development, which is when people not only get to see what’s going, but get to participate. This in turn is key for crowdsourced placemaking, when people determine what places they’re passionate about creating with others, and do so.

One of the most effective forms of transparency in real estate development is letting people know what’s going

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