Maryland’s first pedestrian-only street in several decades, Ellsworth Drive, was profiled in the previous entry, but it’s not the only one.  In Bethesda, a town at the edge of Washington DC, Bethesda Lane opened in June 2008. If Ellsworth Drive reminds people of Downtown Disney, then Bethesda Lane conjures up Universal Studios. It features 44,000 s.f. of retail distributed through 16 shops and restaurants, mostly chains and luxury items, topped with 180 luxury apartments.

It obviously does not appeal to the vast majority of creatives and it looks like a new stage set at Universal (though a very sharp looking stage set). However, it’s an extremely favorable sign of things to come as far as pedestrian-only streets go, all but considered a pipe dream as recently as five years ago.  Plus, it has free public events, lots of outdoor seating and provides a couple hundred alternatives to commute-intensive mcmansions. So no, the average person can’t afford to live or shop there, but at least they can find opportunities to linger.

Ok, so those who’ve been down Silver Spring’s Ellsworth Drive in Downtown Silver Spring feel like they’re in Downtown Disney, but the takeaway here is that this is Maryland’s first successful pedestrian-only district (on weekends) in decades.

Ellsworth is the lone pedestrian-only street in the 22-acre mixed-use Downtown Silver Spring redevelopment, including 440,000 s.f. of retail. It’s more of a suburban shopping mall with its large-scale national retailers, but it does have a triangular plaza (left of photo above and in map) with a multitude of outdoor dining options amid a smattering of local, independent restaurants. In fact, the buzz is that as chains leave town in the weakened economy, they’re being replaced by local independents.

Just click on Vote/Comment at the bottom of each entry! These stories are much more meaningful when followed by your feedback.

Why are large organizations so focused on maintaining their bureaucracy rather than providing what’s needed when it’s needed? That’s what Clay Shirky answers in his new book on crowdsourcing, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and his Smart City Radio interview focuses especially on cities. Some valuable lessons:

- It’s easy to create a new bureaucracy, and very hard to dismantle it.

- The first stage of crowdsourcing is sharing ideas. The second is doing something about it; collective action - “altering your behavior to synchronize your efforts with people who are altering their behavior to synchonize their efforts with you.”

- Within crowdsourcing, because the costs within the crowd of experimentation and failure are largely negligible, innovation and improvement happen much faster. “The cost of failure is so low, these systems actually progress much faster than their hierarchical managed counterparts, precisely because everyone learns much quicker what works and what doesn’t. If institutions did a better job of learning from their failures and also understanding that sometimes it costs less to try something than to sit around deciding whether it’s a good idea or not, it would have a hugely positive effect.”

In my experience this is probably the single most debilitating impediment in initiating a crowdsourcing project - convincing the project leader that they can’t spend so much time planning out what the crowd will or should do - just let them go and watch carefully.

When asked how he would initiate a large-scale crowdsourcing program, “Build a system that does two things at the same time - takes absolute any input from anybody anywhere and very quickly sorts the good stuff from the bad stuff. You can’t try and fliter that stuff in advance - you have to be able to sort after the fact.” He proposes a protocol where if you submit one idea, you have to rate three existing ones.

A popular item on many a creatives‘ wishlist is to see a car-dominated commercial street transformed into a pedestrian-only plaza brimming with outdoor diners. Some fortunate residents in NYC may not have to wait much longer.

Following a rather astounding recent track record in prioritizing pedestrians over cars, the NYC DOT (Department of Transportation) presented its latest and greatest, the NYC Plaza Program. When was the last time a Department of Transportation issued a statement like this: NYC DOT will work with community partners to create neighborhood plazas throughout the City. We will do this by transforming underused streets into vibrant, social public spaces.” It’s real, and it’s happening now.

The first round will award eight projects in any of NYC’s five boroughs by funding the redesign and redevelopment of the street into a plaza, including possible amenities such as tables and seating, trees and plants, lighting, public art, water features and drinking fountains. In addition, the NYC DOT will provide $50,000 each year for three years for a nonprofit to provide outreach, marketing and event planning. The deadline is August 19, 2008.

Looking forward to seeing the results, as well as hearing from other cities bold (and smart) enough to follow NYC’s lead.

There are ‘green festivals’, then there’s San Francisco’s second annual Bicycle Music Festival, a one day, 15 band, 7 festival stop, free music festival that uses zero cars, trucks or even electricity. How?

- The bands all carry their equipment via bicycle trailers.
- The audience arrives via bike, skate and foot. They then travel sequentially to each of the seven festival stops in different parts of the city.
- The 600-watt P/A system is pedal-powered, developed by Rock the Bike in Berkeley, which produces some pretty snazzy bike lights. They also cofounded the festival along with The Juice Peddler.

Check out more in their video.

Image source: 2008-06-21 Bicycle Music Festival (Set)

Many of us are now familiar with crowdsourcing, but the most often asked question is how it’s applied in the real world. Writer and web community creator Josh Catone explains the three categories of crowdsourcing, though I took the liberty of clarifying it further, followed by how it applies in the world of cool towns:

Creation: Developing a new product or business. Examples include Wikipedia and tools for creating new projects like Cambrian House and CrowdSpirit. This is the basis for CoolTown projects like crowdsourcing attainably-priced green condos or rooftop restaurant (pictured).

Prediction: Collective decision making. Examples include businesses that let crowds vote on isolated decisions, like Jones Soda’s labels and Kettle potato chip flavors, or finding gold. This would be the approach for determining which neighborhood to crowdsource a coworking site in, for instance.

Organization: Prioritizing what’s important, what’s not within a body of knowledge. Examples include digg, del.icio.us, Google. Google determines its results based on what people link to the most, while both digg and YouTube are self-organizing services based on what its users think is most popular. Organizing all that’s going on in the crowdsourced placemaking universe is one thing CoolTown Studios will be launching soon, following the precedent set by its Washington DC-based CreativesDC site. This is the easiest way to start crowdsourcing your life.

Image source: Restaurant in Melbourne, by Mark (LP).

If you’re wondering where creatives stay in the city known as the home of the happiest people in the world (Copenhagen, Denmark), it’d be Hotel Fox, no doubt.

In a rather bizarre venture with Volkswagen, an aging hotel was brought back to glorious life by commissioning 21 artists, illustrators, graphic designers, graffiti artists that decorated its 61 rooms in anything from Japanese Manga to neo-Baroque to Pop Art. The rooms come in T-shirt sizes (S, M, L, XL), and savvy guests choose rooms to fit their mood. Of course, you can rent an ipod or a bicycle.

What else can you ask for? It’s also near a train station and at the edge of Copenhagen’s nightlife, plus it’s part of a carbon-neutral program, naturally.

Thanks to Rasul Sha’ir of Vosica for the reference!

Manhattan is on a roll - first there’s Summer Streets where major streets are being closed to cars on August Saturdays, then talk of a bike sharing program, and now the rather mundane announcement that they’re turning two of four lanes on Broadway in Midtown into a pedestrian and bicycle zone - to be completed in mid-August 2008, permanently.

To be known as Broadway Boulevard between West 42nd and West 35th Street, the project will feature a Euro-style designated bicycle lane and a host of public gathering spaces that include cafe tables, chairs, umbrellas and planters.

Once again, the effort is being led by Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC DOT (Department of Transportation). All cities need to take note of this level of government leadership if they’re to establish their own pedestrian-friendly destinations.

Read more at NY Times: Closing on Broadway: Two Traffic Lanes.

If you’re a creative in Washington DC, then CreativesDC is just for you: “A beta community of free agents, entrepreneurs and creatives in DC, crowdsourcing places, events and scenes that inspire conversation.”

CreativesDC launched July 11, 2008 and its founding dozen members have already invited 100 of their fellow creatives (assume a 10% conversion rate) - that’s the power of community focused on a vision. By the end of July 15, the invite list will hit a thousand (again, a 10% conversion rate, resulting in a 100 new members in about a week) as local ‘gatekeepers’ organize a kickoff party on July 23. This is an example of the viral loop.

What’s the point? One longtime wistful request of the innovators in DC has been a forum to meet one another, even collaborate. What CreativesDC provides is not only an opportunity to provide that, but the means to create, as stated, the actual places (eg a design-oriented coworking site), events (eg monthly happy hours) and scenes (eg an active daytime entrepreneurial population) that represent those collaborations - via its groups. This can easily be replicated in other cities.