The previous entry highlighted what 600,000 people thought of 25 cities based on several well-defined criteria in Travel + Leisure/CNN’s 2008 America’s Favorite Cities guide. This entry will focus on those sub-criteria that tend to matter to creatives.

People:
Diverse: New York, San Francisco, Washington DC
Athletic/active: Denver, Austin, Portland OR

Culture:
Live music bands: New Orleans, Austin, Nashville

Shopping:
Local boutiques: New York, San Francisco, Charleston
Art galleries: New York, Santa Fe, Chicago
Vintage stores/flea markets: New Orleans, Charleston, Portland OR

Food/dining:
Ethnic food/cheap eats: New Orleans, San Antonio, New York
Cafes/coffee bars: Seattle, Portland OR, San Francisco
Farmers’ and specialty food markets: Seattle, Portland OR, San Francisco

Quality of Life & Visitor Experience:
Public transportation and pedestrian friendliness: Portland OR, Washington DC, Chicago
Affordability: San Antonio, Nashville, Minneapolis/St. Paul
Environmental Awareness: Portland OR, Seattle, Austin

Nightlife is well covered, and pretty much the same over the subcategories of cocktail hour/lounge scene, singles/bar scene, and late-night/club scene, and more representative of visitors rather than locals, as evidenced by Vegas being on top.

Seems like Portland shines pretty brightly, and you’ll get a good idea why if you do a search on ‘portland’ on this site!

Image: First Thursday Gallery Night, Pearl District, Portland, Oregon by thelizabeth

After a while, listening to ‘experts’ tell you which are the best cities to live, work or play in can start to sound like white noise. However, Travel + Leisure magazine along with CNN, provide a vacation from top down lists with one of the best city comparison tools around based on you; the opinions of 600,000 people. Check out their 2008 America’s Favorite Cities guide.

What’s refreshing is that there’s no emphasis on ranking a top overall city, but only by the criteria that people actually care about, listed below followed by the top three cities, in order, in that category:
People (attractive, friendly, intelligent, athletic/active, diverse, stylish): Austin, San Francisco, Seattle
Type of Trip (romantic escape, wild weekend, family vacation, relaxing retreat, active/adventure, cultural getaway): Honolulu, San Diego, San Francisco
Nightlife (cocktail hour/lounge scene, singles/bar scene, late-night/club scene): Las Vegas - though this is for traveling rather than local nightlife, the latter of which Vegas has been described as lacking by its creatives, New Orleans, New York
Culture (classical music, live music/bands, theater, museums/galleries, historical sites/monuments): New York, Washington DC, Boston
Shopping (luxury boutiques, local boutiques, art galleries, antique stores, vintage stores/flea markets): New York, Charleston, San Francisco
Food/Dining (destination restaurants, ethnic food/cheap eats, cafés/coffee bars, farmers’ and specialty food markets): New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle
Quality of Life & Visitor Experience (noteworthy neighborhoods, skyline/views, public parks and access to the outdoors, cleanliness, public transportation and pedestrian friendliness, traffic, safety, weather, peace and quiet, affordability, people-watching, environmental awareness): Portland, Oregon, Charleston, Austin
Holiday Travel (Thanksgiving, winter/Christmas, spring break, summer vacation): Honolulu, San Diego, Charleston

You can size up two cities at a time with their Compare Cities feature as well. Next entry we’ll look at some of the criteria that matter to creatives the most.

Thanks to Christian MacAuley of the award-winning Wordage (think ‘thesaurus on steroids’) for the reference!

Images: New Orleans’ French Quarters, Seattle’s Pike Place Market, San Diego’s coast

As a follow up to the previous entry, Portland Striving to be the U.S. Bike Capital”, the city held its Sunday Parkways on one day, June 22, 2008, where six miles of streets are closed to auto traffic on Sunday from 8 am to 2 pm. It’s Portland’s version of Bogota, Columbia’s weekly Ciclovia.

The video, produced by Streetfilms, and the imagery of the event, reminds me of a Simpsons episode where the childrens’ cartoon show (Krusty the Clown) went off the air and suddenly the kids had nothing they wanted to watch on TV. So there they were, playing outside, filling the playgrounds, the streets, the sidewalks, playing games, riding bikes, laughing, having fun. Of course, the show came back on the air and the playgrounds were once again desolate, which leads to this closing quote from the video…

“This is fantastic. As you can see here, we have everybody, the young children, older people. I think it’s spectacular that Portland is doing the sunday parkways. My only problem is I think it should be every Sunday. They need to do this every week, for the rest of the summer.”

Still, Portland was the first city to do it, ahead of New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

First of all, what’s cradle to cradle? It essentially means all waste is recycled, as opposed to cradle to grave, where waste is disposed into landfills. It’s referred to as waste = food, and going full cradle to cradle is a near impossibility at this point, but the 90,000 person city of Venlo in The Netherlands is going for it.

Fortunately, the country’s culture itself already provides some of the best precedents - notice the number of cars in the photo above, which is not an uncommon scene in Holland. That’s one of the reasons why the government and business leaders took the lead on transforming their town’s mission when they first heard about the concept in 2006.

The first step, a major one, is securing city-wide buy-in, and they seem to have accomplished that, really. From a TreeHugger article (though with a name like that...) documenting a recent visit, “Cradle to Cradle was everywhere, or rather, in everybody’s mouth since it is a little too early to see the practical results of this endorsement. From businessmen to young designers and even the bar keeper- everybody in Venlo knows about Cradle to Cradle and people are very enthusiastic about the new approach to making things.”

Assisted by cradle to cradle experts in architect William McDonough and professor Michael Braungart, the second step is figuring out how to work together to actually achieve cradle to cradle. It’s really not up to the town businesses and residents itself to invent new ways to recycle products that never were, so this is a global effort (which I would think would benefit immensely from crowdsourcing). However, given the technology, you can count on Venlo’s citizens to implement them. That says a lot.

Would you live in such a town? Also, post a comment if you find a website that tracks this effort!

Image: Venlo, The Netherlands by Louis XVII

While farmers and public markets are experiencing a renaissance across the U.S., the Viktualienmarkt (Victuals Market) in Munich, Germany provides a model of what a city should do if it wants to take the next step in establishing a regional destination for culture and commerce. Originating from a farmers market itself in 1807, the 5-acre market features 140 stalls, shops and cafes offering your usual market fare times ten, but in a much more elegant setting.

Here’s what makes it Germany’s most popular public market:

Open everyday on a central square
Not just on Saturdays, but all day on weekdays too until 8 pm, closed on Sundays. Since that means a permanent site, it’s been strategically sited on a picturesque square in the heart of the city.

Buildings and stalls are organized to create a place
Unlike most farmers markets where the stalls are temporary and have no relationship to the surrounding buildings, the Viktualienmarkt presents all of its venues as permanent fixtures establishing permanent outdoor rooms, which makes for a vastly festive, convivial dining scene.

Have you been to markets like this in your travels?

Thanks to Luke Graven for the reference.

Amid the biking craze in many cities around the world, if you’ve been biking around urban destinations lately, such as the DC neighborhood of Adams Morgan, you may find parking at a premium. In Japan, 700,000 people bike everyday, more than in the U.S., so one can imagine bike parking can be an unprecedented drag. Of course, the Japanese have already used their renowned technical ingenuity to not only solve this problem, but encourage even more people to bike.

The ward government of Edogawa invested $67 million to build a 9400-bike automated bicycle parking garage (see the video above) around its main commuter train station that allows you to both drop off your bike and pick it up in about 10 seconds. For those familiar with car and bike sharing, it involves the swipe of a magnetic card, which costs a mere $18/month.

It’s already resulted in a 20% spike in neighborhood bike use around the Edogawa station.

Btw, check out the ‘bike-friendly stairs’ in the video. They sure have got it going for bicyclists over there.

For a more extensive portrayal of the bicycling economy around the world, peruse the Washington Post article, For Bicyclists, a Widening Patchwork World.

Following the announcement of a green home crowdsourcing program in July 2008, Taurus Enterprise Group, led by president Gail Montplaisir, has agreed to see if the building pictured above can be redeveloped and crowdsourced into green condos that creatives can truly afford. We’re not talking about ‘affordability’ in quotations, we’re talking about what first-time home buyers, those with average salaries or even recent graduates can literally afford to pay a month in order to buy their own place.

Over the next two months, if there are enough interested people that are committed to crowdsourcing a green building with attainably-priced units that in turn helps Taurus secure their financing, you will witness if not be a part of the first crowdsourced attainably-priced green condo development in the U.S., if not the world. The building, which also includes offices (ready to go) and a to-be-determined ground floor tenant, is located in the H Street district that is fast returning to its vibrancy as a colorful retail entertainment destination.

What makes this a truly crowdsourced project is that there’s a huge demand for attainably-priced urban condos, much less green ones, across the country, and this provides a means of letting people do something about it on their own rather than waiting years if not decades for developers to listen to them.

If you’re interested in participating or keeping track of this project, check it out here. If you want to be notified when other beta communities arise for such buildings in Washington DC, join the GreenHomesDC group.

In the continuing more community less architect series, we take a look at Veterans Field in Silver Spring, Maryland, aka ‘The Turf’, pictured above. The nearly acre-sized lot was covered with a temporary turf field in the three-year interim period before construction began on a new civic building, but since then it has become the most popular gathering spot in the city.

Alas, July 2008 was its last month of existence, but it’s another example of the kind of urban space that people are longing for, the same kinds of places that have served as the hearts of communities for centuries - an empty stage surrounded by vibrant restaurants, cafes, markets and shops. What people aren’t looking for are places over-designed by architects, hired by developers that don’t understand what creatives desire, assigning permanent places for people to sit, eat and walk rather than letting them choose for themselves, and not only that, but be allowed to do things that may not appeal to architects and developres, such as throw a frisbee, watch a live band or revel in a flash mob.

Read more in the Washington Post and the American Society of Landscape Architecture, sharing the remorse for losing the unassuming, under-designed, yet overwhelmingly celebrated Turf.

The European piazzas are among the most celebrated urban spaces in the world, with each of these destinations having a rich history and story-filled past. Yet what makes them such beloved places is better explained by what they don’t have than what they do.

Visit any of these venerable ‘urban stages’ and you’ll find they nearly all have something in common in its space - nothing. No architectural walls, platforms and stairs, no trellises, central fountains and planters, not even trees and benches. What you will find instead is scores of people. What you’ll also find is the things they spontaneously bring with them instead, like foldable furniture (see the permanent breakfasts), blankets, drawing pads and instruments, though usually nothing but themselves. In the photo above, notice the organic clusters of people in the piazza, as well as the surrounding outside dining scene supported by waves of portable furniture.

However, over-designed plazas have become such an icon of decision-makers being out of touch with what people really want and need, that it’s appropriate to document this unfortunate trend via this ‘more community = less architect’ series. Please post examples for this ongoing series here on the CoolTown social network.

Image: Piazza Del Campo, Siena, Italy by ionk.

In May 2008 the NYC DOT (Department of Transportation) announced plans for the Broadway Boulevard, a pedestrianized street from 35th to 42nd avenue.

By the end of August 2008, a mere three months later, the pedestrian plaza is completed. That’s a rare sign of a government bureaucracy defying being a bureaucracy, opting for a more effective people-oriented decision-making process, such as their streets to plaza program.

The public-private partnership is a model of sharing responsibilities:
The private sector Business Improvement District: Plantings, sweeping/litter removal, supplemental furniture, programming
The public sector DOT: Planters (46 large, 126 small), roadbed surface treatment, starter kit of furniture

Image source: zodak