There are a slew of ‘most walkable city’ rankings, but the one by Walk Score (profiled previously) is as scientific and practical as they get.  Walk Score is a web-based service that scores the walkability of an address on a scale of 1 to 100 based on access to amenities, groceries, transportation, etc., so it wasn’t difficult for them to map out every single address and display it graphically (the more green, the more walkable, red being the least).

The Walk Score rankings:

1. San Francisco, CA
2. New York, NY - Maps all five boroughs, otherwise Manhattan would easily be #1.
3. Boston, MA
4. Chicago, IL
5. Philadelphia, PA
6. Seattle, WA
7. Washington DC
8. Long Beach, CA
9. Los Angeles, CA - I know, but they’re looking at central L.A., not greater L.A. The same for SF.
10. Portland, OR

Check out the walkability ‘heat maps’ for all of them here.

Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s main street, is pedestrian-only on four Saturdays from July 19th to August 9th, 2008, noon to 7 pm. Check it out at Wiliamsburg Walks. Those in the know are aware this is a NYC DOT led effort through their streets to plazas program, though heavily supported by the local businesses and residents - some quotes:

“It feels a lot more peaceful, people are spread across the sidewalk and road, vs everyone crammed onto the sidewalk.”

“Definitely good for business, brings people here, now we get more customers, new customers, people try us out.” Erica Goepel, Business manager

“Tables out, people hanging out in the street… fantastic!”

“When they find out it’s just a fair and it’s whatever they want to make it, they get really excited and ask questions. Can I bring a chess set? Can I bring a picnic? The answer is yes, it’s your street, it’s your space, it’s your happening.” Teresa Toro, Community Board

“We hope that the community wants to see it happen again. Whether it happens again next summer or extended… the end goal for a number of us is that it can be done permanently on Saturdays, and then maybe be a permanently closed pedestrian street one day.” Business owner Jason Jeffries.

Up until recently, crowdsourced placemaking only made it to the front page of this website. Sunday, July 27, 2008, was a seminal moment as it hit the front page of the fifth largest newspaper in the U.S., the Washington Post in the article Online, a Community Gathers to Concoct A Neighborhood Eatery. The story, written by food writer Jane Black, is focused on the crowdsourcing of a green, healthy, education and community-oriented restaurant in Washington DC called Elements, which has been profiled here a few times.

I actually think this is one of the best crowdsourcing articles for a number of reasons:
- It quotes Jeff Howe, the person who popularized the term crowdsourcing and has a book coming out very soon.
- It quotes a New York-based restaurant consultant. You can’t get much more qualified than that.
- It quotes two of the crowdsourcers; the future restaurant customers. When was the last time you got to read about what they think?
- It quotes, ahem, yours truly, and the owner, Linda Welch, which leads to my favorite part of the article:

“When Welch told him about her plans, Takemoto suggested crowdsourcing the restaurant. “I said, ‘Great!’ “ Welch remembers. “ ‘What the hell is that?’ ”

How do you top Maryland’s first pedestrian-only street in several decades and its first pedestrian-only mixed-use lane? Easy, its first real piazza, which we profiled while in the planning stages here.

The $360 million, 15-acre Rockville Town Square has literally become the city’s center stage overnight, hosting concerts, movies, a farmer’s market and even a rock climbing wall. Being in the space feels right - it’s like an outdoor room, enclosed on four sides, filled with outdoor dining tables and trees that will transform the place as they mature. Two blocks from Washington DC Metro/subway, it features 108,000 s.f. of restaurants and shops plus a 100,000 s.f. library, with 644 condominiums in three stories above.

While far from having a true creative, organic vibe because it was built all at once involving one developer, thus the predominance of national chains, this is a major step forward toward seeing one of these within a natural cultural district.

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)