It starts out as a vastly familiar story. As the industrial economy grew and manufacturing jobs moved to the outskirts, many of Wichita, Kansas’ historic downtown buildings were boarded up, with vacancy rates up to 70%. Now an evolution to a knowledge-based economy is bringing people back to the city center, and as we know, the creatives will seek out the natural cultural districts first.

The premiere natural cultural district in Wichita (which may surprise you in that it’s the 51st largest city in the U.S.) is Old Town, the historic downtown district spanning 20 blocks of brick-lined streets. What was once the aforementioned abandoned zone of buildings is today the downtown’s hot spot, with public plazas and loft residences (pictured), vibrant street life and bustling restaurants and nightlife venues.

Following the successful formula of starting with restaurants first, the city then enacted a TIF district to re-invest taxes back into the sources that generated them, followed by a partnership with the county to invest $4 million for street improvements, brick paving, boardwalk preservation and the restoration of the building for the new farmer’s market.  This also included two large public plazas for civic events and social networking.

Housing developers followed with the first mixed-use residential loft development in Old Town, Mosley Street Place, then spurring 40 condominiums, 160 apartment conversions, more than half of which were attainably priced, a restoration of what is now the Hotel Old Town and the Old Town Warren Theatre, and an Old Town Square Addition (pictured) featuring mixed-use buildings with shops, offices, apartments, green public space, a splash park, a new CityArts gallery… you get the idea.

Image: Old Town Plaza, Wichita, Kansas by Keith Wondra.

On July 15, 2007 Paris launched the world’s largest bike sharing system with 10,000 bikes (now 20,000), inspired by the same system in Lyon, France, which inaugurated May 2005. On August 13, 2008, Washington DC launched the first bike sharing system in the U.S., albeit modestly with 100 bikes. Just about every major city is now considering a bike sharing system, so now’s a good time to have found this concise video explaining how the bike sharing system works, with some energetic motion graphics and music that capture the progressiveness of its intended population. You gotta feel the vibe in order to get why people want this. If only the narrator could lose the lilt…

As is now well known in bike sharing circles, the system is financed by an advertising corporation in return for the city allowing them to run ads in public transit spots, which also shares in the revenue. According to wikipedia, in Paris, the ad firm JCDecaux paid start-up costs of about $115 million, employing 285 people full time to operate the system and repair the bikes. The city receives all revenue from the bike sharing program plus a fee of about $4.3 million a year. JCDecaux is allowed to advertise on half of the 1628 city-owned billboards, the other half reserved for public-interest ads.

Read previous entries on DC’s SmartBikeDC and Paris’ Velib bike sharing programs.

Would you pay $40/year to use a bike sharing system like this? The first 30 minutes are free.

The Creatives Cities Summit 2.0 was held in Detroit, Michigan, October 12-15, 2008, the sequel to the first one in Tampa in 2004, hosted by Creative Tampa Bay. The purpose? Provide models for growing a creative economy. Why Detroit? It was more a case of Detroit needing the summit more than any other city, and by that token, having the most aggressive leadership to get there - see Michigan Governor Granholm’s Cool Cities Initiative. Still, creative is better demonstrated tangibly rather than through policy.

Perhaps it’s helpful to highlight the baby boomer-oriented keynote speakers that represent the content of the summit:

John Howkins - Author of The Creative Economy and proponent of intellectual property laws.
Richard Florida - Creativity economist and author of Rise of the Creative Class, Flight of the Creative Class, and Who’s Your City?
Bill Strickland - Based in Pittsburgh, one of the most extraordinary community organizers of our time, especially for centers that train people in creative professions.
Tom Wujec, Autodesk - Author of Return on Imagination: Realizing the Power of Ideas, an expert in visual communication, demonstrated via capturing the entire conference.
Doug Farr - Author of Sustainable Urbanism, and the green development expert for the event.
Ben Hecht, President/CEO, Living Cities - Founder of One Economy Corporation, assisting 150,000 low-income people throughout the world.
Charles Landry, COMEDIA UK - Author of The Art of City Making, based on The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators.
Carol Coletta, President/CEO, CEOs for Cities - Host of the weekly public radio show Smart City, which is often referenced on this site.
Diana Lind - Editor of the quarterly magazine on progressive urban innovations, Next American City.
Majora Carter, Co-founder, Green For All - Established one of the first urban green-collar job training and placement systems, and continues to do so.
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco - A widely published urban philosopher and poet.
Dean Kamen, Founder/President, DEKA Research & Development Corporation - Holder of 440 patents, including the Segway, and focused on transitioning university talent into the creative economy.

See their full bios here, and check out the CEOs for Cities blog for summaries of the ideas presented at the event.

On one hand you have freeways being dismantled for public parks (eg Portland, Oregon’s west waterfront) and on the other you have parking spaces temporarily turned into public spaces (eg Park(ing) Day). Somewhere in between you have streetside parking for cars being replaced by an inviting, rather fun dedicated bike lane, such as the one featured in the Streetsfilm video above in Boulder, Colorado.

The big deal with dedicated bike lanes is that it actually feels like bikes are prioritized, especially when they have their own traffic signals. Going one step further is a contra-flow bike lane, which goes against auto traffic, and obviously there’s more extensive landscaping to ensure it’s accessible only to bikes.

Boulder, Colorado is a nationally-recognized biking capital, and this dedicated bike lane is a model for the future. However, if you want the best benchmark for dedicated bike lanes in the world, visit the Netherlands where you’ll see these kinds of bike lanes throughout the country.

There are few better authorities for comparing the thousands of neighborhoods, streets and public spaces than the American Planning Association, especially since their vast membership represents just about every one of these destinations. Thus, special attention should be applied to their annual Great Places in America, with ten designees in each of the three aforementioned categories. However, they choose new recipients each year, and this is its second year, so you may want to check out their 2007 winners - scroll down to see them here.

How does can this apply to your city, neighborhood? Not only do these provide great models, but the site also lists the detailed criteria for how these were selected.

You can easily see the 30 choices on one page at their Great Places in America 2008 site, so rather than list them all, here’s a review.

Great Public Spaces - You can’t go wrong with this list, particularly since they didn’t have public spaces as a category in 2007.

Great Neighborhoods - The ones with a more urban vibe include Charles Village, Baltimore, Maryland and their deeply strong sense of community; the revitalization of new to complement historic downtown Salem, Massachusetts; the arts community in Echo Park, Los Angeles; the college-life-infused Greater University Hill in Syracuse, New York; the loft conversion movement of Old Town Wichita, Wichita, Kansas; and the beautiful quaint architecture and cobblestone streets of Society Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (pictured). The others on the list are more small town family/retiree oriented.

Great Streets - Looking at the entries that fit the tone of a freshened natural cultural district at a more human scale, these are the historic, nightlife rich 7th Avenue in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida; the historic fishing waterfront of Commercial Street in Portland, Maine; the true urban of Washington Street in Boston; and the creative urban hotspots along West Main Street in Louisville, Kentucky.

If you’re looking for an effective precedent in how to jumpstart the creative economy in your city, you need to learn about CreateHere in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

On July 1, 2007 Helen Johnson and Josh McManus entrepreneurially initiated a three-month research and planning project focused on studying the engagement of creatives in the city with the intention of gaining a better understanding of how to retain and attract them, crucial to its transition to a post-industrial knowledge economy. Helen and Josh experienced such a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among 24-35 year olds that wanted to interact with and help define their city that they established a collective of programs now identified with CreateHere, with a goal of achieving a robust, self-sufficient creative economy and sustained community engagement by emerging leadership.

CreateHere is neither an organization or a business, but a project, designed to avoid bureaucracy and focus on efficient results. As is stated on their website, “CreateHere is a collective of programs, projects, incentive funding, and individuals working for creative economic & cultural development in Chattanooga,“ which includes the following:

ArtsMove - These are essentially $15,000 grants for artists buying homes in five designated natural cultural districts, provided as five-year forgivable mortgages.

SpringBoard - An 8-week planning class to assist new or struggling entrepreneurs to produce an effective business plan. CreateHere is currently looking to establish a business acceleration program modeled after PeerSpectives, Opportunity Knocks and CEO roundtables.

MakeWork - A $150,000 arts grant program for artists and artisans within a 50-mile radius of the city. The criteria prioritizes those projects that will stimulate cultural and economic growth.

LeadHere - Think Teach for America for emerging creative community leaders. It’s a paid fellowship program, 20 to 40 hours a week, designed to empower the next generation of leaders to further grow the creative economy.

The two keys to CreateHere’s success?  Identifying what peoples’ passions are, then putting the right people together to make a program happen.

Which of these programs do you think is most effective in growing a creative economy?

We’re familiar with the term ‘movie going’, as in going to the movies, but what about those who want a little more socially fulfilling? Every evening in Locarno, Switzerland’s Piazza Grande, during their annual 10-day Locarno Film Festival in August, 8000 participants movies are treated to a film on a massive scale.

Combining an original art experience presented on a four-story screen, set in one of the most beautiful piazzas in Europe (especially when lit up at night, in and of itself, a sculptural masterpiece), you can be assured people won’t be rolling in 10 minutes before the presentation and immediately after. In fact, being that it’s a festival in the heart of a city, many will be staying in the vicinity the entire day, as well as frequenting the myriad surrounding outdoor cafes after.

Think of it as an artful alternative to a sporting event, or going to the cineplex for that matter.

Do you think your city or neighborhood should have such a movie staying experience, albeit on a smaller scale? Crowdsource one at the CoolTown Network!

Continuing our look at the 12 principles for crowdsourced placemaking beta communities based on Airoots/Eirut’s 12 principles of architectural participation which were in turn based on the Linux open source community...

The first six.

The last six:

7. Communicate: This is what open source is all about - the ‘sponsor’ providing the business plan and updates as if it were a co-op, and listening to their members just as well. Here’s an example from a beta community agreement in New Orleans: “The purpose of the Broadmoor Beta Community is to provide NCD (the developer sponsor) with an identifiable group of future tenants and customers for a third place that is eventually established in the neighborhood. NCD understands that the Broadmoor Beta Community’s commitment to the social and financial success of this third place is directly proportional to how much NCD listens to and incorporates the ideas and input of the Beta Community.“

8. Convene: Crowdsourcing works best when people meet face-face to make decisions, or at least have a solid deadline (resulting in virtual convening), rather than contributing individually on their own time. As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

9. Include: Two things here:  1) Ensure you’re getting proper representation of the neighborhood that you’re working in, even if it means taking a little more effort and time to find them; and 2) Provide some training or ongoing assistance if they lack social network skills, much less be social network bilingual. While technology has helped bring people together, it shouldn’t be an excuse to exclude anyone either.

10. Acknowledge: Recognition is a powerful motivator. Are you still recognized for contributing to nonprofits years ago, or forgotten among the masses? People are recognized in every beta community project for their efforts on a monthly basis - sometimes being rewarded with free dinners to favorite restaurants like with CreativesDC, or even with profit sharing as with the Elements restaurant.

11. Process: This is where the rubber meets the road. How do you take the collective values of hundreds of participants and interpret that into design and programming that inspires them? This is a matter of working with a new generation of architects and developers with not only the skills, but the mindset to be able to professionally synthesize ideas into a tangible form.

12. Be Critical: Innovation can’t happen when there’s groupthink - “a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Design by committee doesn’t work. But, if people were courageous and stated what they really wanted, “That side alley should be outdoor dining for cafes!“, perhaps we’d have more inspiring destinations.

Which of these six principles are most important to you?

Thanks to Braulio Agnese of Architect magazine for the reference.

Nice, France by VIDOK

What are the principles for crowdsourced placemaking? One way to determine that is to take Airoots/Eirut’s simplified 12 principles of architectural participation based on the Linux open source community (a pioneer of crowdsourcing) and apply it to crowdsourced placemaking... and more specifically beta communities. So here’s Airoots/Eirut’s 12 principles in bold, followed by a beta community application.

1. Need It: Define the project’s vision, based on what’s collectively needed in the neighborhood but not provided, via a collaboratively-written declaration, manifesto or constitution. Secondly, develop a program for how this will be executed. You can see some of this on the Elements restaurant home page.

2. Get It: Use precedents as models to explain what doesn’t exist yet. For example, a beta community looking to develop truly attainably-priced green condo efficiencies, like at the Bearden Arts Building in Washington DC, should look at San Francisco’s Cubix Yerba Buena, or downtown apartments in Tokyo and Paris.

3. Do It: Have the beta community start meeting to define the vision and program, with professional designers and the development team transforming those into tangible floor plans, renderings and product offering suggestions. The Gear Factory in Syracuse produced floor plans based on beta community input, and so will the Bearden Arts Building.

4. Be Open: Don’t write off ideas you don’t like because you don’t think other people will like them either… only to find out you’re in the minority. This happens a lot with pedestrian-only streets and smaller home sizes. Openness is also one of the tenets of a creative community.

5. Share: This is a big one for self-righteousness - don’t talk louder because you think your idea is the best, even if it’s ‘going to save the world’, like demanding that a restaurant serve more ‘raw food’. It’s not a pure democracy either - decision-making by committee leaves you with the status quo. However, if you share your values with others, a clear vision and program will emerge that will then be a lot easier to interpret into real design.

6. Contribute: Time to give back to your community. Nothing will happen without people attending meetings, offering their feedback and referring others. This is where being social network bilingual is highly productive - make sure your beta community champions can speak both languages. Also, the goal is a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, so think ‘community-first’. Ironically, it’ll often be more individually rewarding as well.

Read on in the next entry for the next six.

Which of these first six principles are most important to you?

Thanks to Braulio Agnese of Architect magazine for the reference.

Image: Sharing in Union Square, New York City by tyduckman.