Given the shift to more pedestrian-oriented built environments, what kind of transportation can we expect to see? We know the Segway isn’t going to be a model for transportation - too heavy, clunky and where do you park the thing? Stackable cars are pretty nifty, but a decade away at the soonest. So then, how about the YikeBike?

Think of it as a cleaner, smaller, lighter, quieter, more portable moped

It’s a little ahead of it’s time (in other words, it has a $4450 price tag), though it’s something you can just see dropping in price the more popular they get. It also doesn’t make a great replacement for the bicycle as far as getting exercise with zero carbon output, two benefits the U.S. could use more of. However, for those looking for another reason not to drive, it’s a heck of an option, especially if you consider ‘Yike sharing’. Think of it as a cleaner, smaller, lighter, quieter, more portable moped. At 22 lbs with its foldability (15 seconds to get it 2 feet x 2 feet), there’s really no place you can’t take it, and with its electric motor, you’re never far from its 20-minute recharge.

Designed in Christchurch New Zealand, it’ll be available mid-2010 starting only in Europe. It’s by no means affordable, but can you imagine a bunch of YikeBikes available for rent at $1/hour? The key question is will it result in less people biking or driving?

For other key specs, check out the YikeBike FAQ.

In related news, it’ll at least be easier to find places to ride to now that Google Maps provides bike lanes as an option (thanks to Christian MacAuley of Fab Apps for the reference).

Onno Sminia and Louis Pierre Geerinckx represent what we need more of. The two Dutch industrial designers simply felt there was a better way to move within their urban neighborhood without having to depend on their parents, renting a moving truck and/or finding parking, much less do it on any kind of regular basis. So they innovated and built their own solution.

The solution? A ‘moving bike’, small enough to traverse most any place a bike can, yet big enough to haul a couch. They then formed a new company around it, Vrachfiets, which means ‘cargo bike’ in Dutch. How’s that for problem solving? Two pedalers provide the added power needed for heavier loads, while the next version will have solar-powered electrical assist the up the towing capacity even more.

They already have their first interested customer, the City of Delft, in the Netherlands.

Slowly but surely, the emerging generations are creating their own pedestrian-only/carfree world.

Now if anyone can help translate what they’re saying in the video above, that’d be great!

What happens when a virtual world becomes real? What happens when a digital community becomes a physical one? In yet another sign of things to come, that’s what happened to the online realm of Instructables, “a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others,“... it became the Instructables Restaurant. Or in this site’s terms, the Instructables crowd is the beta community for crowdsourcing their own restaurant.

What makes this ‘the world’s first open source restaurant’, according to its founders? The recipe for every item on the menu (image below), the construction of the furniture, even the instructions for developing the restaurant itself are provided on the Instructables website, which sources creations by anyone from around the world.

The restaurant is currently only experienced in pop-up retail format at events throughout Amsterdam, meaning that its locations are temporary. Thus, it looks temporary, such as the one pictured above that existed for only three days at Picnic 2010, a quirky cross-discipline festival for creative conversation and collaboration. However, stay tuned for a permanent location…

Many of Google’s HQ employees in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, California fit the creatives vibe. So it’s encouraging, though probably not surprising, that the company is prompting the City to invest in sustainable development and a vibrant community in the area surrounding its campus. In other words, Google is looking out for its employees beyond the workplace, and it’s not only smart, it’s a sign of the times. Goodbye office park, hello urban village.

Check out the following letter excerpt from Google to the city:

“Our goals for Google’s HQ are to provide a future redevelopment that is nurturing and regenerative to the environment provide a vibrant community and worklife balance for all and efficiently manage transportation and pedestrian access needs. This must include mixed uses office retail and residential along with the kind of land use development described in the Final Report by the Mountain View Environmental Sustainability Task Force. We encourage you to be the model Silicon Valley community leading the way with visionary development opportunities to create the most efficient sustainable and fiscally supportive plan to the community of Mountain View and the North Bayshore area.“

The good news is they don’t have to look far regarding models for urban living, where Mountain View’s Castro Street (pictured) in the downtown is well known for being an urban design, social and retail success, and San Francisco is just several miles to the North.

Read more in TechCrunch.

Photo of downtown Mountain View by neighborhoods.org

If a cell is defined as the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism, if a building were an organism, its rooms would probably be its cells (‘cellula’ is Latin for a small room). For a city though, it may be more helpful to associate cells with its blocks, fitting perhaps since a cell is often described as the building blocks of life. From the air, a city’s blocks resemble cell structure more than its buildings.

Anyway, accepting this analogy to make a point, this is what makes the Living City Block in Denver, Colorado such an important project, defining the ideal ‘cell structure’ for a healthy city in the 21st century. It’s mission? “To create a replicable, scalable and economically viable framework for the resource efficient regeneration of existing cities.“

Scheduled to launch in Summer 2010, two adjacent city blocks (one street block) in LoDo (Lower Downtown) Denver will become a live demonstration and model for environmentally-conscious business and economic development, and livability. How so?

- Focusing on retrofitting and renovating existing buildings.
- Having buy-in from 80% of the building owners to uphold the mission.
- Benefitting from a diversity of active non-profit, educational, business and government partners.
- Providing an opportunity to pioneer features such as buildings producing more energy than they use, “last mile’ mobility solutions, energy capturing sidewalks, green leases, charging stations for plug-in vehicles, large-scale solar installation, urban agriculture/living roofs, vertical gardens, onsite renewables, co-generation, home metering, IT driven consumer behavioral change… all in one place, all on one block.r
- Attracting workers and entrepreneurs to such a progressive destination, spurring job creation.
- Linking it with the inauguration of the Biennial of the Americas, a month long “cultural celebration of innovation, imagination and the artistic achievement of the Western Hemisphere”, starting July 2010.

Thanks to Suzanne Hunt of HuntGreen for the reference.

If you think it’d be cool to live in a building like this, you’re probably not alone. The building plays music through its instrumental drainpipes when it rains, and is part of the a series of whimsical courtyard buildings in Dresden, Germany known as the KunsthofPassage.

However, why don’t we see more creative, humanistic buildings like this, and what can we do about it?

First, the short term bad news. The vast majority of real estate investment dollars won’t touch this kind of project because it’s too small, because the money is in the big head and not the long tail. The long term good news is this will change in 10-20 years when investment management evolves to invest in the more lucrative ‘long tail’.

Second, the short term good news:

1. Crowdsourcing investment models (ie crowdfunding) that allow people to collectively invest in such developments themselves.

2. Emerging generations of real estate developers that understand crowdsourcing and how to invest in the culture of the rising creative economy, such as Kevin Cavenaugh with the Burnside Rocket, Rick Destito with the Gear Factory (the rendering of the proposed 5-story building redevelopment for creatives does not do it justice) and Jamal Williams/Vance Gragg with an upcoming development in DC.

If you live in DC, join in as we’re experimenting with a new web app to allow people to submit their ideas for creative inspiration, the most popular of which will be considered for investment, at RemixDC.com (the site/URL will change to remixdc.com soon).

It’s official, as Mayor Bloomberg of New York City announced on February 11, 2010 that Times Square (and Herald Square) are permanently car free, almost a year after first announcing the plan. See the press release here.

Mayor Bloomberg, “In this day and age if you go around the world, all the other great cities have already tried to reduce the number of cars on their streets and convert some of the open spaces into space for other people.“

“Three-fourths (76%) of New Yorkers surveyed think the area has improved, so do two-thirds (68%) of people in the region, and 60% of Times Square workers, 60% of property owners and building executives, and 70% of local retail managers.“ Also, a 63% reduction in injuries to motorists and passengers and a 35% reduction in pedestrian injuries.

Dan Biederman, President of the director of the 34th Street Partnership, “This is a 21st century idea. The 20th century idea was three lanes of noisy, annoying traffic, going right past all these great institutions and stores. The 21st century idea is seating and pedestrian life dominating, and traffic being subsidiary.“

What are the city’s largest retailers saying? “In the year that a new Broadway has become a reality, we’ve seen a new vibrancy in the Herald Square area. More people are taking the time to enjoy the area and experience first-hand the exciting opportunities that exist on one of the world’s most famous streets. We applaud the Mayor and the City of New York for their vision of the City’s future,” Macy’s Senior VP of External Affairs Ed Goldberg.

What’s next for Times Square? “We will now design a world-class public space that’s a new center stage for the greatest city in the world,” Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

What’s next for New York City? “Incidentally, there are other parts of the city where we’re getting lots of call from merchants in other parts of the city who want the same thing,“ Mayor Bloomberg.

Read more in the NY Times and Streetsblog

What would a car free city be like? DC residents got a taste of that when the city experienced record snowfalls in early February of nearly five feet, the most since 1898. Just about the only thing shut down were the cars. Instead, the city was alive with people in the streets like no other day.

As you can see below, the local coffeehouse was packed, and the buzz of conversation was a few notches higher than usual. Now you may be wondering, what about other cities that have significant snowfall all the time? Well, cars and drivers in DC aren’t equipped for such weather, nor is the City, so the overall consensus was simply to allow the roads to be uncleared for a day or two.

Streets normally filled with cars and traffic were replaced by streams of people, and not only that, there was a sense of winter wonderland euphoria in the air. Big smiles, spontaneous high fives with strangers, impromptu laughter - is this what a city would be like with no traffic? Well, the truth is, that’s what Washington DC was for a day or so, and people were in a great mood.

Check out the video below to get a sense of the festive spirit in the air…

Look way down in the distance in the photo below - see all the people…

That essentially captures what New York’s Brooklyn Bowl is all about.

Bowling. Robert Putnam’s best-seller lamented that the social capital in the U.S. was one the decline as we were ‘bowling alone’ more often. While his measure of social capital may be misleading, maybe Brooklyn Bowl’s founders took his comments to heart, as it’d be difficult to bowl alone with a live music venue, restaurant, lounge and ongoing events present. Convergence is what creatives are used to, though not the $40-$50 per lane per hour rates.

Live music. There’s live music every single night, with tickets starting at $5. Now that’s something more up the creatives’ alley.

Local. Local businesses can have four times the economic impact than nationals, and Brooklyn Bowl (with a name like that, you know it’s local) does their part with a local restaurant as well as having all their beers brewed in Brooklyn.

Green. It’s LEED-certified, the only such bowling alley in the world, featuring 100% wind-powered electricity; pin-spotters that use 75% less energy than a typical pin-spotter (see video), serve no bottles or cans with all soft drinks and beers on tap; LED stage lights that use 90% less energy than the typical draw; 100% reclaimed cork floors in Bowler’s Lounge and 100% recycled truck tires for the stage floor; and 30+ capacity bike racks.

This is the kind of destination that can define a revitalizing neighborhood, though more so if the activity (ie bowling) were less price exclusive.

As creatives are increasingly preferring a world beyond cars in natural cultural districts that function more like Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Britannica, bureaucracies both corporate and government are largely stuck in management models of the industrial age that will slow the transition on their end.

Enter the government of Geneva, Switzerland and a tri-partisan 2-1 City Council vote to close 200 streets to cars. Or as Geneva’s council member Fabienne Fischer states, “It’s not really to close 200 roads or streets in the center of Geneva, but to open 200 streets to improved life in the neighborhood.“

We’re not talking about the closing of a street or two here and there, this is 200 street blocks that pretty much scale up to an entire downtown. If the proposal is officially enacted (it hasn’t yet, as larger businesses may be opposing it), you can place the City of Geneva on par with the economic progressiveness of Google, Amazon and eBay. In fact, the city government is already there, it’s a question of whether the private sector can match it.

Fabienne adds, “200 places for pedestrian life or relationships corresponds to 200 schools, kindergartens, or even every type of people at home. The idea is to concentrate these pedestrian zones near these places in order to protect the more fragile people, older people younger people. The small shops also need to have a real social life in order to have people coming.“

You can listen to a brief interview with her here.

Also, check out the article by April Streeter of Gothenburg, Sweden on 6 Cities That Could Easily Be Car “Lite” or Car Free .