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 establish 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.

That’s according to a 2007 Johnson Gardner study, based on 2006 numbers in Portland, Oregon, commissioned by Oregon Metro, as only recently reported on in this recent article, Trendy shops put a shine on home values.

Their study concludes that property values within a block and a half would be affected accordingly by the following businesses:

- Neighborhood theater - 14-30% higher property values. Some positives cited by the study include an increase in pedestrian traffic (safety) at more hours of the day, and the fact that such theaters have no parking which encourages a more local crowd. Neighborhood theaters also tend to play avant-garde, foreign and indie films, which attract more creatives, which then attract higher home values.
- Specialty grocery store - 20% higher property values. One explanation could be that because people will pay a bit of a premium for healthier groceries, they also have the income to pay a premium to live nearby. Then again, who doesn’t want to live within walking distance of their favorite grocery.
- Wine bars - 11-21% higher property values. A quiet third place, something many people wouldn’t mind living near.

Some venues that didn’t help raise property values, and possible reasons:
- Day spas. Such regional destinations often require surface parking.
- Brewpubs. This is probably more attributable to being only a block and a half away, especially if live music is involved. There’s nothing to say they lower property values if not within hearing bands late at night.
- Gourmet bakeries. Early-morning truck traffic.
- CD/record stores. I would suspect home owners and teenagers will never be on the same page

Which venues did you find the most surprising as far as the study results go?

Perhaps too many people buying homes they couldn’t afford wasn’t the problem behind the Wall Street collapse, but a symptom. The real problem may be that there are too many homes out on the market that people could never afford in the first place. In other words, the average U.S. American can’t afford $300,000 for a home, as is the going rate in many cities. So rather than lend out more money to buy homes people can’t afford, that banks can’t back, perhaps the real solution is addressing the lack of supply of homes that the average U.S. citizen can actually buy.

The creatives, aka the renaissance generation are already on it. They’re into ‘not so big’ homes, quality over quantity - the average space/occupant was 290 s.f. in the pre-auto era, 939 s.f. today. They’re into urban and walkable, not suburban/exurban and drive-thrus, and they have a much more international, cosmopolitan viewpoint of housing size - bigger is not better. They know ‘bigger’ requires more maintenance, is more costly to air condition, has a larger carbon footprint and most of all, is much more difficult to keep making payments on simply because bigger costs more.

So, the next time you hear the blame being passed around on who got us into this mess, maybe it’ll be more productive and inspiring to focus on those who are already investing in what may get us out of this mess, like truly attainably-priced green condos in the heart of the city. In fact, we’ve got a number of them being crowdsourced as we speak in Washington DC - the Bearden Arts Building, priced a third less than the lowest price one can buy a new home for in DC.

Image: The 380 s.f. one-bedroom ipad in the UK.

While this site provides you 1400 vignettes on what crowdsource placemaking can create, it doesn’t provide you with the direct means to actually crowdsource these places. That’s no longer the case.

Join the CoolTown Network (see new green button in the right column) and create a new Group to start crowdsourcing the kind of place you’d like to see in your city or neighborhood. Is it a coffeehouse? A coworking site? Attainably-priced lofts? You define the vision, then start attracting people to build up a crowd.

What’s next? Once you build up a following of at least a hundred people also committed to implementing that shared vision; a beta community, we’ll help you find a ’Sponsor‘, that is, an entrepreneur willing to invest in your group to implement your collective vision. We’ll call it the CoolTown Crowdsourced Placemaking Challenge.

If you need technical support in helping you grow your beta community, you can subscribe to such a service - go to the CoolTown Beta Communities home page and scroll down.

Image: Street in Prague, Czech Republic by ZeHawk.

The online world centers around conversation, via discussion forums, chat rooms, comment threads, Facebook’s ‘Walls’… many of these mediums didn’t exist ten years ago, even five years ago. That’s not difficult to fathom, given that today it doesn’t take more than five minutes to set up an online community with all these things. However, an internet minute is equivalent to a real estate year, so if you’ve subconsciously wondered why walking through your built environment lacks the spontaneity and enthusiasm of surfing the net, that’s because it hasn’t been manifested in the real world… yet.

An initial question is, what would that look like? Virtual discussion forums consist of a regular community of people with like-minded interests that freely converse in a common place. A physical version of that would be presented in two ways:

1. A regular community of people within a physical community that freely converse in a physical public forum, such as a piazza, plaza, courtyard or square, at the center of where they’re most likely to cross paths, such as the center of downtown. However, they need to be provided with a myriad of dining and drinking choices via outdoor tables because food is the one thing that brings people together, and it supports the economic vitality to keep the place vibrant and fresh.

2. A regular community of people with like-minded interests that freely converse in a third place, such as a coffeehouse, cafe, pub, rooftop hangout, with both an ongoing series of events that support those interests which eventually lead to spontaneous encounters in between. It’s the latter that sparks the notion that there’s a real sense of community going on here, and an innate sense of enthusiasm that you can’t get online.

It helps to be social network bilingual in both the virtual and physical world.

How do you see the social dynamics of the virtual world transformed into your physical world?

Image: A cafe-lined square in Freiburg, Germany by Jassy-50.