Which grocery store chain has lost 3000 employees in the past five months in one major U.S. city because they can no longer afford the gas to get there?

We're not naming names, but we do know that said chain has "blown up" its future plans for greenfield expansion… more

"??When Cities Tango: The Art of Glocal Public Space Design," is the topic for Bill Morrish, professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, who is first up on San Jose's 2008 Great Cities Speakers Series this Sunday. Wish I could be there.

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Paul Graham has written a wonderful essay on great cities and the effect they have on cities.

It begins...

"Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more;… more

Number one on Met Home's Design 100 list is the Million Trees Initiative. Operating in Los Angeles and New York, the initiative plan to transform, beautify and green our cities by planting one million new trees.

Why isn't every city participating?

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Screw organics. Go nuclear. Live urban. Crank the A/C. That's the headline on the cover story of this month's Wired magazine. It continues, "Inconvenient truths. In the age of climate change, what matters most is cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That means rethinking everything you ever learned… more

Inspired by the images of LA in Blade Runner, developer Sonny Astani hopes to use rows of LEDs to turn the city's new downtown condo buildings into images stories tall. The LA Planning Department is pushing back, treating the proposed "art" as signs that potentially clutter the environment and… more

Demonstrating again that being "affordable" is not first on the list of attributes talented young adults seek in a city, The New York Times chronicles the life and times of young New Yorkers who skip meals, slip their own drinks into bars, put off haircuts until they get home,… more

When cities go looking for an architectural signature project, they often turn to museums and performing arts centers. But parking garages? Hardly. But here's a project in Santa Monica, CA, by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects that challenges conventional choices. To see it go here. Click on "Work," then "Civic… more

When it comes to boomers, demography is not necessarily destiny, according to new figures reported by Business Week. According to a study by Kevin Coyne of Coyne Partnership, "the size and growth rate of the U.S. retirement market will be much smaller than is widely believed." For financial and… more

Paul Krugman's Monday New York Times column caught our attention big time. In it, he rightly asserts that in order to address the issue of rising gas prices and energy consumption, people will have to drive more fuel efficient cars and drive them less. He goes on to say… more

How is the free bike system working in Paris? Take a look. more

Here's the advance word on Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't"... "In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of 'outliers' -- the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks… more

That's how Fast Company celebrates Chicago, named U.S. City of the Year by the magazine. Mayor Daley marked the achievement with a lunch for civic leaders and young entrepreneurs (a very nice touch) staged by World Business Chicago on the stage of Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park. Although… more

Before I left for Liverpool, I moderated a forum at Mayor Daley's U.S.-Arab Mayors Forum. Our topic was "The City as Catalyst: The Creative Potential of Urbanization." Our panel included Vladimir Platonov, President of the Moscow City Council; Ahmed Shareef, Undersecretary of Municipal Affairs in Abu Dhabi; and Lois Weisberg,… more

Mayor Manny Diaz gave his State of the City address last month, and it had a number of important ideas. He told the people of Miami, "We have entered a new economic era where information flows freely across the globe. Because information flattens the world, the role of ciites has… more

Chicago is celebrating its Great Places and Spaces this weekend. (This annual event is worth a special trip to Chicago. I don't know another city that is prouder of its built environment and trains so many of its citizens -- many of whom are from the metro area --… more

Doug Farr challenged CEOs for Cities to promote his 2030 Community Challenge -- to reduce vehicle miles traveled to 1970 levels. And as Doug says, in the long term, this takes planning a community for fewer car trips. Individuals can't do it alone. I write this because this afternoon after… more

Next Generation Cities surely must be sustainable cities. Doug Farr offered us a challenge: To reduce VMT to 1970 levels (3900 VMT) by 2030. We must plan to drive less. Make cities – their planning and design, transit, infrastructure, and their walkability -- priority number one on the sustainability… more

Wall Street Journal Real Estate blog picked up Driven to the Brink, released 10 days ago by CEOs for Cities. more

From Time's 100 Influential People essay on Michael Bloomberg by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: "I've long argued that one of the most critical environmental issues is the challenges of making our cities attractive, enriching and safe places to live. The best cure for destructive sprawl is to build cities people… more

Oil giant BP PLC announced last week that it plans to move 1200 employees from Chicago's western suburbs to space in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the heart of the Loop. Why? The decision was driven in part by employees. The employees tend to be professionals and younger, a combination… more

NYT columnist Frank Rich wrote in this morning's paper, "The part of the press that can't tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons' vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake [of grand-scale social networking and small Internet donors]… more

We've written here before that universities, often thought of as anchor institutions, are increasingly mobile. Now comes a challenging proposal from Greg Mankiw in response to Massachusetts legislators' study of a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion. (Greg… more

I just had the most amazing customer service experience with Amazon. A digital camera I purchased several weeks ago is defective in the most basic way. It will no longer turn on. First, I went to the Amazon web site, easily found a way to ask Amazon to call me,… more

From Trend Central... A growing group of environmentally conscious consumers are turning neglected public spaces into lush green gardens. So-called guerilla gardeners essentially squat on abandoned land, turning dirt plots into brightly colored flower gardens. Because they are beautifying land that doesn't belong to them, the gardeners often strike… more

From All About Cities... This weekend volunteer neighborhood residents are offering guided tours of their communities to the public in a national celebration of the late Jane Jacobs and of cities. As Jacobs said, to understand cities and to know what will work, “you’ve got to get out and… more

Thoughts from designer Paula Scher at Serious Play... My work is play. And I play as I design. The definition of play is engaging in a childlike endeavor. And gambling. I do both in my work. Children are serious. Adults are solemn. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is… more

Eames Demetrios spoke at Serous Play of the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames. Even though they made beautiful objects, they worried about our acquisitive nature. If status is defined as owning a new BMW, we are doomed to failure because we don't have the resources for everyone… more

Speaking this morning at Serious Play, RISD’s President-elect John Maeda made a comment I love: “The world is such a tasty place.” When conference host Chee Perlman asked John about his new role as president (and chief fundraiser) of RISD : “I grew up in a tofu factory… more

The Environmental Business Cluster of San Jose, CA, received the National Business Incubation Association’s 2008 Incubator of the Year award this week at NBIA’s 22nd International Conference on Business Incubation in San Antonio, TX. The award is NBIA’s most prestigious honor, recognizing overall excellence in business incubation, and is awarded… more

Big business is setting its sights on future markets and interestingly cities are the defining setting being used to envision those future markets and worlds. Peugeot has launched its latest design competition in which “young designers are invited to imagine a Peugeot for the megalopolis of tomorrow. This concept car… more

Facilitation, cartooning, brainstorming are new techniques being used at Google to design the user experience. And that is a sea change, according to Irene Au, director of User Experience at the company. "Unless you write code, it's hard to get any kind of credibility," she told the audience at Serious… more

70% of Google's traffic comes from outside the U.S, according to Irene Au, User Experience Design Director at Google. She is speaking now at Serious Play. She is describing Google's field research in India and other countries and the dramatically different needs the people there have. (How do you… more

The burgeoning Cleveland Design District, headed up, in part, by our colleague Ned Hill at Cleveland State University was the topic of a feature in I.D. (International Design) magazine in April. Building on the region's large number of consumer products companies, Ned teamed up with Daniel Cuffaro, head of the… more

Just heard Elizabeth Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro at Serious Play. Elizabeth is concerned with architectures of the environment and atmosphere. The first project she showed is a new outdoor space for smokers that envelopes smokers in a tall cone that encloses their smoke. When they light up,… more

Great New York Times article here about urban farmers using the city as both the farm and the market. more

From The Observer comes this..."Given that Zimbabwe has for a long time been staging a drama before a worldwide audience, it's amazing that anyone felt it necessary to mount an arts festival. But someone did 10 years ago, and the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) has been… more

We already know Baby Boomers are returning to cities, but who knew they would start going after internships? Check out this New York Times article. more

A number of cities have conveniently relied on eds and meds to generate jobs growth. Business Week famously reported in September '06 that the only jobs growth the U.S. had experienced was in the medical field. And both industries are widely assumed to be “anchored” in place. These are… more

How does Google fuel its innovation factory. CEO Eric Schmidt tells Business Week that the biggest obstacles to innovation at Google is the sheer number of offices the company has. "A problem that we face now is that we have people in multiple sites. It's a problem that everybody… more

Still in Liverpool and surfing blogs tonight, I ran across Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum's review of Fareed Zakaria's new book, The Post-American World. Here is a portion of what he wrote: "What Fareed does in his new book is show this diffusion of power and authority is taking place… more

Don't talk about diversity. Talk about the problem of homogeneity. That's the advice from a fabulous presenter, Susanne Justesen, at today's Intercultural Cities Conference. Although her research and consulting work has been primarily with large companies (Lego, Cisco, Nokia, are just a few), her work had direct application to cities… more

Observations from the morning session in Liverpool from the Intercultural Cities Conference... Five very good presentations and no time for questions. That is the problem of too many conferences. Where are the timekeepers? Nonetheless, here are the ideas from the first two presentations that intrigued me that I hope to… more

From Tuesday's New York Times, this article examines the statistics of death sentences in Harris County, Texas. Definitely worth a look. more

If everyone is creative, does creativity have any value? And who would you want on a desert island: an artist or a craftsman? Rupert Christiansen, writing in the Telegraph, says that creativity has become the Holy Grail of life today. "Businesses hold creative-thinking seminars, universities teach creative writing, ministers… more

The Intercultural Cities Conference is now underway in Liverpool, sponsored by the European Year of International Dialogue, the British Council, the Council of Europe, among others. I'll be chairing the first session with an amazing group of panelists including Saskia Sassen (The world in one city); Ash Amin (In search… more