Last year I visited Growing Power, a well-known urban farming operation in a not-so-well-known area of Milwaukee’s north side. Located in and behind a greenhouse on a parcel of excess land next to an Army Reserve base, Growing Power is quite simply a farm. They raise food. But there is more to the story. Growing Power is located in a “food desert,” an area of a city without a grocery store to provide an adequate array of healthy food options, particularly fresh produce. So they grow food, including fruits and vegatables, and they also raise chickens and fish. They practice…

Add Des Moines, Iowa to the list of successful downtowns. Yesterday’s article in the New York Times hits on several salient factors critical to success. The list of recent projects in downtown Des Moines is impressive. In late 2010, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield will open a 600,000 square foot headquarters in downtown Des Moines. Two years ago, Nationwide Mutual Insurance completed a 1.2 millon square foot campus. The 34,000 square foot Pappajohn Education Center, part of the University of Iowa, opened in 2006, as did a new public library. The new John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park brings…

It had been seven years since I last visited Portland, Oregon, and fully ten since my original visit. I was very excited to see what had changed since 2003 in this bastion/laboratory of urbanity, and frankly I needed inspiration. It was time to return, and this time by bike. I actually arrived by train, the 7:30 Amtrak Cascades from Seattle. I highly recommend it for those traveling between Portland and Seattle, although there was a bit of a delay as out train had to wait for a BNSF freight train to pass – Amtrak must find a way to stop…

I have seen the future and it is coworking! I just got back from Seattle, and besides enjoying some typical midwinter rain and riding their shiny new light rail from Sea-Tac airport, I checked out an office concept that may serve as a future model in many urban areas. This particular space, called Office Nomads, occupies the top floor of a renovated two-story building in the trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. My friend Bart is one of more than 50 “nomads” that rent a space at Office Nomads. The basic idea of coworking seems to be quite simple –…

With a short layover in Detroit a week ago, I made myself comfortable between flights by watching the Cardinals-Packers game. The Delta/Northwest terminal at Detroit is the best place to watch football in any airport I know of. Rather than jockeying for a table in a bar with a decent view of a tiny TV, every other gate area has a huge, scoreboard-size screen. When there are games on, those gate areas fill up with football fans. The seats facing away from the screen stay empty. As I like to do in other cities (or simply their airports), while watching…

I had a couple extra hours after the ULI conference in San Francisco in November. So, as I like to do when I’m in that fair city, or when I’m in any great urban place, I took a walk too see the city and grab a bite to eat. From my hotel, the charmingly faded Pickwick Hotel (I have found no better value in that town, and just a block from the convention center!), I headed around the corner to Market Street, followed the trolley line along crowded Powell Street and Union Square, up the hill past the crowds, and…

Absolutely. Allow me to explain. A few years ago the firm I was working for moved to the Banks Building, a renovated warehouse in near northeast Minneapolis. At that time, the primary intersection in the neighborhood, at Hennepin and University Avenues, was flanked by a few businesses, including Surdyk’s liquor store and Kramarczuk’s meat market and deli. Even with these Minneapolis institutions, the area didn’t have critical mass. The businesses were destinations, but not the neighborhood. Fast forward a couple years, a couple hundred housing units and several new and renovated retail spaces, and the place is hopping. Even within…

The first thing I noticed about Houston is the lack of an accent. It’s not that a good southern drawl is entirely absent, but on my one day whirlwind tour of that city, I realized just how international it is. See my photos of Houston here. Nobody does roadside sprawl better than Houston. Many of the freeways in Houston don’t have formal interchanges, but rather a frontage road on both sides and frequent on and off ramps with the occasional overpass to reach the other side. So rather than businesses concentrated at interchanges, anything that can draw revenue is tossed…

My neighborhood is facing a small crisis, unfortunately pitting complete streets against complete neighborhoods. The city of Minneapolis has secured matching federal funds to complete the RiverLake Greenway, a proposed bike boulevard project. The RiverLake Greenway bike boulevard runs through my neighborhood. While I fully support the route of the greenway, and support efforts of the city to increase biking, unfortunately, the bike route has one major potential problem. Where it passes in front of a small row of local stores, the plan calls for the removal of a lane of parking along one side of the commercial street in…

Of all the public markets, Pike Place Market in Seattle is my favorite. It has a (here comes a gem from planning lingo) “patina” about it. Probably because it is 100 years old and the patina is actually accumulated grime on the walls from those fish-throwing guys. Sure I love the original Farmers Market adjacent The Grove in Los Angeles, and there’s Faneuil Hall in Boston, the gorgeous renovation of the Ferry Building in San Francisco, the wonderful Reading Terminal Market in Philly, and even the upstart Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, but Pike Place Market wins me over. Pike…