It’s finally back! Check out lucky 8th annual urbanists gift guide, with 11 amazing ideas, sourced from the State of Place team! So happy to bring back this super popular holiday guide after a brief hiatus!
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It’s (finally) back!! Our 6th edition of our Thankful for Place blog series. After a brief hiatus, we couldn’t be more excited to share with you the many places for which the State of Place team is grateful. We strive to quantify the exponential power of place every day - but as Thanksgiving approaches, we can’t help but stop and reflect on some of the most special places that we carry close to our hearts. We wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving and hope you are able to spend time with a place - and people - whom you hold dear!
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We are thrilled to share a little piece of joy with you in the midst of the turmoil….we once again have the honor of being named finalists in Colorado’s Smart City Alliance’s Connected Colorado Challenge (C2) as part of the Safe Streets focus area. We have proposed to apply our AI-driven, built environment data collection and vehicle collision forecasting model to help cities prioritize urban design interventions most poised (from an evidence-based perspective) to help save lives as well as identify and redesign near-miss intersections before any more tragic, preventable loss of life. Download the full proposal and powerpoint via our blog.
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We are over the moon excited to introduce you to our new strategic partner - 17 Asset Management (17AM), capital connoisseurs who help place-based investors do well by doing good. Together, we will help citymakers and the investment community unleash the power of place - and capital - to foster more just, thriving places!
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Our 5th annual Ultimate Gift Guide for Citymakers is out and chock full of inspiring, thoughtful, and whimsical gifts to get you through the rest of 2020. Check out these 13 awesome gift options, no matter what and when you’re celebrating this year!
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On this our 5th edition of our grateful for places post, the State of Place family shares why they’re thankful for place this year in particular, and invite you to share your own expressions of gratitude for the places you hold dear.
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It’s Valentine’s Day - and we’re feeling the PLACE love!! As per always! So we’d thought we bring you one of our most beloved posts - about a data-driven love story, if you will: how Street Plan’s awesome tactical urbanism “makeover” brought serious love to Asheville, North Carolina. We just nerdified the love a bit with some Os and 1s - but no surprise there. We promise you’ll love this transformation story. This street do-over will not only tug on your heartstrings, it will also show that PLACE love also pays - and quite handsomely at that! So dig in - and fall in love! :)
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Last week, we compiled a list of awesome gifts for the citylover and datageeks in your life. This week, we profiled five awesome, walkable shopping districts, where you can actually shop for some of these gifts - or just walk away the calories you’ve already been piling up using our very own State of Place analysis. Check out which places made the cut and how you can use data to make your place more walkable and livable - and maybe even be profiled here next year, just in time for the holidays!
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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! This is our FOURTH annual installment of our gratitude post - one of our favorite posts of the year where State of Place team members give thanks to special places - and people - in their lives. We also want to thank YOU all for trusting us to help you unlock the power of data to make it easier (and more cost effective) to plan, deliver, and invest in awesome places people love! We hope to help many more of you in 2020 and we welcome you to SHARE which PLACE you are grateful for below in the comments!! :)
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On this our 8th anniversary of State of Place (or at least the concept behind it), we dare to be bold. And we must all dare to be bolder in order to usher in the power of data-driven placemaking to make inclusive, walkable, sustainable places that will help save our climate - and help us do right by the next generation and respond to Greta Thunberg’s passionate, outrage-fueled, indignantly-justified condemnation of our collective lack of action toward mitigating the climate crisis.
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Who doesn’t love a good before after makeover. And if you’re an urbanist, while you may secretly binge Queer Eye’s Fab Five, your love for street transformations is completely out in the open (although I’m equally vociferous about my love of both, haha!)! So what better time than the beginning of Summer to indulge yourself? Working with Street Plans, we chose an awesome mobility meets public art street re-do and Quantified it! Check out how this simple $150K project increased the State of Place of this once-drab block by nearly 30 points and achieved an over 20X ROI and why tactical urbanism meets data-driven citymaking is the key to achieving a truly fab street makeover!
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Revisiting our tribute to Anthony Bourdain, the consummate Seeker and place-oholic, one year later: “Bourdain had a magical, hypnotizing ability to not just transcendently capture [the "intersection" between food, place, and people] but to exploit it to show us something deeper in ourselves, to inspire empathy for "the other," to connect us to communities far afield and familiar alike, to deliver unto us a sense of place(s), to embolden us to seek out and relish the unknown, to find joy in the simplicity of food - and the human experience.
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After a little 6-week hiatus, which we promise will end (with a roar) next week, we wanted to make sure we weren’t totally ghosting you and make sure you got your dose of all things placelover and datageek, so please spend the 20 minutes you would have spent with us over the past 6 weeks of blog posts with this seminal Ted-style talk on citymakers must incorporate a more data-driven approach to creating places ALL people love, that can make us happier, healthier, save our planet - and actually maximize the bang (ahem, return on investment) for the buck while at it. PLEASE enjoy! :)
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Notre. Dame. On. Fire. How mourning the loss of place gives me hope for valuing place…
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Last week, I had the honor giving a keynote on Data-Driven Citymaking at Nordic Place Branding Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. I have to say, this was the first conference on place branding I have ever attended. And it got me thinking, what comes first, the place doing or the place telling? Normally, the answer to this would-be riddle would be a no-brainer. Well, there’s nothing to brand if there’s not a place first, right? But after listening to the stories of several places that had previously not been on the map, successfully use place branding to create people-first places, I started to wonder…could you create a place, or at least put the forces in motion needed to do so, simply by telling its (authentic) story?
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Last November, while keynoting at the Proptech Norway conference, I met Ronen Journo from WeWork, a fellow keynoter (which was super cool, by the way!) who spoke about how the company was using data to inform their decisions “inside the building." As a data-driven citymaking champion, I was stoked. Well, yesterday, they announced they’d be tinkering with data and urban design - in some yet undisclosed way. So we’d thought we’d give We some concrete ideas for how to use data to create (and locate in) awesome places people love!
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How many times do we have to be disappointed by citymaking's next "panacea" before we realize there will NEVER be a silver bullet answer to solving the beautiful, chaotic mess that is a city organism? This might seem odd for a "tech" company to say, but tech alone will NOT save cities - in fact, no one thing alone will save cities! Today, nearly a year after the devastating FIU pedestrian bridge collapse and the fatal Uber autonomous car crash, we revisit the need to "KISS" our way to better places and use tech as a means and not an end.
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Hi all, Michelle, here - State of Place, COO. As some of you may know, last Fall, Mariela spiced up the Nordics - not once but twice, at the Oslo Urban Arena and Proptech Norway - sharing her unapologetically impassioned plea for more data-driven placemaking. Now that Scandinavia is thawing out just enough for her Miami-Cuban blood enough not to be totally frozen, she’s up for a double reprise this April! First, she’ll be one of the keynotes at the Nordic Place Branding conference in Stockholm on April 3rd and then she’ll be keynoting the Northwest conference in Alesund, Norway (where she’ll have the unenviable task of following Richard Florida, last year’s keynote!). So we’d thought we’d get your juices flowing by giving you a taste of Mariela’s Ted-style talk! We urge you to watch it in all its spicy glory!
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