Tag: town center

Leveraging your Town Center for Economic Development So far, this series has taken on three of the essential components of a healthy walkable town center: hotels, retail and multi-family residential. But, traditionally, our town centers were not simply a collection of residences and shops. They formed the commercial... Continue Reading

Residences:  An Obvious IngredientOne obvious yet undervalued ingredient of an effective mixed-use town center is the residential component. To emphasize its importance, I would go as far as to say that it is actually the substrate on which a healthy mixed-use environment is based. In a healthy, balanced region,... Continue Reading

Shops: Everybody Wants 'EmLast week we started this series off with Hotels, a sometimes overlooked, value-adding addition to a walkable town center. This week we are looking at one of the essential ingredients of a town center: the retail shops. The retail component of a town center is the most visible component, often... Continue Reading

Series OverviewWhile walkable mixed use town centers may not be the *easy* choice for the asphalt guy, the engineer, or even the developer who has to attract tenants to an environment they may not be as used to... they are certainly becoming best practices for sustainable community development. More importantly, they... Continue Reading

By the early to mid 1970s, something was wrong with rock and roll. It no longer fought the system. Worse than that, it had become the system. Bloated. Detached. Pretentious. Performer and audience, once fused in a mutual quest to stick it to the man, now existed on separate planes --  an increasingly complacent... Continue Reading