If you’re looking for a model example of crowdsourced placemaking, check out the Better Block project in Oak Cliff, near Dallas, Texas.

For two days on April 10th and 11th, 2010, locals changed a car-centric thoroughfare to a people-friendly destination, complete with temporary businesses like a cafe, flower market, kid’s art studio, and featuring historic lighting, cafe seating, live music and more. All with a budget of $1000! The event was such a success that members of city hall now want to make it permanent. See the before and after photo above, and video below.

Thanks to Jason Roberts, one of the project’s champions, for alerting us to this project, “I wanted to pass along a story related to a group of active residents including myself, who retook a blighted car-centric block in our neighborhood and converted it to a complete street…we installed temporary businesses as well (cafe, kids art studio, and flower/gift market) to show the potential for the types of businesses that could thrive if the city changed its form. Your website was one of the inspirations for the project. We crowdsourced the whole endeavor and brought in 40+ people from the community to pull the project off.”

A little bit of history from Jason, “The idea for the event came after our friends opened a small bicycle shop on the corner here. In the summer last year, we held a bicycle block party and invited friends and kids out. The event brought out 300 or so people and was so packed that police arrived and said, “You’re going to have to get these people out of the street… the street is for cars”. We wished we had caught that on film, but instead set out to reshape the block completely to show the potential for reviving the old buildings.

We flaunted every ordinance we could openly like. For instance, Dallas has a law limiting the ability to open a fruit stand, so we put out a fruit truck. Dallas requires a $1000/year permit to have cafe seating, so we threw in our own. City staff said that lighting across a street is too expensive and would require an extensive permit process… we did it in 1 hour and cost us $50 in used Christmas lights + bailing wire.

All in all, it was more successful than we could ever imagine. We had residents come out who had lived in the area for 50 years that said, “How do we make this stay?!?!…Can I start a petition???” Pretty amazing stuff.”

Here’s one of the most important parts of the story: Their city council member worked to find $130,000 to help make this and more changes permanent. The point of a ‘beta block’ and a ‘beta community’ if you will, is to make it easier to go permanent.

Learn to develop your own Better Block via Oak Cliff’s How to Build a Better Block guide.

Thanks to the geniuses at ThinkStudio that brought us the direct economy matrix, we’re able to provide a chart that better explains what crowdsourced placemaking is, when people have a direct hand in shaping their built environment.

As in the direct economy matrix, the x-axis represents progressive levels of interactivity, and the y-axis displays progressive levels of knowledge, as explained in The creative economy = the ‘direct economy”. Notice how raw data really doesn’t add up to anything, while true tangible results only happens at the interactivity level of co-creation involving collective intelligence and resources, and the knowledge level of logic, when you understand enough of something that you can capture this into a logical model (e.g. Wikipedia’s structure) that produces tangible results.

The direct economy is where “customer knowledge is replacing producer knowledge”. ThinkStudio illustrates this economic model through the two dimensions of interactivity and knowledge.

The five progressive levels of interactivity:
1. Passive – Listening to music, surfing the web.
2. Self service – eBay, Amazon, iTunes.
3. Do-it-yourself – IKEA, mixing music.
4. Co-design – Wikipedia, blogs.
5. Co-creation – Linux, open source, crowdsourcing.

The five progressive levels of knowledge:
1. Raw data - “19.“
2. Information - “19 degrees Celsius, a temperature”
3. Classification/categorization - “Weather in Geneva in January”
4. Process/time - “The temperature range in Geneva in January over the past 50 years.“
5. Logic - “Recognizing that it is has never been this warm in Geneva in January allows us to understand that this might be the result of global warming. And if we understand the logic of this process, we might be able to model it mathematically, thus leading to prediction of future temperatures or some form of automation.“

To reach the level of creative enthusiasm, that’s about heading to the top right of the chart… and the future of our economy and culture.  With the basics of the direct economy explained, we can delve deeper into how we can individually make this happen locally. Stay tuned.

Read more about the direct economy via ThinkStudio’s resource page.

Crowdsourcing - “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.“ Alternatively, “the application of open source principles to fields outside of software,“ as defined by the official crowdsourcing blog and book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe. Also, check out Crowdsourcing 101.

Placemaking – The best definition comes from a collection of definitions at Project for Public Spaces, such as “Placemaking is the art of creating public ‘places of the soul,‘ that uplift and help us connect to each other.“ Also, the book Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities, defines it as “the way in which all human beings transform the places they find themselves into the places where they live.“

So combining these definitions, one gets…

Crowdsourced placemaking – the act of taking development traditionally performed by real estate conglomerates and outsourcing it to a large, undefined group of people in the form of an open call, to transform the places we find ourselves into the places where we live, as ‘places of the soul’ that uplift and help us connect to each other.

For a more comprehensive report on crowdsourced placemaking, download Crowdsourcing Cool Places for Creatives.

Why crowdsourced placemaking? Think of your district as a traditional encyclopedia, full of resources and places to see. However, hardly anyone uses a traditional encyclopedia anymore, they’re predominantly on the crowdsourced Wikipedia. Think of applying ‘wikinomics’ to your neighborhood – wow.

Many of you in the know have heard about the Creative Class, the Cultural Creatives, and now, the Renaissance Generation. What is the difference between these groups, and if there is, how are they interrelated and what do they have to do with cool towns?

Cultural Creatives – 50 million in the U.S., aka the New Progressives, introduced by author Paul Ray in his book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. These are the people who care, and specifically care about the bigger picture, from sustainability to authenticity to humanity.

Creative Class – 38 million in the U.S. representing the creative industry workforce in science, engineering, architecture, design, education, arts, music and entertainment. Based on research by Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Flight of the Creative Class, their presence is directly tied to economic prosperity.

Renaissance Generation (RenGen) – Take the Cultural Creatives and the Creative Class and apply them to a defined movement and time period rather than a demographic or psychographic, the result of which is literally a second renaissance. There will always be a creative class and cultural creatives, but it is only here at the beginning of the 21st Century, a time of unprecedented need and opportunity, will we have a <a href=”http://www.cooltownstudios.com/2007/11/01/make-way-for-the-second-renaissance”>RenGen</a>.

The result of which will be the coolest of towns, the likes of which we’ve never seen before – think of the mindset and population of Silicon Valley in the urban fabric of a Venice, or of course, Florence, Italy.

Read more about creatives in this series of entries.