Wiley H. Bates Heritage Park

Wiley H. Bates High School in Annapolis, Maryland, a cultural landmark that sat vacant for more than 20 years, has been reinvented as Wiley H. Bates Heritage Park, a development incorporating housing for low-income seniors, community services for seniors and young people, and a museum of the school and its community. Bates School, which opened in 1933, was the city’s first freestanding secondary school for African Americans and was named after a local man who was born into slavery and later became one of Annapolis’s wealthiest citizens.

Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City

Kashiwa, a city with a land area of 115 square kilometers (44 sq mi) and a population of just over 400,000, is in Chiba Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo in Japan’s Kanto region. Though home to companies in food processing and other industries, as well as a professional soccer team, it is now best known as the home of Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City. Currently being developed on 273 hectares (675 ac) in northwestern Chiba Prefecture, Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City was launched in 2005 with the opening of Kashiwa-no-ha Campus Station on the Tsukuba Express train line. The land is divided into 299 parcels, to be subdivided further into blocks with interconnecting streets and pathways. Initial development is taking place in parcels 147, 148, 149, 150, and 151. This 42-hectare (104 ac) group of parcels extends outward from Kashiwa-no-ha Campus Station and encompasses the University of Tokyo Kashiwa Campus, Chiba University Kashiwa-no-ha Campus, Kashiwa-no-ha Park, and industrial areas.

Accessible from Tokyo in less than an hour by train, Kashiwa-no-ha is an area rich in natural beauty as well as the home of a concentration of academic and research institutions. Creation of the grand design for the project was from the beginning a collaborative endeavor, with Chiba Prefecture, Kashiwa, the University of Tokyo, and Chiba University involved in the planning and deliberation.

The Newton

The Newton is an 18,599-square-foot mixed-use retail, dining, office, and events building in Uptown Phoenix, Arizona, housing an independent bookstore with a beer, wine, and coffee bar; a home and garden store; a chef-led restaurant; a small office; and spaces for meetings and events. The Newton hosts hundreds of events each year, whether sponsored by its tenants or booked by the public. It was built within a renovated restaurant/banquet facility whose midcentury modern architecture and old-fashioned cuisine made it a local landmark for 40 years.

THE ARC

THE ARC—an acronym for Town Hall Education Arts & Recreation Campus—is a $27 million, two-building, 110,000-square-foot (10,219 m2) multipurpose campus serving children and their families living in the Anacostia neighborhood, Washington, D.C.’s poorest ward. Located on a 16-acre (6 ha) site owned by the National Park Service and completed in February 2005, the campus was […]