Lower Downtown Denver has become the city's night life hub -- and a laboratory for community-level sustainability.Photo: Wally GobetzI once worked for a New Yorker who loved to wisecrack that the only difference between Denver and yogurt was that "yogurt's got culture." Looking at the Mile High City's endless sprawl of lookalike, Anywhere, U.S.A. subdivisions, it's easy to understand where he was coming from. But in a former warehouse district just off of downtown, an innovative experiment in neighborhood-level sustainability is underway that could show New York and the rest of the country what really rocks the house when it …

Photo: Peretz PartenskyIt's hard to put a finger on the exact moment the crap took over Americans' lives, but I know exactly when it happened to me. And as we head into a day of national gluttony followed by a collective, orgiastic display of shopping, I've resolved to do more than weather the onslaught. I want to look into my own personal relationship with crap -- and I hope others will, too. My story starts in 1997, when I moved from Montana to a small town in Colorado, where I'd landed my first paying job in journalism. I made the …

Photo: Lauren DeCicca via weeklydig"Mike check! "MIKE CHECK!" "Mike check!" "MIKE CHECK!" This call-and-response has become a familiar refrain for those who have attended Occupy Wall Street protests or followed the movement from afar. When police banned sound systems in many encampments, protesters responded by creating human amplifiers: Anyone who has something to say to the crowd cues up the mike, and people standing nearby chant the speaker's message in unison. The routine is a hallmark of the movement's spirit of plucky, hacker-style innovation and its egalitarian, anyone-gets-a-chance-to-speak ethos. It also gets incredibly tiresome. Once you've heard enough self-important babble …

Photo: c/o Peter GibsonWhen Peter Gibson first set out with spray paint and stencils into the streets of Montreal, he had protest on his mind, not art. He had little sense that his small act of sabotage would usher him into the boundary-pushing realm of street art -- or land him in the back of a police car, facing serious criminal charges. It was just after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Gibson, a university-trained pianist who was 27 at the time, watched as the U.S. and its allies searched for an object on which to inflict their …

The walls of our cities are becoming canvases for creative expression in the hands of a new generation of artists. These kids are street-smart and engaged. (And, OK, they're not all kids.) They work, on some levels, in the same spirit as Occupy Wall Street, reclaiming and transforming the urban landscape, and infusing their art with social and environmental consciousness. "Street art is showing that there can be these locations and public spaces that are temporarily taken over with artwork -- spaces we would traditionally think of as non-art space," says Martin Irvine, an associate professor at Georgetown University. Irvine has …

Jad Daley with the Trust for Public LandPhoto: Hanna Welch All right, we know that no place with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants deserves to be described in these terms -- but let's face it, some cities are known for being dumps. Yet every dump can be cleaned up. Few understand this better than Jad Daley, director of the climate conservation program at the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that acts as a "conservation real estate agent," helping to procure parks and green spaces for public use. The Trust is notable among green groups in that it works in …

There are a couple of things you ought to know about the new film Revenge of the Electric Car, director Chris Paine's sequel to his 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? First, this would be more aptly named The Running Saga of the Electric Car, or better yet, How The Electric Car Gets Its Ass Kicked Over And Over, But Keeps Crawling Back for More. The second thing you should know is that this is a movie made to appeal to car freaks -- read: most Americans -- but even if you consider yourself above all that, as you …

Photo: c/o MooseStreet artist Moose Benjamin Curtis was having some difficulty with the police. The officers had just arrested him for creating designs on a wall in South London. But it was complicated -- as things often are when Moose is involved. You see, Moose doesn't use spray paint or wallpaper paste -- the usual tools of this trade. Instead, he wields scrub brushes, old socks, cleaning fluid, and, when he's living large, a high-pressure hose. He creates images by cleaning shapes into filthy urban surfaces such as retaining walls, signs, and tunnels. People have called it "reverse graffiti," "clean …

Something is stirring in Detroit. Here, in a city that in the past decade alone lost a quarter of its already dwindling population, plans are in the works to revive the manufacturing economy -- at least on a small scale. The Detroit FAB Lab taps into the vibe of "maker" labs and hackerspaces around the globe. Its creators envision an incubator for artists, artisans, and entrepreneurs. Members will have access to equipment for woodworking, metalworking, digital fabrication, and media, as well as business coaching and networking. "Detroit has always been a place where things have been made," says Alex Feldman, …

This is not your grandmother's flower house.Photo: c/o Phipps ConservatoryThe Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh is the kind of place your grandmother would have loved. You know the routine -- the spring tulip show, a whole room full of orchids, 5,000 varieties of rosebush. Housed in a classic Victorian glass house, it's the kind of place you'd think would've sunk into the swamp long ago. But it hasn't. In the past decade, Phipps has set out to become a leader in the green building movement. The conservatory built a LEED silver-certified visitors center and a new tropical forest conservatory tricked out …