The Grand Rapids Downtown Market is a fantasyland of eats: the 132,000-square-foot three-level building offers bread from a wood-fired oven, charcuterie sourced from nearby farms, and other locavore delights. It is also a dream come true from the perspective of urban planning and local business, since its success indicates the community can achieve such goals as supporting local farmers and revitalizing a neglected industrial area at one stroke. During its first year, the market generated 215 new jobs and $5 million in retail sales and spurred conversion of two neighboring warehouses into mixed-use projects with 170 housing units. Montclair, New

In 2012, George Brown College, an urban community college in Toronto, built a waterfront campus for its school of health sciences. Representing a 40 percent expansion of the overall campus, the new 450,000-square-foot, $140-million building responds to rising demand for health-care professionals, in particular those who are preparing for a collaborative practice. By uniting the schools of Dental Health, Heath and Wellness, Health Management, and Nursing and creating strategic social spaces shared by all student bodies, the facility refutes the silo mentality that had kept these related departments from intersecting. Students traveling diverse paths now meet each other easily, build

For a youthful rite of passage or a midlife meander, the hostel remains a staple of low-budget travel. The typical hostel's no-frills barracks-like interiors keep costs down but lack a sense of the city beyond'and fun. London-based, American entrepreneur and veteran traveler Josh Wyatt is harnessing design to create a new hospitality model for his Generator Hostels'shaking up the industry by doing both. Generator took root in 2007, when an investment company, Patron Capital, for which Wyatt is Hotel & Leisure senior advisor, bought a pair of hostels in London and on Berlin's east side. They were both typical of

Boston is full of co-working centers, incubators, and labs, but most are housed within one of the city's 50 institutions of higher education, cloaked with exclusivity or even anonymity simply by association. Others are part of a particular company, perhaps relegated to the corner of a lobby or makeshift space. District Hall, the result of a public-private partnership, belongs to everyone, and it's a smash hit, not just an idealistic showpiece for the city. The bright, airy 12,000-square-foot building on the South Boston waterfront, across from Diller, Scofidio + Renfro's Institute of Contemporary Art, is an innovation center unaffiliated with

Good Design Is Good Business When RECORD first launched the Good Design is Good Business Awards in 1997, attitudes toward the impact of design on profit were changing. According to the editors at the time, corporations and entrepreneurs were just beginning to recognize the benefits of a thoughtful, well-executed workplace or business environment. Today, design excellence is a growing movement, as indicated by the range of this year's nine winning projects. From innovative facilities for nonprofits like London's JW3 and Boston's District Hall to the reconsidered environments of such established industry icons as Macy's Herald Square and McCann New York