INDIANAPOLIS, IND.- Around the country, art is spurring the transformation of gritty industrial spaces into thriving art enclaves. These aren’t just hipster hangouts of vegan food trucks and green markets. They’re areas that have undergone a process known in urban planning circles as adaptive reuse.

Consider a future visit to one of the following seven neighborhoods, where art, food, and lodging are cutting-edge:

· Los Angeles’s Art District: Only in this area will you see 40,000 Angelenos get out of their cars and talk to each other face to face.

· Charlotte’s NoDa Neighborhood: NoDa is a paint-splattered counterpart to the city’s white-collar Fortune 500 corporate establishment.

· Miami’s Wynwood Arts District: Visit Wynwood Walls, an open-air mural park featuring some of the world’s top graffiti artists including the likes of Shepard Fairey.

· New Orleans’s Arts District: Unlike the nearby touristy French Quarter, the Arts District is a favorite with locals.

· Portland’s Pearl District: An incubator for creative expression and business start-ups, its buildings have been rehabbed to eco-friendly LEED-certification standards.

· Brooklyn’s DUMBO: Stroll this waterfront district with its noir patina of granite Belgian blocks and old train tracks to gain a full appreciation for a part of old New York that has been reborn.

· St. Paul’s Lowertown: While it wasn’t until the local artistic community found support for their grassroots efforts that a true transformation began, Lowertown now has one of the largest concentrations of working artists in the Midwest.

These are communities where structurally sound and historically significant buildings are reclaimed, repurposed, and reborn as the linchpins of creative new zones of commerce and tourism.

To view recommendations for when to go, where to eat and stay, and what you can’t miss, the full article from The Saturday Evening Post is available online at http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/07/16/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/art-festival.html.