On Monday I watched the movie Moneyball for the first time. I really enjoy movies, but I unfortunately don’t watch a lot of them, which is why I am only now watching Moneyball. It was released in 2011.

The movie is based on a 2003 book of the same name that many people believe changed the game of baseball. It emphasizes rigorous statistical analysis (known as sabermetrics) over gut feeling, instinct, and traditional metrics when it comes to assembling winning baseball teams.

I don’t know a lot about sabermetrics, but I am now excited to read the book. Still, the dichotomy between the New York Yankees and the Oakland Athletics is incredibly interesting to me. And it reminded me of a post I wrote a few months ago ago called: When everyone thinks you’re wrong.

In the movie, Billy Beane, the GM of the Athletics, realizes that he cannot compete with the Yankees dollar for dollar. The Athletics are a small market team and the Yankees, with their large payroll, will always be able to pay more for players. So he decides that he will need to think about the problem differently to win.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s exactly the framework I talk about in my post when it comes to buying (real estate) development sites:

“…you can really only win development sites in one of two ways. Either you’re willing to spend the most money or you see something and have a vision that nobody else sees.”

Of course, lots of baseball teams today are now employing sabermetrics. But at the time, everyone thought Billy Beane was nuts. It’s hard to try something new and be different. Many of us just want to do what is least likely to fail.

But there’s so much value in having conviction and being right about something that everyone else thinks is wrong. You won’t always get it right. And that’s okay. But when you do get it right, it’ll be magic.

The “ground plane” is an important reference in architecture. The ground is typically where people walk. The ground is where our fabricated buildings meet the earth. And the ground is where our experience of the urban environment–however good or bad it may be–truly takes shape. Often times I feel that we, city dwellers, spend far too much time worrying about the height of buildings and not enough time worry about the ground floor.

But what if there were no clearly defined ground plane? This morning I stumbled upon an interesting book called, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. The authors call it “a manifesto for a new theory of urban form.” And the argument is that Hong Kong has developed a unique series of public/private spaces that allow it to function as a fully three-dimensional city. 

Through underground tunnels, above ground walkways, escalators, and other connective infrastructure, Hong Kong is reinventing the way we typically think about cities–both from a user experience and a real estate standpoint. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian architecture and design blog:

The phenomenon began in the 1960s, when the Hongkong Land company, one of the main developers in the region, built an elevated walkway to connect a luxury hotel to the second storey of an adjacent shopping mall. An insignificant move, perhaps, but it in fact had the effect of changing the rentable values within the building: suddenly the mall’s second floor units could be rented out for more than those at ground level. It entirely recalibrated the vertical logic of real estate value.

Now, you could argue that Hong Kong is a unique place. And it is. Other, less dense cities, have found above and below grade walkways to be a destroyer of urban vibrancy. But in Hong Kong it works and, as many other cities around the world focus their energies on urban intensification, we may find that Hong Kong is indeed a new model for urban form.