I have long been interested in the work of entrepreneur Dennis Crowley. He is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Foursquare, which popularized location "check-ins." But he's created a bunch of other stuff too. The common theme is that his products exist at the intersection of tech and cities (the physical world), which is probably why I've been so interested over the years.

Check-ins, for example, allowed you to say to all your friends, "hey everyone, I'm at this bar." It was a way of checking if anyone you knew was there too, or close by, and also a way of inviting your friends to come join you if they were so inclined.

This was extremely popular for a period of time, but then kind of fizzled out, and Foursquare was forced to pivot and try a bunch of other things. And in the end, this "problem" of augmenting the physical world with our social graph (and other information) never really got solved. I mean, this is broadly the promise of augmented reality.

Thankfully, Dennis has a new company (Hopscotch Labs) and a new tech/city product called Beebop (which is currently in private beta). Here's how it works (excerpt from this Crazy Stupid Tech interview):

It's an iPhone app. There's not much to do in the app, there aren't a lot of buttons to press. Once it's installed and you set the permissions, every time you put on your headphones — your AirPods or any other headphones, it doesn't matter—it chimes and says, "Beebop's been activated." (Beebop is the first project from the company, Hopscotch Labs.)

Then as you walk around the city, it will tell you things about certain places. Eventually, if I walk by a place where my friend was, it tells me that Alex was here two days ago. If I walk by a place and someone's inside, it tells me that Max is inside that place. A lot of it is still under development. Eventually, people leave a comment at a place. Imagine Twitter. It is as if you leave a tweet and you stick it in the ground. When you walk over it, you hear it.

So like before, it's about experiencing cities:

It's been a long time since I built something. What's different now? AI is what's different. You know what's different? Everyone's on their phones all the time. Back in my day, we made stuff for the streets. You would use your phone, you'd put it away, and stuff would happen. Where are the people making that stuff anymore? All we make is stuff that makes you look at the screen. Let's make stuff that gets you out in the world, where you're not glued to the devices. You're out there doing stuff. Big companies out there aren't going to make stuff like this.

The key idea here is that augmented reality doesn't have to just be visual. Visual also requires somebody to figure out a cool set of glasses that people will actually wear out in public. Who knows when this happens, though I do think it will eventually.

So what Dennis is doing is making something that works today -- with audio. This has been called the poor person's augmented reality, but I think that's selling it short. This is really clever. And once again, it's fundamentally connected to how people live in and interact with our cities.

It was explained to me this week that Paris has two principal towers: The Eiffel Tower and the awful tower. The awful tower is, of course, the Tour Montparnasse. Completed in 1973, the Tour Montparnasse is tall, brown, monolithic, and seemingly out of place with the rest of Paris’ urban context. At the time of its completion it was the tallest building in Paris and it remains the tallest building outside of La Defense (business district).

But the Eiffel Tower is also tall. In fact, it’s taller. So how is it that the Eiffel Tower became such a symbol for Paris and the Tour Montparnasse became the “awful tower?” Both were intended to represent modernity (at their respective times) and both were controversial at the time of their construction.

Today people respond to these two towers very differently. Is it because the Eiffel Tower is set in a beautiful park and more separated from its urban context? Or is it because the Eiffel Tower has had almost another 100 years to settle in. It’s not exactly clear. But we do know that as humans we have a bias toward the status quo. And so I like to think of change in the following way:

- There’s change that people immediately like

- There’s change that people hate and will always hate

- And there’s change that people initially hate but will eventually like

The Eiffel Tower, you could argue, falls into category number three. It was big, modern, and alarmingly different when it was built at the end of the 19th century. But now people seem to like it. I know this based on the number of street vendors selling little replicas. For the record, I have yet to see little replicas of the Tour Montparnasse sitting on blankets on the street. I’m a buyer if I do come across one though.

But is it really right to place Montparnasse into category number two? Could it be that it just needs more time to settle in and then it will ultimately move into number three? Maybe. In 2017, an international design competition was held to find an architect for the redesign of the tower. Studio Gang submitted an entry. But Nouvelle AOM was ultimately selected.

I wasn’t part of the selections committee, but I think a good way to evaluate the success of this project will be whether or not it moves the tower into category three. That is, people start to like it. Then maybe Paris will become known as a city of two towers, as opposed to a city with one nice one and one awful one.

New Zealand has been in the news lately for sweeping housing legislation that effectively abolishes single-family zoning throughout most of Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington, and Christchurch.

But before I get into how this will all work, here's a bit of background from an article that Matt Gurney wrote talking about Toronto's inability to build affordable housing and create safe streets:

Now it’s time to segue back to the New Zealand thing, and there’s no particularly graceful way to do it, so I’ll just be blunt and inelegant: the federal government in New Zealand intervened on local housing rules because there was a crisis that local leaders were unable or unwilling to address. New Zealand has severe housing-affordability challenges (though Canada seems determined to close the gap). This has been a problem in New Zealand for years, and not enough was done, so the federal government stepped in... The government expects this to immediately spur construction of new housing units.

It is no doubt a top down approach. But we all know how difficult it is to build anything at all when you start from the other end.

So the way this new legislation will work is that it forces local councils to allow landowners to build up to 3 homes and 3 storeys on most lots. This is instead of 1 home per lot. The maximum site coverage has also been increased to 50%. And all of this will be available on an as-of-right basis, so no special permissions or variances needed.

The pitch is that this will unlock as many as 105,000 new homes in already built-up areas. This is, of course, a good thing for a whole host of reasons. It uses land and infrastructure more efficiently, it makes public transit more viable, and it increases housing supply in a highly constrained market.

I suspect that we will be seeing a lot more of this in the coming years.