Here on ATC, we’ve talked a lot about the changing nature of work and what that could mean for cities.
We talk (and debate) about the value of density and of being in close proximity to others so that ideas can percolate – whether that means open office floor plans or community coffee shops.
But alongside all of this, there are some fascinating structural changes taking place within organizations. Below is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article called, How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business.
But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.
Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.
What I find interesting about the statements I’ve bolded is that they represent a radically different approach to business and employment. Of course, it’s not really a new thing. Google has been encouraging its employees to work on personal projects since, I think, the very beginning.
But as you read the above article, you really get the sense that Page believes that this kind of organizational culture is fundamental to the long term competitiveness of the company. It’s something he is genuinely worried about.
As counter intuitive as it might seem to encourage employees to work on other things besides the core business, one could argue that it’s almost essential in a world of rapid and constant innovation. Would you rather an employee or a competitor discover what’s next in your industry? If it’s the former, you have a chance of absorbing it into your current business. If it’s the latter, you’re already too late.
If you go back to the article I posted earlier this week, you’ll see that creative destruction is happening a lot faster than it did in the past. The average life span of many, or most, companies seems to be decreasing.
The tech sector seems to be ahead of most other industries with respect to this kind of thinking. But I believe that it will continue to percolate through the economy. And when it does, it will probably have many impacts on the kinds of spaces we design and build in our cities.
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together.
We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as the strike zone. We would play football on corner lots, where it was tackle on the grass and “two-hand touch” on the street. And we would wax our curbs so that we could skateboard them.
None of these spaces were ever really intended for baseball, football, or skateboarding, but we kids repurposed them.
As people, including families, continue to move into urban centers around the world, I have no doubt that the next generation of children will once again repurpose spaces for play. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do when it comes to properly preparing our communities for people of all shapes and sizes.
One of the most interesting design challenges facing us today has to do with our towers.
Architects have long been obsessed with the idea of vertical villages. Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation in Marseille had two shopping streets embedded within the tower that were intended to act as public spines. I don’t know how well they did, but it was a highly progressive idea for the time.
Following on this idea, I was recently watching a TED talk with architect Ole Scheeren (thanks Mariane) and I was fascinated by his obsession with breaking down the raw verticality of towers.
His belief was that, yes, cities are and will continue to become more dense through tall buildings, but that most towers isolate rather than connect people. His work strives to do the opposite.
And this one of the big trends that I think we will see more of in our cites. We will see new forms of urban connectedness and a blurring of private, public, and semi-public spaces. Screw Euclidean zoning.
On that note, I am reminded that I owe the ATC community a post on my predictions for 2016. I hope to get that out shortly.
Diagram via Büro Ole Scheeren
Cities are in vogue. And that has brought about buzzwords like urbanism, tactical urbanism, urbanist, and the list goes. But what exactly does it mean to be an urbanist?
If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll likely get something along the lines of: someone who is a specialist in city planning. But I bet that there are many people out there who would self-identity as being an urbanist, but who would also not consider themselves specialists in the field.
The term has evolved to imply other things.
To this end, Scott Bonjukian (over at The Urbanist) recently wrote a good piece called, Why I call myself an urbanist. And in it he offered up this definition from the former mayor of Seattle, Michael McGinn:
“At the core, urbanists want more people living in cities, so they support more urban housing of all types. They prioritize walking, biking and transit, and support a high quality shared public realm. Parks, nightlife, theaters, transit and taxis can replace backyards, TV rooms and private cars. That way we can live well with less stuff, sprawl and pollution.
I’ll go a little further, and say urbanists prefer bottom up, granular, and seemingly chaotic innovation to top-down planning and mega-projects. Think the “Main Street” of neighborhoods with food trucks and lots of little stores, as opposed to tax-subsidized big box stores with legally required massive parking lots. Bike lanes, crosswalks and plazas instead of public garages and new highways.
Urbanists believe that mixing people and ideas creates wealth in a city. Why else would people choose to live so close to each other? Cities, therefore, should be open to people of every background, ethnicity, race and class to maximize the potential from our human capital.”
Scott added that most urbanists are probably also environmentalists on some level, and I can certainly see where he’s coming from with that. Regardless, I think the above definition is pretty apt.
But if you unpack some of the points, this definition raises some interesting questions. For instance, take the first line around supporting housing of all types.
This could mean that even if you lived in an inner city transit-served single family neighborhood, but you didn’t support alternate housing types such as duplexes, triplexes, accessory dwelling units and/or laneway houses, then you might not be a true urbanist. You would rather homogeneity over a “chaotic” mix of housing types. And I can certainly think of inner city neighborhoods in Toronto that have fought against “monstrous” duplexes.
So I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the above definition of urbanist. Do you agree or disagree? Is there anything you would add or take away? Are you an urbanist? Let us know in the comment section below.
Here on ATC, we’ve talked a lot about the changing nature of work and what that could mean for cities.
We talk (and debate) about the value of density and of being in close proximity to others so that ideas can percolate – whether that means open office floor plans or community coffee shops.
But alongside all of this, there are some fascinating structural changes taking place within organizations. Below is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article called, How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business.
But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.
Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.
What I find interesting about the statements I’ve bolded is that they represent a radically different approach to business and employment. Of course, it’s not really a new thing. Google has been encouraging its employees to work on personal projects since, I think, the very beginning.
But as you read the above article, you really get the sense that Page believes that this kind of organizational culture is fundamental to the long term competitiveness of the company. It’s something he is genuinely worried about.
As counter intuitive as it might seem to encourage employees to work on other things besides the core business, one could argue that it’s almost essential in a world of rapid and constant innovation. Would you rather an employee or a competitor discover what’s next in your industry? If it’s the former, you have a chance of absorbing it into your current business. If it’s the latter, you’re already too late.
If you go back to the article I posted earlier this week, you’ll see that creative destruction is happening a lot faster than it did in the past. The average life span of many, or most, companies seems to be decreasing.
The tech sector seems to be ahead of most other industries with respect to this kind of thinking. But I believe that it will continue to percolate through the economy. And when it does, it will probably have many impacts on the kinds of spaces we design and build in our cities.
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together.
We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as the strike zone. We would play football on corner lots, where it was tackle on the grass and “two-hand touch” on the street. And we would wax our curbs so that we could skateboard them.
None of these spaces were ever really intended for baseball, football, or skateboarding, but we kids repurposed them.
As people, including families, continue to move into urban centers around the world, I have no doubt that the next generation of children will once again repurpose spaces for play. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do when it comes to properly preparing our communities for people of all shapes and sizes.
One of the most interesting design challenges facing us today has to do with our towers.
Architects have long been obsessed with the idea of vertical villages. Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation in Marseille had two shopping streets embedded within the tower that were intended to act as public spines. I don’t know how well they did, but it was a highly progressive idea for the time.
Following on this idea, I was recently watching a TED talk with architect Ole Scheeren (thanks Mariane) and I was fascinated by his obsession with breaking down the raw verticality of towers.
His belief was that, yes, cities are and will continue to become more dense through tall buildings, but that most towers isolate rather than connect people. His work strives to do the opposite.
And this one of the big trends that I think we will see more of in our cites. We will see new forms of urban connectedness and a blurring of private, public, and semi-public spaces. Screw Euclidean zoning.
On that note, I am reminded that I owe the ATC community a post on my predictions for 2016. I hope to get that out shortly.
Diagram via Büro Ole Scheeren
Cities are in vogue. And that has brought about buzzwords like urbanism, tactical urbanism, urbanist, and the list goes. But what exactly does it mean to be an urbanist?
If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll likely get something along the lines of: someone who is a specialist in city planning. But I bet that there are many people out there who would self-identity as being an urbanist, but who would also not consider themselves specialists in the field.
The term has evolved to imply other things.
To this end, Scott Bonjukian (over at The Urbanist) recently wrote a good piece called, Why I call myself an urbanist. And in it he offered up this definition from the former mayor of Seattle, Michael McGinn:
“At the core, urbanists want more people living in cities, so they support more urban housing of all types. They prioritize walking, biking and transit, and support a high quality shared public realm. Parks, nightlife, theaters, transit and taxis can replace backyards, TV rooms and private cars. That way we can live well with less stuff, sprawl and pollution.
I’ll go a little further, and say urbanists prefer bottom up, granular, and seemingly chaotic innovation to top-down planning and mega-projects. Think the “Main Street” of neighborhoods with food trucks and lots of little stores, as opposed to tax-subsidized big box stores with legally required massive parking lots. Bike lanes, crosswalks and plazas instead of public garages and new highways.
Urbanists believe that mixing people and ideas creates wealth in a city. Why else would people choose to live so close to each other? Cities, therefore, should be open to people of every background, ethnicity, race and class to maximize the potential from our human capital.”
Scott added that most urbanists are probably also environmentalists on some level, and I can certainly see where he’s coming from with that. Regardless, I think the above definition is pretty apt.
But if you unpack some of the points, this definition raises some interesting questions. For instance, take the first line around supporting housing of all types.
This could mean that even if you lived in an inner city transit-served single family neighborhood, but you didn’t support alternate housing types such as duplexes, triplexes, accessory dwelling units and/or laneway houses, then you might not be a true urbanist. You would rather homogeneity over a “chaotic” mix of housing types. And I can certainly think of inner city neighborhoods in Toronto that have fought against “monstrous” duplexes.
So I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the above definition of urbanist. Do you agree or disagree? Is there anything you would add or take away? Are you an urbanist? Let us know in the comment section below.
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