When I was in Revelstoke, BC last year I met a number of people who had made the move out there from Toronto. When I asked if they missed living in a big city, pretty much everyone gave me the same answer: “No, I love it here.”

This past week when I was in Park City, Utah, I similarly met a number of people who had made the move from New York and other large cities. And when I asked them the same question, I heard statements like: “I used to live in New York, but then I got a life and moved out here." 

In these two examples, the obvious draw is the mountains. But it’s not like everyone just moved and became a ski bum. In fact, Inc Magazine recently published an article talking about Park City’s robust startup scene. People are figuring out how to combine hard work with the lifestyle they want.

What I find interesting about this is that it runs counter to the trend of young people preferring big cities. Here’s a quote from NPR:

“But affordable real estate and waterfront views don’t have millennials biting. They continue "a multigenerational pattern of young adults preferring more expensive urban areas over lower-cost rural ones because the lifestyles and opportunities in such places make the extra burden of cost worth it,” says Robert Lang, professor of urban growth and population dynamics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.”

However, some small towns clearly have a unique lifestyle advantage: mountains. And that seems to be a strong enough draw that some people are simply figuring out how to create the economic opportunities for themselves.

For me, this is yet another reminder that if you’re trying to attract the best human capital to your city or town, you need to think about lifestyle. And since young adults aged 18-34 are far more likely to move around than any other generation, you should also be thinking specifically about what this generation wants.

Here’s a chart from CityLab that shows how precipitously migration falls off (in the U.S.) once people finish school and get settled in a job:

Obviously, not every town or small city is blessed with mountains. But there are many lifestyle advantages that can be created. It’s for this reason that I keep talking about nightlife and Toronto’s laughable 2AM last call. Those are lifestyle things and we can do better.

I am more than happy to trade-off living space (that I don’t really need) for a better location. It means I get the benefit of driving less and enjoying the city more.

But as more of us move to urban centers, we are finding ourselves having to do more with less space. Often this means creating flexible and multi-purpose spaces.

One strategy for this that I really like – which I just learned about through 5 Kids 1 Condo – is the idea of square foot hours. Here’s how it works:

“The concept behind ft2hours (square-foot hours) is to add a time-based measurement to how we assess and use our space. So if your 10′ x 12′ bedroom is used only eight hours a day (i.e., when you’re sleeping), your actual usage is 120 ft2 divided by three (one-third of the day), which is just 40 ft2hours of used space.”

In many ways, this happens intuitively. If you really want to maximize a space, you figure out how to use it more often throughout the day. But I like the idea of applying some math to it.

Of course, this runs counter to the notion that some spaces should be reserved for specific uses. In the case of a bedroom, it’s sleeping and sex. This is so that your mind doesn’t start associating it with things like work, which might start to disrupt your quality of sleep. But perhaps that’s about to become an anachronism in the modern city.

Without having the above formula in mind, I have thought along similar lines for my own apartment.

When I think about where I spend most of my waking hours, it’s bouncing between the kitchen and the living room. And yet my kitchen isn’t up against the windows; it’s recessed towards the back. Instead, my bedroom – where the blinds are almost always drawn – got the windows. (Access to light is a code requirement.)

If it were up to me, I would have flipped my bedroom and the kitchen. But typically in the real estate world, “recessed bedrooms” are considered less desirable. 

I don’t think I’ve heard many people complain about a recessed kitchen, but maybe that will change once we start thinking more about things like square foot hours.

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