Yesterday I wrote about the High Line Park in New York and the tremendous success that it has seen since the first section opened in 2009. It attracts somewhere around 5 million visitors a year and is thought to be responsible for over $2 billion a year in economic activity.

But the economic activity it’s generating and the future tax revenues it’s creating are really a byproduct of the fact that people, quite simply, love the High Line. It attracts people. And that reminded me of a short post I wrote earlier this year called: It’s all about people. Because if you think about it, that’s really the key metric for a lot of things in life and in business.

When you build a park like the High Line in New York or Millennium Park in Chicago, you’re designing it to attract people. When you build a mall, you seek out anchor tenants, because you know they drive foot traffic. When you build a new neighborhood, you’re trying to create street life from scratch. When you run a bar, you want headcount. And when you build a web or mobile app (or write a blog for that matter), you want registered users and eyeballs on your platform.

And you want these things because foot traffic, street life, eyeballs, impressions, users, and headcounts ultimately generate revenue. But here’s the thing: if you focus directly or too much on that end goal, you run the risk of missing an important step along the way, which is simply to delight real people.

In his most recent essay, startup guru Paul Graham put it perfectly when he said:

“The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you’re solving for them.

He’s obviously talking about technology products, but the same could be said for parks, streets, malls, plazas, and so on. To design and build better cities, we need to be experts on people. And we need to create spaces and environments that people actually want to occupy. Spaces that improve people’s lives.

Now, this may sound fairly obvious to some of you. But quite often I feel like we get sidetracked by things that don’t matter as much as people do.

Image: Flickr

Yesterday I tweeted this picture out from Chicago:

I love this big bean. What do you think the ROI is on this piece of public art? pic.twitter.com/TXXZcju9nb

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b) August 16, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Many of you, I’m sure, have seen this public sculpture before, either in person or somewhere online. It’s called Cloud Gate and it’s by Anish Kapoor – though its nickname has become, quite simply, the bean.

Given that it’s been a hugely successful piece of public art, I asked what people thought the ROI of it might be. Obviously I wasn’t expecting any sort of number, but I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the right kind of investment in public art can pay huge dividends. Oftentimes we, developers and others, don’t think of it in this context though.

And it’s probably because it’s so hard to figure out what those dividends might be. What's the value of a big recognizable bean that everyone around the world associates with your city? But if you think about it, it’s not that different than a corporate logo that everyone knows is yours, which is why I’m interested in the branding of places.

However, as Gil Meslin rightly pointed out in his tweet storm response to my tweet, it’s hard to consider the bean investment in isolation. I mean, the whole point of the bean is to reflect the surrounding urban landscape. So if it wasn’t for the larger Millennium Park investment and the beautiful historic buildings along Michigan Avenue, maybe that bean wouldn’t be the bean that it is today.

Ultimately, that just makes coming up with any sort of defensible ROI even more difficult. But that shouldn’t deter us. Because as I’ve said before, just because you can’t measure or prove it (right now), doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea. In this case, I think it’s pretty clear that this bean has been a hugely successful investment.

Yesterday I wrote about the High Line Park in New York and the tremendous success that it has seen since the first section opened in 2009. It attracts somewhere around 5 million visitors a year and is thought to be responsible for over $2 billion a year in economic activity.

But the economic activity it’s generating and the future tax revenues it’s creating are really a byproduct of the fact that people, quite simply, love the High Line. It attracts people. And that reminded me of a short post I wrote earlier this year called: It’s all about people. Because if you think about it, that’s really the key metric for a lot of things in life and in business.

When you build a park like the High Line in New York or Millennium Park in Chicago, you’re designing it to attract people. When you build a mall, you seek out anchor tenants, because you know they drive foot traffic. When you build a new neighborhood, you’re trying to create street life from scratch. When you run a bar, you want headcount. And when you build a web or mobile app (or write a blog for that matter), you want registered users and eyeballs on your platform.

And you want these things because foot traffic, street life, eyeballs, impressions, users, and headcounts ultimately generate revenue. But here’s the thing: if you focus directly or too much on that end goal, you run the risk of missing an important step along the way, which is simply to delight real people.

In his most recent essay, startup guru Paul Graham put it perfectly when he said:

“The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you’re solving for them.

He’s obviously talking about technology products, but the same could be said for parks, streets, malls, plazas, and so on. To design and build better cities, we need to be experts on people. And we need to create spaces and environments that people actually want to occupy. Spaces that improve people’s lives.

Now, this may sound fairly obvious to some of you. But quite often I feel like we get sidetracked by things that don’t matter as much as people do.

Image: Flickr

Yesterday I tweeted this picture out from Chicago:

I love this big bean. What do you think the ROI is on this piece of public art? pic.twitter.com/TXXZcju9nb

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b) August 16, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Many of you, I’m sure, have seen this public sculpture before, either in person or somewhere online. It’s called Cloud Gate and it’s by Anish Kapoor – though its nickname has become, quite simply, the bean.

Given that it’s been a hugely successful piece of public art, I asked what people thought the ROI of it might be. Obviously I wasn’t expecting any sort of number, but I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the right kind of investment in public art can pay huge dividends. Oftentimes we, developers and others, don’t think of it in this context though.

And it’s probably because it’s so hard to figure out what those dividends might be. What's the value of a big recognizable bean that everyone around the world associates with your city? But if you think about it, it’s not that different than a corporate logo that everyone knows is yours, which is why I’m interested in the branding of places.

However, as Gil Meslin rightly pointed out in his tweet storm response to my tweet, it’s hard to consider the bean investment in isolation. I mean, the whole point of the bean is to reflect the surrounding urban landscape. So if it wasn’t for the larger Millennium Park investment and the beautiful historic buildings along Michigan Avenue, maybe that bean wouldn’t be the bean that it is today.

Ultimately, that just makes coming up with any sort of defensible ROI even more difficult. But that shouldn’t deter us. Because as I’ve said before, just because you can’t measure or prove it (right now), doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea. In this case, I think it’s pretty clear that this bean has been a hugely successful investment.