This week Strong Towns has been running a great social media campaign called #BuildHereNow.
The way it works is very simple. They asked people to get outside and take photos of vacant and/or underutilized properties in their town or city and post them to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BuildHereNow. The goal was to start to identify properties that could “use a little love" and to encourage city builders who might need a little push to develop a particular property.
I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing information and I love the idea of digitally annotating buildings and spaces. In this case, it’s about pulling together the desires of the community,
Hashtags are a great way to quickly make something like this happen, but I would love to see a purpose-built tech platform do this in a more permanent way. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be about developing. Buildings are rich in information; hopefully so rich that a platform like this could survive.
If you think about it, property titles are already a form of annotating real property. So this isn’t really a new idea.
But now technology allows us to harvest all kinds of other information – such as what people would like to see built. Imagine the possibilities if we became more effective at collecting, organizing, and leveraging this data at scale.
One of the things that makes cities so exciting is the fact that they’re always changing. New restaurants open up. New buildings are built. Old buildings (with no heritage value, of course) are demolished. Bike lanes are added. New infill homes pop up in quiet residential neighborhoods. And the list goes on.
For years I’ve wanted an app or some sort of product that would allow city builders to keep track of everything that’s going on in their city. In the same way that Foursquare helps you find cool restaurants around you, I would like to know about everything that’s going on, from rezoning applications to construction updates.
One of the challenges, of course, is that I’m sure more people care about cool new restaurants than about esoteric planning applications. It’s definitely a niche market. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a thriving group of people who do care. So I’ve decided to introduce an Architect This City hashtag on Twitter: #ATHISCITY.
I’ll be using it for city building updates and, if some of you join in as well, I think it could become a great way to keep track all of the neat things that are happening in our city, as well as in others around the world.
Designing your platform so that your producers can bring along consumers is a great strategy for seeding a platform while concentrating on only one side of the market.