Tag: communities

• Imagining the way things could be

  

  Old in new by Andrew Johnston on 500px

  I was out for lunch with a colleague of mine yesterday afternoon and he said to me: “Brandon, I’m really surprised that you’re so interested in technology. It just seems so different compared to real estate and architecture.”

  And I’ve certainly heard that exact same comment from a number of people before. But I don’t see it that way and here are a few reasons why.

  The common thread for me between architecture, real estate development, and technology is that in all of these cases it is about imagining the way things could be in the future and then creating it. It’s about change. It’s about growth. It’s about creation. And I consider myself a builder in practically every sense of the word.

  At the same time, each of these disciplines is about creating engaging spaces for people. Architects and real estate developers do it in the physical world, but many technology products strive to do exactly the same thing in the online world.

  In fact, a couple of years ago I was fascinated to learn that Facebook has and continues to draw inspiration from many of the same books and philosophies that architects, planners, and developers rely on when it comes to creating engaging communities. The medium might be different, but it’s still about people.

  Finally, as I’ve said many times before here on Architect This City, I think that the distinction between tech and non-tech companies and industries is quickly evaporating. Is Airbnb a tech company or a hospitality company? Is Uber a tech company or a taxi company? Pretty soon we’ll be saying that about many other industries.

  Maybe it’s because I’ve always been interested in wading through the overlaps between disciplines, but this is just the way I see it.

  2015.04.16

• Don’t forget that this is about people

  

  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

  2014.10.03