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.