How crowd urbanism builds a stronger culture of innovation

The 2008 financial collapse was not kind to Athens. High levels of debt and a depressed economy unsurprisingly also led to high levels of unemployment and poverty. The empty shops and neglected buildings gave a sense of hopelessness and abandonment. Despite that, the streets of Athens were still percolating with activity. In homes and public spaces, large and small grassroots projects were popping up. These projects brought a rustling and bustling back to a city in the midst a crisis to find solutions for growing urban problems.

In 2014, the government decided to pull these grassroots projects together under a digital platform called SynAthina. The platform gave people the ability to upload their revitalization projects to the internet to increase visibility, exchange expertise, and best practices. Within three years, 2,400 projects were uploaded, ranging from those trying to protect street art to groups discussing what to do with abandoned spaces in their neighbourhood. The platform later became a winner of the Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge, an initiative focused on uncovering bold and inventive ideas that solve tough city problems. While reading about the effort of Athenians to improve their communities through a series of small and large actions, the work of the late Jane Jacobs kept popping into my head.

Cities can be built for happiness

What Steve Jobs did for computers is what Jane Jacobs did for cities. Computers have come a long way since Steve’s insightful development of the first Apple computer and so to have cities since Jane published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her ability to transform urban issues that were once easily passed over into significant forces shaping our economy, society and environment was second to none. Later generations have since turned her observations into scientific study. A science that can almost predict the economic, social and civic trajectories of our cities and its communities. This science can be seen in the ways we can move around our cities and the types of homes we can live in. It can also be seen in the number of trees that line our streets or the number of gathering spaces in our neighbourhoods.

Jane has allowed us to better understand how a series of small projects can lead to transformational change.

While Jane left us with quite a number of breakthroughs on how to build better cities, two of them really stand out for me. The first is that cities can be built to better serve people. This insight has led teams of researchers to study how cities can make people happier. The notion that we can intentionally build communities that make us happier is truly remarkable. Their findings led us to better understand how green space can improve mental health, the toll commuting times take on our physical health, the role of public spaces in combating the epidemic of loneliness, and how buildings can positively influence the way we feel and think. As this body of research grows, so to does our ability to make decisions that better serve people.

Secondly, we don’t have to spend years debating large infrastructure investments to make a positive impact now. Jane has allowed us to better understand how a series of small projects can lead to transformational change, like on Kenmore Boulevard in Akron. In an effort to reconfigure a street to better serve people, the community installed a beer garden, extended sidewalks to allow for loitering, used paint to make an intersection safer, and a bike lane and bus stop to offer more mobility options.

Combined with the ability to make better decisions rooted in evidence, this understanding of small actions leading to big change has given rise to successful crowd urbanism projects, just like those in Athens and Akron. These projects have also included a makeshift library that hosts community programs, mobile parks that provide access to green space, and reclaiming rivers as public space with swimming pools that also cleans the contaminated water. With its roots in the power of crowds, these initiatives leverage local community assets such as residents, community associations, nonprofits, and businesses to activate and organize local participants in improving their communities.

Cities can be built for creativity and innovation

Within economics exists a branch that explores the role of culture in influencing economic outcomes. In a previous article, I wrote about the ways cities can be designed to attract and retain talent and companies. In that piece, the role of culture in economies was touched upon in the work of Hubert Schmitz & Bernard Musyck. They examined how a trusting and cooperative culture enabled companies to remain productive during periods of economic recession. The demise of New Jersey’s economy as a result of Bell Labs’ self-protective and inward-focused culture serves as an example of the opposite and negative effect culture can have on a local economy.

It’s not a mere coincidence that cities like London or Boston, which are home to some of the world’s top performing universities, are ranked among the world’s most innovative economies.

In an attempt to better explain the dynamics of cultural economics, an offshoot was created to explore interdependencies. A great example of interdependency is the relationship between universities and the type of economy that exists locally. It’s not a mere coincidence that cities like London or Boston, which are home to some of the world’s top performing universities, are ranked among the world’s most innovative economies. Culture is pervasive and for cities that are truly innovative, their economic culture can be found in every corner. It’s also not a coincidence that both Boston and London have recently hosted conferences in crowd urbanism.

On Market Street in San Francisco, also home to a world leading university and innovative economy, exists a crowd urbanist project called the Living Innovation Zone. While walking along the street, users can sit in front of whisper dishes that allow them to have intimate conversations with others sitting 15 feet away, or sit on a bench that plays music when users hold hands to complete an electric circuit. Since the success of the initial project, the city has committed to installing ten innovation zones as a way for groups to prototype and demonstrate solutions to improve public spaces.

Bringing ideas to life

Ideas cannot flourish without an ecosystem that provides the resources needed to bring them to life. For crowd urbanism, the resources it needs for a strong ecosystem are not that different from the resources needed for a thriving startup economy. This includes access to different types of talent and mentors, diverse options of capital, meaningful networking opportunities, gathering spaces that propel creativity, access to early adopters, and systems that allow for fast and convenient movement throughout the ecosystem.

The similarities for crowd urbanism also extend to the methodologies used for startup economies. Agile, Lean Startup, and Sprint are not that different to LQC (lighter, quicker, cheaper), tactical urbanism or urban acupuncture. Whether used for a startup or a community project, all of these methods involve ideation, prototyping, creating a minimum viable product, iterating, pivoting, and building a community of support. The methods are so similar that they can be applied interchangeably. For example, pop-up shops and micro-mixing, mixing multiple businesses in a single space, are now commonly used in business development but have roots in tactical urbanism.

Crowd urbanism can also be used as a more accessible, affordable, and low-risk mechanism to create a stronger culture of innovation that empowers entrepreneurship.

With such strong ties to startup ecosystems and methodologies, crowd urbanism is not simply a tool that can be used to improve communities and make people happier. Crowd urbanism can also be used as a more accessible, affordable, and low-risk mechanism to create a stronger culture of innovation the empowers entrepreneurship. With the need to engage many residents and community organizations in creating meaningful solutions to complex urban problems, there is also a tremendous opportunity for knowledge and skills development in innovation that’s easily transferable to workplaces and entrepreneurship.

The learning curve of the crowd

There is a competing debate within crowd urbanism about whether residents can make the best decisions for their community. At a time where city-building is increasingly becoming a science, especially with the emergence of smart city data, who is in the best position to make decisions?

People are inherently caring, reasonable, purposeful and curious.

In Toronto, there’s a public engagement firm called MASS LBP. The company has become world renowned for their ability to meaningfully engage with citizens in making public policy decisions. Their approach to engagement is rooted in the idea that people are inherently caring, reasonable, purposeful and curious. Their process is anchored in asking better questions and convening citizen panels. It’s also anchored in education, an understanding that someone who works in oil and gas may not understand all the complexities of urban mobility systems.

In an era that is seeing the increasing democratization of information and the proliferation of misinformation, crowd urbanism could become an even stronger asset to communities, government, and businesses in supporting the ability to learn about cities from credible sources in an effort to make better decisions together.

The rise of inequitable cities

Whether its Jay Pitter and John Lornic’s Subdivided Cities, Sean Micallef’s Frontier City or Richard Florida’s New Urban Crisis, there has been growing concern in recent years about how increasingly innovative cities are also becoming increasingly inequitable cities. This is because inequitable cities become more segregated as high income families choose to live in resource rich parts of the city. As a result, the cost of living in resource rich neighbourhoods rises. This diminishes the opportunity for low income families to live in these neighbourhoods and benefit from the resources. This structural inequality leads to significantly divergent outcomes in education, health, and economic mobility. As cities become more structurally unequal, they diminish their capacity to innovate and sustain longer periods of economic growth. I will be publishing an article in the coming weeks that delves further into the issue of structural inequality and segregated cities.

There is no reason that crowd urbanism could not be used as a tool to target investment in struggling communities with the support of more affluent neighbourhoods.

To remedy economic, social and civic disparities, many cities are creating a variety of tools to target investment in low income areas to build better neighbourhoods. In 2014, Toronto identified 31 neighbourhoods in need of investment as part of their Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy. These neighbourhoods were identified using a variety of metrics. The targeted investments made will be used to move the metrics in a positive direction to reduce inequity. In the United States, Opportunity Zones aim to direct long-term targeted investments by reducing taxes for those who choose to invest their capital gains into struggling communities. There is no reason that crowd urbanism could not be used as a tool to target investment in struggling communities with the support of more affluent neighbourhoods.

Remaining globally competitive

By 2050, almost 70% of all people in the world will live in cities. By 2025, the top 600 cities will produce 60% of global GDP. During this time, it’s expected that 136 cities will also drop out of the top 600. In today’s fast moving economy, it’s difficult to make predictions about the future of each city. For instance, only 60 firms who were on the Fortune 500 in 1955 were on the list in 2017. While it’s safe to assume that New York will remain on the list, who knows if they will be able to maintain their position by 2050. Shifting indicators such as the 100 new Chinese cities that will enter the top 600 list and the 900,000 person decrease in New York’s net domestic migration between 2010–2017 makes the future outlook uncertain.

It’s for these reasons that a growing number of the world’s most innovative cities are investing in Chief Innovation Officers and are committing to startup mentalities rooted in continual testing, iterating and prototyping to maintain and improve their global competitiveness. Cities that choose to advance crowd urbanism have the added benefit of further embedding their innovative culture through bypassing, or partnering with, post-secondary institutions to engage directly with neighbourhoods. As participants engage in the ecosystem and its methodologies, innovative culture will inevitably become more embedded.