For my last trip to New York City, I approached the planning process in a completely new way: instead of spending hours looking through dozens of sites for deals, lists of hotels, distance to landmarks, comparing prices and star ratings I used one tool: the Livability Calculator from New York magazine’s Neighborhoods issue, which I had just written about in new york’s most livable.
The online tool was designed to help New Yorkers find the best boroughs to live in, so to experience the city the way they do, I figured the best way was to follow them. Using the interactive sliders, I prioritized transit, restaurants, nightlife, diversity and green space over schools, health and definitely slided housing cost all the way to the left. The top choice: “West Village/Meatpacking”.
Meatpacking? Really? From my loyal subscription to Monocle magazine, I’ve learned that a good market can always transform a neighbourhood. Read yourself about the transformation of Cape Town as a result of the opening of “Neighbourgoods Market” by Justin Rhodes and Cameron Munro (Issue 35, pp.145). Not to forget that I spent the last 6 months arguing that St.Lawrence Market was one of the best ways to discover Toronto. Fine, let’s go to the West Village/Meatpacking.
 Photo joevare @ Flickr The trip was superb in many ways. A few of the highlights included watching a World Cup game among another 30 or so neighbours in an improvised street theatre with a HDTV courtesy of an entrepreneurial bistro, walking the cobblestoned streets of West Village which seem to be rebelliously misaligned from the rest of the grid, discovering the new urban oasis that is the High Line, the quintessential subway adventure which included taking the express two stops too far and hanging out with long lost friends at one of the hottest unassuming Bossa Nova venues in the city.
But the prelude to all this was the firm decision to find accommodation in or around the West Village. There are a few really great hotels in the area, most of them small boutique hotels like Soho House New York or Gansevoort Meatpacking NYC. Even The Standard an iconic building right on top of the High Line could’ve been an option. But as nice as they all are, they have one problem: you’ll be looking at a bill of at least one thousand dollars for a long weekend.
 Instead, I found a nice single room in a large apartment available for US$65/night, just a few blocks away from my target area and around the corner from a subway station. The short term rental was a in a 6-story apartment building with one of those elevators with double doors you see in old movies. The building was in itself a good indicator of the awesomeness of a mature neighbourhood, as its type is the landmark of urban models that appeared at the turn of the XX century, with “high-rise” promoting density and mix use of the land.
Lately cities like New York and Paris have been trying to figure out the ecosystem of short term rentals (read update at the bottom). Perhaps under pressure from the lodging industry that finds the emerging trend troubling following one of the worst years in terms of occupation. It is ironic that some of the arguments used to counter the trend is the fact that these rentals take away inventory that would be otherwise available for residents to live in. From The New York Times: To Address Its Housing Shortage, Paris Cracks Down on Pied-à-Terre Rentals
Mayor Bertrand Delanoë ordered an agency last year to warn property owners that renting out residential apartments for less than a year at a time violated French law. The move was intended to address the lack of affordable housing in the city center.
“To live in”. The reason why those of us exploring these social networks of short term rentals find them incredibly appealing: they are a gateway to the real lifestyles of locals. No matter how many amenities a hotel offers to their guests, they can’t control the neighbourhood. Just visualize the chaos that reigns around Broadway and 7th at the street level. It is impossible to leave the lobby of any hotel without being approached by a never ending cast of characters inviting you to every imaginable show on Earth.
As Benji Lanyado explains in his recent New York Times Travel feature Europe Without Hotels:
Social B&B networks are a natural next step, imposing an important distinction: money. The new sites appeal to a traveler’s desire to see a city through local eyes (and from the vantage point of a resident’s home)
Better experience at a fraction of the cost? That is not the only reason these sites are finding great reception among the adventurous. They are also a new kind of social network, one where the people you discover in the virtual world become your guests in real life. One where the judgement you pass on the random conversations you have online will likely have a lasting effect on the friendships you develop and one that is certain to get your closer to cities around the world that you wouldn’t have considered otherwise. I’ll call it the neighbourhood social network.
I used to spend more time trying to figure out what hotel would offer the best deal, cross-referencing information from various sources, comparing their location on a map, reading countless contradicting reviews… still to be disappointed with the overall destination. In this visit to New York all my research was mostly about the neighbourhood, automatically making the whole experience far more gratifying as I clearly scored some pretty great “insider tips” from the very same people that would be my host.
The night I walked into the apartment, my host wasn’t home, but he left a small welcome note with the WiFi password and a short list of the ways in which he was making me feel home, including his mobile number in case I needed anything, at any time. That was the last on a series of communications that started a few days before my trip. Short questions brokered by the website where I found the listing meant to introduce us and give us an opportunity to decide if this was going to be “the place”. In a way I trusted him far more than I have ever trusted a concierge before.
Update from July 28, 2010: Perhaps I used a very soft tone when I said that cities like New York “were trying to figure out the ecosystem”. A bill that outlaws rentals for less than 30 days was recently signed by Gov. David Paterson. To paraphrase Arthur Frommer: Big hotels win, tourism looses. However, these are trying times. People are digging deep to figure out a way to make a decent living and paying expensive hotels, even if prescribed by law will not do. What lobbyists may have triggered is an explosion of services that will find every possible way to give tourists what they are looking for: better prices, authentic experiences, closer relationships and opportunities to venture into cities that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive in the current economic conditions. Services that are based on hosts receiving guests in their own homes are going to be much more popular as they seem to be immune to the new bill. Other entrepreneurial property owners are likely going to learn fast, so I wouldn’t assume that their inventory will be removed from the market as much as it will be morphed into hosted accommodation.
Disclosure: iStopOver is a client. The trip related in this article was of a personal nature and paid by the author.
My routine for Saturday mornings includes an easy stroll down a street lined up with a few mature trees, to a recently opened patisserie where I can have freshly baked pastries, perhaps a strong-flavoured tea and from there to the bookstore to secure a good dose of weekly magazines in matters of travel, entrepreneurship and technology. There is a good bench just one block up the bookstore that guarantees a good amount of sun on your back while you read, or there is a very large park where the background laughter of kids does well to read with optimism no matter what. I like the flow of these simple events, as each one prepares me to enjoy the next move better. I like the fact that it all takes places within just a few blocks, my neighborhood.
I was reminded of “experience design” while reading a little post by Henrik Werdelin about his stay at a W Hotel:
The other day, I stayed at the W hotel in San Francisco. As I was stepping into the shower I noticed that the bath mat towel used when stepping out on the floor after showing was rolled instead of folded. This meant that I could tap it with my foot just before stepping into the shower instead of bending down and un-folding it. I then turned on the shower and noticed that the shower head had been pointed towards the wall, making the first bit of cold water that is always in the pipes go onto the wall instead of me. Finally, as I went out of the shower, I found the bathrobe next to the shower with the string tied in a way so I could just pull the string and the bathrobe would open instead of having to untie the knot. Future more the string was secured to the side of the bathrobe so it didnt fall down on the floor.
We’ve gotten used to experience design from brands. The example above is perhaps the result of many iterations studying every possibility and intentionally deciding to wow the guest. No wonder W Hotels have such a strong brand. But I now want to be surprised by the same intentional ‘betterness’ design when I walk down the street. Is this the stuff that makes urbanist get excited? Or is it why people engage in local politics? There seems to be a big gap between one and another and in the middle we have all those empty stretches of streets that could result in those Aha! moments. Perhaps a weather-proof magazine rack besides my favourite bench would encourage sharing; or a completely open facade to the coffee shop and an engaging tune would give the street its own soundtrack; or the best gelato in the neighborhood would be strategically placed near the park where kids play and not three blocks away. It seems there are too many opportunities wasted and my Saturday mornings could use a little bit of that continuous experience innovation.
The New York magazine devoted its most recent issue to Neighborhoods and in the process of trying to decide which one was the most livable, they ran into some very interesting challenges. Unlike other rankings based on the opinion of an editorial group, they decided to arm themselves with as much information that would quantify different aspects of livability and create a model that would use it all to compute the results. Seems too algorithmic? Consider some of their sources: Yelp, StreetEasy, Zillow, US Census Bureau and the local government. In the age of open data, things like potholes, code violations, test scores at schools, crime rates, density of shopping alternatives, parks, noise levels and many more are all available to provide a robust foundation.  All of these get organized into broad priorities such as housing, transit, safety, schools, diversity, green space, etc. Don’t trust their formula to prioritize the various factors that affect livability? Try their Livability Calculator to set your own priorities.
What I find most useful about this approach is the recognition that open data can be built into dynamic tools that help us make better decisions. I’m not going to claim that we went through such an exhaustive process to define our features for our recent local guide, but I’m certain a healthy dose of live data would provide the ultimate planning tool. Not only stay up to date as new businesses appear and others close, but account for shifting preferences that make some venues more popular during the summer days, or the degree to which a venue is likeable in the various social media tools may soon be the norm for ranking places, in real time.
It’s been a long hiatus from writing in this space, but as Alain de Botton says
And travel, my reliable muse, has not only brought me back to familiar places but reignited the passion for the ideas that I have developed throughout this blog.
Where were we? Oh yes, hyperlocal is hard.
The quest to assemble a local guide for the global citizen has taught me that Hyperlocal is hard. While cities have a convenient way to measure their boundaries, narrowing a particular area within a city with a very specific mindset or spirit seems a lot harder. We often fail to recognize that a lively neighbourhood is the sum of its core commercial strip, the back alleys that hide its best secrets, the surrounding residential areas that define the character of its inhabitants and the eternal flow of people that make it their favourite. Now imagine trying to define a city by one of its many neighbourhoods.
Such was the naive journey I embarqued in when decided to develop such a guide. In the process of researching some neighbourhoods I found myself knocking on doors of boutique hotels camouflaged as residences, negotiating “licensing fees” to take a few photos in amazing secret gardens, discovering the unbelievably rich history behind ancient buildings, growing frustrated with the gross inaccuracy of map services that led me to dead ends or ghost hotels (I swear, they are not there) and trying to put myself in the shoes of the brave traveler willing to go farther for the sake of a great journey.
The intent was clear: if I was a “slow traveler”, willing to invest myself into a destination, which particular area within a city would maximize my chances of understanding it? Originally conceived as a project to arm myself with plenty of good ideas for future travel, it quickly became the topic of many conversations with travel enthusiasts realizing this was a fresh alternative to the complexity of city-oriented travel guides with their endless listings.
So it is hard. Not impossible. And because I have the good fortune of being allied with a smart group of people that have devoted their careers to make travel easier, I have escalated this particular venture to the level of a business project with PlanetEye. As I write this post, the production team at PlanetEye is finishing touches to launch what is our first joint project: a mix of some of the ideas you’ve read about here and some of the content that I produced over the last months with a very interesting visual proposition and more importantly a potential business angle that will make it a viable project, allowing us to expand to many other destinations. I really hope this first venture of the Global Culture brand is embraced by the always curious global citizen.
The following is an adaptation of the post by the same title appeared in el-oso.net, with a few of my own conclusions. In the original post “oso” explores some of the common patterns in the evolution of cities.
Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums
As Kevin Kelly rightly points out, “every city begins as a slum … a seasonal camp with free-wheeling make-shift expediency.” Cities are founded on economic opportunity, spontaneous slums, and lawless saloons. Eventually gender ratios equal out, churches move in, government takes shape, and urban planning is institutionalized.
Chapter 2: Hegemony Rules
During the transition from slum to civic center some social group usually takes power and dictates policy. It tends to be the ethnic majority though in the case of colonized countries that was almost never the case. In most cities in the United States power lied among the WASP community. Ethnic minorities were pushed out to the edges while the elite built Victorian homes around the downtown business districts and plazas.
Chapter 3: Suburbanization or scalability of the dream
This is the chapter that takes on different manifestations depending on the ethnic and class make-up of a city, but the basic concept is still generally applicable. During WWII in the United States there was an influx of black americans seeking work in urban centers. After WWII four developments (other than blatant racism) led to white flight from urban centers to suburban communities. First was population density. After the war soldiers returned home to urban centers, but those who moved in while they were gone also remained. Then there was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which began the process of desegregating the country’s public schools. White parents felt that their children would receive a lower level of education in a desegregated school, and so they moved to suburbs where neighborhoods and their schools were all white. Third, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 enabled the workday commute from suburb to city center. Lastly, suburban developers had large returns to scale as they could purchase a single large plot of land and build hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical homes.
Chapter 4: Urban Gentrification
While the majority of white Americans from my generation grew up in mostly white suburban neighborhoods, our schools and public institutions became increasingly integrated and multicultural. Television and mass media brought the Cosby Show, The Jeffersons, Fresh Prince, and Family Matters into our living room. And then came hip-hop. All of a sudden there was nothing less cool than to have grown up in the suburbs. Young people from affluent suburbs moved into lower-income urban neighborhoods where they opened coffee shops, art galleries, and cocktail bars. Awkwardness and antagonism between the newly arrived affluent and the established lower-income population were inevitable. In the worst of cases property prices increased and low-income renters were forced to move out to other neighborhoods. However, there has also been an effort by young people across different classes in gentrified neighborhoods to shape a common aesthetic around hip-hop, indie rock, street art, and skateboarding.
Chapter 5: Back to the basics?
For a long time one of the ideas that persisted across many of my posts was that in the future all cities would share a common global culture. I wasn’t predicting the future as much as I was describing what I believe to be the advanced society in which I have the honour to live. With one of the most multicultural societies in the world, Toronto does well in integrating such diversity. But often times the protocol to coexists without incurring into cultural mishaps leaves us with a very superficial relationship. I sense that many more people would want to get closer and more integrated. While it is difficult to predict how cities will continue to evolve, I’m suggesting there is plenty of interest in creating spaces where the spirit of spontaneity, chaos and lawless goodness can favour a far more amenable environment, with smaller communities of people more open to experiment with their relationships. All we need to do is figure out what factors will promote such an environment.
A while ago I started to collect city rankings, but more than anything else I was creating the foundation for what would eventually be the greatest destination. If I’ve learned anything throughout this process is that no city can claim such honour. Depending on who you ask, each city will have a unique array of features and advantages that are hard to qualify, let alone compare. But more importantly, the city itself is such a large entity in our mostly urbanized world that trying to generalize any qualities may result in a gross generalization of certain attributes that would be better appreciated if we could localize them.
But since we’re hopelessly lost in this quest for our ideal place, I thought a great place to restart the quest is the latest attempt from Monocle magazine to design the perfect city block. As it seems now a tradition, along with their Quality of Life index, they also look closer and generalize what they’ve learned through the process of ranking cities to put together a theory of “smart urban living”. Without trying to discredit the effort (I really think they are onto something), the article falls to easily into common clichés such as wind turbines, urban farming, community greenhouses, rooftop entertainment and falls short of getting into a serious exploration of the most powerful element to transform our cities: a lively, dense, diverse neighbourhood with progressive minds ready to adapt as new technologies and ideas becoming affordable. In my opinion, more than building we need to explore our cities to find those neighbourhoods that are almost at the brink of a creative explosion, just waiting for the right people to converge and turn them into the ideal urban quarters.
What are the attributes that would make a neighbourhood such a candidate? I expect this will turn into a debate, but here a summary of arguments I’ve put forward over the last three years (in no particular order):
- Hyper-connected: both in the virtual and living realms, it must provide the infrastructure to keep its dwellers engaged with other people across the city and around the globe.
- Sustainable: as with any self-organizing entity, it must optimize resources for its survival, learning to reduce dependency on external sources. This could very well apply to energy efficiency, local food supplies or even its ability to foster the innovation necessary to sustain a thriving culture.
- Evolving: opposing any attempts to characterize the area with a limited number of attributes or features, a great neighbourhood is a living entity with an ongoing narrative that can only be understood by its actors and can only be fully appreciated by being part of such narrative.
- Diverse: not only in the variety of its people, but in its ability to bring these people together into a single meeting point. You should feel like every day is an opportunity to meet a different person from whom you will learn something new.
- Acoustic: as in acoustic medium, where the space becomes a medium that excels at enabling cultural transfer by virtue of the evolved traditions of its participants, advanced mechanisms enabled by technology to propagate information and a rich mix of sources that can be used and reused for many different purposes.
- Unique: even though we may one day discover the perfect recipe for a great neighbourhood, I bet we will continue to be amazed by their variety. A signature lifestyle should be a good hint that you’ve got a good thing going in this place.
- Livable: a great destination should make you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere and not like you’re in transit as an spectator. Its ability for calling on people to settle should be of utmost importance.
How is that for eligibility criteria to become the greatest destination? Can you nominate any area in your city? I’ll continue to explore this theme as we pack our bags and start our Global Culture tour in a quest to find a collection of the best hoods around.
On the trail of liveability rankings released recently by both The Economist Intelligence Unit and Mercer, and just a couple of weeks until Monocle’s Global Quality of Life Survey is out, I thought it would be interesting to question why we care so much about liveability?
But first here are some thoughts from a friend on why we don’t want to live in a ‘liveable’ city:
This hurts Vancouver so much…
1) Employers can say, it’s so livable ! so we can afford to pay less – people SO want to live here.
2) Real estate market keeps going up — people want to live here
3) Vancouverites who haven’t been elsewhere keep the same attitude that it is so perfect and there’s no room for improvement :
- Release city restrictions : Velib bikes ? Sidewalk cafes ?
- A little more culture : +art, +theatre.
It is great that you can ski and go to the (cold) beach on the same day, but that does not mean it would be bad if you could ski and go to see ‘Wicked’ or a Monet on the same day…..
Is it possible that a city can hypnotize its inhabitants into such a state of apathy that liveability is an attribute to be desired but never to be acquired? Just as Borges suggests that there is nothing remarkable about being immortal except to know oneself immortal; I wonder if our (my?) obsession with liveability would terribly affect our lifestyles should we realize we already ARE living in the absolute best place we can possibly find.
Perhaps the most important lesson in travel can be applied to this quest: what matters is not the destination, but the journey. To aspire to find better ways to live, learn from other people making a good and balanced living, connect with other people pursuing the same ideals; these are the reasons to continue our quest for liveability and never settle and assume that we’ve found it. The most interesting bit of this quest is every single new place that will teach us something new that we hadn’t learnt in our previous stops.
I should add that the quote from my friend is based on his own experience living abroad, finding the city of lights after many years of what anyone would’ve assumed was already a great lifestyle. It demonstrates the spirit of a true global citizen, never assuming that things are as well as they could be. Not for himself, not for his family and not for the people that live around him. There will always be a better way, and that’s the spirit of the invitation in give up your urban “devil”:
the key may be in experimentation: what if you could try alternate lifestyles for a short while? Maybe farming is not going to cut it, but helping a community in need develop advanced social programs tapping into your urban skills may be your call. If you could try not one but a few life-changing experiences, chances are not only you’ll change your life, but you’ll end up enhancing the life of many people around you.
P.S. If you haven’t read The Immortal, go buy The Aleph by Borges.
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