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.
Over the course of the years I’ve spent countless vacation days hanging out at some very charming towns where the rhythm of life seems to run at a different pace. I keep going back to those places every now and then with a good book and a mindset to let go and enjoy the moment. Days are long as nothing seems to really happen in these places, but somehow I always find myself recharged when I come back.
Well, I’m going back again, but this time I’m on a mission. I’m taking a few business plans, ideas, contacts, technology tools, even a moderate budget and I’m going with the intent to bring some of the big-city mentality of innovating to places that may not be used to it. I expect to come across people that will find this sudden change of pace motivating and will take the lead. If I can create one meaningful connection between this place and the city where I live, I will consider the mission a success. Then there will be other towns. Then there will be a global tour, a global culture tour.
In the ongoing discussion about the tension between ever-accelerating innovation on big cities and the craving for a slow urban way of life, I’m convinced that the best of both worlds can only be discovered when we mix them up good, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.
A recent article on BusinessWeek stated that some small towns are finally realizing the value of entrepreneurs and are creating local incentives to attract startups, creating a very interesting landscape for anyone thinking about launching a new venture.
cities are beginning to recognize entrepreneurs as a “third leg” of economic development, as important as retaining existing jobs and attracting large corporations. While startup meccas like the Bay Area offer concentrations of talent and investors, new companies there face plenty of competition for those resources, and the cost of doing business is high. In smaller cities, new businesses enjoy lower costs and a higher profile to attract workers, and may be able to get government incentives to create jobs.
A complete analysis of small cities across the United States was commissioned by BusinessWeek and their entire list can be found in their Best Small Cities for Startups, but here are the top performers based on number of startups per capita with an average of 5.5 startups per 1,000 inhabitants:
- Boulder, Colorado
- Doral, Florida
- Sandy Springs
- Boise City, Idaho
- Bozeman, Montana
- Bend, Oregon
- Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
- Franklin, Tennessee
- Fairfax, Virginia
Intrigued by the idea? Have any suggestions about places that could use this kind of exchange? Leave a comment.
“Acoustic” was mostly used as a metaphor for “many things happening at once”
Any jazz lover can tell of the marvellous ways in which a simple riff becomes a rich, complex, unique piece of art through methodic experimentation and endless variation around a central theme.
A couple of years ago, inspired by the popularity of Lonelygirl15, I wrote the post lonelytv:
First consider the fact that TV is mostly an exercise of serializing and organizing a complex story in a way that can be digested by the masses with little effort: from the rigidity of weekly schedules, seasonal programming, series of predefined length to the organization of several threads of action into a cohesive sequence that eliminates any possibility of misunderstanding the story. It’s not too different from the organization of a novel in a book that must address several tracks in a way to keep the reader engaged. The advantage of this approach is accessibility. Very little effort is required to consume.
However, for a new generation of viewers, viewing is not enough. Participation is a must. The Lonelygirl15 phenomenon provides a preview of the type of interactivity that the audience is demanding. Unscheduled snippets of action, very short, cuasi-serialized but easily interchangeable, many different levels of stories that may appeal to different participants, alternate channels to get involved whether providing comments or producing additional snippets of content and endless hooks to plug-in their own ideas into the story. In this new medium there are no rules on how to consume the message
Three different stories in Wired magazine made me realize how far that vision has come and the many ways in which it is being realized:
- Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think: comments on the innovative ways in which people are using new video tools (web cameras, YouTube, etc) to create powerful messages that span many individual videos. His take is that after the expected “adoption” phase where people try to use the new technology in very much the same old ways, we’re finally seeing the innovators creating a whole new medium with it, enhancing our abilities as humans.
- David Downs on how Yo-Yo Ma Brings Remix Culture to Music’s Ivory Tower by providing the initial musical track to a yet unfinished piece that will only be complete when mixed with one of thousands of submissions. More importantly, by recognizing that any personal contribution to the body of knowledge (or art in this case) is only a piece of the puzzle, and encouraging others to contribute, augment, modify, Yo-Yo Ma has started a musical theme that will likely exist in many different ways and will be consumed in many different versions. This reminds me of the work that Creative Commons does and their “shared culture” statement.
- Sonia Zjawinski explains how Interactive Film Gives Editing Tools to You, in what seems to be a real production of the participatory experience I described a couple of years ago:
watching Lonelygirl15 or its next incarnation will allow the audience to react to the story while endless threads of stories become available, allowing every single person to experience it in a different way, requiring a strong oral tradition among those participants to maintain a global cohesion and ultimately realize the vision of this new medium. The “acoustic” approach would require not just watching all the snippets associated with a particular thread of action, but also catching up on what others have to say about the snippets they have uncovered. The story as a whole exists only when the community comes together to share their experiences consuming their individual versions.
McLuhan wrote about the return of society to its tribal ways, pushing the literate man back to an “acoustic” world where oral tradition is the preferred mechanism for cultural transfer. Just like when a jazz ensemble improvises a piece, starting with a simple riff and adding complexity as the ideas evolve in the minds of the musicians, we’re seeing the beginning of a radical new way of building up our cultural heritage by purposely creating simple “riffs” that must be enhanced, mixed and experienced multiple times in many different ways. No consumers, we are all producers in this new medium.
Continuing with the exploration of cities with a population actively engaged in global communications, here is a snapshot of the top 30 cities with most tweets (twitter messages) as calculated by TwitterLocal. The link presents the top 30 in the last 24 hours, here is a snapshot at the time of publishing:
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- Tokyo – 13.5%
- New York – 9.2%
- San Francisco – 6.1%
- Los Angeles – 5.9%
- London – 4.9%
- Washington – 4.1%
- Chicago – 3.9%
- Boston – 3.0%
- Seattle – 3.0%
- Sao Paulo – 2.7%
Other cities outside of North America included in the list: Osaka, Madrid, Sydney, Amsterdam, Paris, Melbourne, Berlin, Bangkok, Barcelona, Taipei, Santiago, Dublin and Caracas.
Further to my last post on accelerating innovation, and after reading a post on Facebook users by country I thought a bit of research was pertinent. Based on my own survey using Facebook itself, here is a list of some of the cities with the highest percentage of facebook users:
- Montreal – 35.2%
- Sydney – 28.4%
- Toronto – 24.7%
- London – 22%
- Hong Kong – 18.9%
- New York – 17.4%
- Singapore – 14.1%
I had to remove from the list other potential candidates where Facebook didn’t breakdown their user base by city; cities in northern Europe and South America among them. Any feedback or inquiries on other cities are welcome.
One of the conclusions of my recent post about urban innovation was that growing cities need to adapt at a faster rate (innovate) as they grow to avoid stagnation. It would be a common mistake to assume that because a city is bigger it is capable of producing more ideas. The correct interpretation of the research is that since a process like innovation follows the law of increasing returns, not only a city would produce more ideas because it has more citizens, but each citizen would have to be more productive as the city grows. One must wonder how citizens can continuously become more productive in today’s world, thus enabling their cities to continue an ever expanding trend.
While the research is too general to venture into the possible ways in which such levels of productivity can be accomplished, a visualization produced by Facebook engineers provides some insight:
The linked video visualizes the interactions among Facebook users in real time. An interesting observation is the density of interactions within certain regions and among remote locations around the planet. While it is very likely the majority of these interactions are banal by nature the visualization helps me present my point more clearly:
In a closed community there are only so many interactions possible. The size of the group will determine the maximum number of interactions per individual, which in turn will determine how many messages each individual will be exposed to, which one can argue will lead to productive ideas. I can’t remember the source but this is a well researched area in communication theory. Given the communication tools that our generation has been given it follows to conclude that we must be exposed to a higher number of ideas. Our tools are continuously getting more efficient in many dimensions: global reach, instant delivery, zero overhead (twitter anyone?) and 24×7 availability through mobile devices.
At this point I’m reminded of something I wrote over a year ago in acoustic world:
An acoustic medium requires the user to consume it partially and obtain the full picture by means of active participation in it. Interpretation is not only good, it is encouraged as it makes the discussion more interesting. By presenting vignettes of reality apparently disconnected one from the other we can convey the illusion of reality as long as there is space for that active participation that compliments the act of viewing them. The net effect should be more powerful than having a single long feature narrating our story linearly.
This appears to describe the nature of our communication obsession. We must all participate, looking for the stories that evolve through the little vignettes produced around the world on common themes. These vignettes have a single source but are interpreted in many different ways by consumers around the world. All of the sudden it becomes obvious how digital citizens can achieve higher degrees of productivity: always scanning the digital ether for inspiration in simple messages originated beyond the scope of their own cities.
It would seem that a good indicator of a city able to accelerate innovation is the proportion of its population engaged in active global communication.
A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to be invited to one of those social clubs for executives that were so popular a few decades ago. No the health club type, but the lounge with really expensive furniture where gentlemen of the highest social spheres get together to read the newspaper and change the world. When I read Martin Varsavsky effort to once create a site for the smartest people in the world, I couldn’t help but chuckle and imagine them all sitting in such a lounge, smoking their cigars, drinking coffees made of exotic beans and entertaining the notion of maybe one day putting their brilliant ideas to work. Sorry, I shouldn’t dismiss the effort as I know Mr. Varsavsky is a first class entrepreneur and would’ve accomplished many things.
The idea I’m challenging is the fact that you need to get many people together in order to accomplish something meaningful. Even in this blog I have used the notion that a community of Global Citizens would create tremendous value, but now realize that such an organization doesn’t need to have a certain size before it is effective. In fact, large communities tend to be refuges for passive members that enjoy the benefits of the community but create little value, a well known effect of today’s popular social networks.
While not everyone has access to an expensive lounge to enjoy their exotic beans, it is becoming more and more popular to put some effort into finding good fair trade coffee. Increased access to information about the repercussions of big coffee producers on local communities has awaken a certain level of social responsibility. Unfortunately, with the number of people subscribing to this idea, companies have taken note and have developed entire marketing campaigns trying to exploit this trend.
Take for example Cocoacamino, a chocolate label that claims to follow Fair Trade practices and even provides extensive information about La Siembra, a co-op of farmers which even though it has a spanish name, is located in Ottawa, Canada. Fair Trade is all about the trade, so you have to be suspicious when a Canadian label claiming to adhere to this principle is buying the product from a local producer. Furthermore, I happen to know a thing or two about how farmers in Canada accomplish their quotas and in many cases (although I can’t speak for this particular one) it is by exploiting migrant workers living under very controlled conditions.
Enough of criticism. What can be done about this? It takes global citizens with knowledge of the world around them. For example, I happen to know a few farmers in poor regions of Mexico. They do have a real co-op and would be thrilled to be able to sell their product to a brand looking to adhere to real Fair Trade principles. Do you know anyone with the skill and access to a market to make a successful product? That is all we need. Little connections like this one.
I would pay premium for coffee or chocolate like this.
Update: On April 2008, La Siembra was listed in the WorldBlu Most Democratic Places. I guess I should’ve researched their organization a bit more before using them as example in this post. I’ve been in direct contact with farmers in the South of Ontario and their lives are thorn apart by a system that tries hard to make them invisible. Any transparency efforts in this industry should be praised.
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