Ideas for Cities
From Talent Developers in city halls to Tech Missions roaming the streets of our cities, the ideas on the future good life in cities that emerged from our Velocity Salon in Grand Rapids are being brilliantly showcased on GOOD.is as part of a series called Ideas for Cities. Check out the ideas (and the very cool graphics GOOD created to go with them) below.
In the meantime, we've taken those ideas and the overarching vision of the future of cities created in Grand Rapids and D.C. and have been picking the brains of some of the smartest designers, message developers and generally super-smart people to craft a compelling means to tell this story powerfully. It’s still in the works, but the essential theme is this: US.
If we’re going to invest in US, we need to invest in our cities. Our cities should be Of, By and For US.
Much, much more to come soon.
Multi-use Public Transportation
Accessible, easy, ample, and multi-use public transportation could connect citizens throughout the city; one of the cars of the subway could be a classroom, one a spa, and so on.
Share Physical Things
Cities could create a technology platform that enables subscribers to share physical things like cars (Zipcar), bikes, homes swaps for vacations right within the city, clothes, accessories (Bag Borrow Steal), tools, wifi, gathering places, kitchens for people to come cook and eat together, food pantries from local gardens, and more.
Share Responsibilities and Chores
A technology platform for cities could make chores transparent and connect the right people to the right opportunities to share and leverage spontaneous help, like getting groceries, childcare, transportation support, cooking, house-keeping, gardening, clothes, and more.
Affordable Healthcare
Cities could partner with Hello Health to create a city-wide subscription-based healthcare service on a sliding scale, with community-level health services, including in home visits and online clinics. There would also be ample and accessible safe houses and sanctuary for kids and families in physical or emotional trouble.
Kid Entrepreneur Opportunities
Schools could provide mentoring, infrastructure, and micro-financing from the community for projects that kids dream up as part of their studies.
DIY City
The city could be an open platform that connected citizen service-providers and problem-solvers with opportunities to serve. There would be a transparent database of needs of the community, and instruction or guidance on ways to help that situation. SeeClickFix is an excellent model of capturing and making needs transparent from which to build. Cities would extend this to include matching people with particular skills and availability with the right cause. For example, if there is a family that is struggling to care for its children while parents are working, other parents can offer to babysit for the hours needed. If there is a pothole reported, someone from the city can go fix it and report back. Tasks are also tagged related to required skills or experience. So, there could be physical requirements (strength) and intellectual requirements (marketing) that help direct citizens towards the right kinds of tasks. There could also be an exchange or “trade” for services—e.g. trade babysitting for dog walking, plumbing for legal advice. The platform would go far beyond traditional city services, as this exchange and participation could become a way of life. Ultimately all citizens would have a complete and growing profile of their skills, experience, and contributions in a Facebook-like citizen social network paired with opportunity matching.
AddVenture Laws
Laws that prevent progress could be re-evaluated to ensure a basic level of public safety and stimulate creative, entrepreneurial ventures. For instance, cities could permit the use of residential space as a retail or restaurant space (like in Cuba). “Graffiti” could also generally be permitted so that every wall is a canvas to promote artistic expression and for personal branding (like Barcelona).
Reclaiming Space
Buildings not kept to code for more than five years could be reclaimed by the city. If they are not structurally sound they would be destroyed, and if they are sound, they are provided to entrepreneurs in the community with a basic stipend for minor repairs and paint.
Citizen Branding
Cities could be responsible for helping citizens understand and communicate their own story and talent effectively. They could provide services that function as a cross between talent agency and media agency. Every citizen would receive this service to help recognize, package, celebrate, and accelerate his or her value to themselves and the community.
Opportunity Match-making
Cities could host a technology platform and monthly meeting to enable people with ideas to share and get feedback from the community. Members of the community could voice their opinions and the city would seek to make connections between citizen entrepreneurs, neighborhoods, and investors. The city would earn a percentage—like a talent-agency would—for these connections.
Incubation Infrastructure
Cities could partner with property owners and incentivize them to ensure clean and safe homes, streets, and workspaces with logical standards for an entrepreneurial community at reasonable, all-inclusive market rates. Homes and workspaces would be outfitted with wifi, telephones, and a computers—the basic tools—as well as electricity, air-conditioning, heat, and hot water. Shared conference, meeting rooms, and workspaces would also be provided at the all-inclusive price. Property-owners would enjoy tax breaks for participating in the program, and a management company would organize all the details of the package.
Edible Schoolyard
Cities should provide service opportunities and training for all ages to instill confidence, self-reliance and pride. One of these programs could be an Edible Schoolyard that is cared for by students and led by professional farmers and volunteers. It would provide 100 percent of the school meals to the student body, and excess food would be delivered to the ill and elderly. In addition, schools would produce zero waste by composting all bio matter. The school could also compost neighborhood bio matter to fund its agricultural efforts.
Lending Circles
Cities could provide a platform for connecting people with ideas and ambition to city business angels, venture capitalists, community micro-finance organizations and self-forming lending circles. The lending circles could support each other as they take turns helping to get one of their cohorts to achieve his goal.
Can-do Culture
Cities must nurture the capitalistic, materialistic, ambitious, passionate, honest, authentic, and practical people that are its citizens. The city should become an interconnected series of creative petri dishes, inspiring individuals to invest in themselves and the community through a variety of endeavors that generate revenue and meaning for all. Programs, initiatives, and management would be designed to uplift and instill pride in individuals and the community. Branding, documenting, and showcasing the excellence of individuals, initiatives, and neighborhoods would be a critical success variable.
Always-on Service
Cities could provide a call center to answer any question of concern at any time, similar to New York City’s 311 service. The service could also makes house calls for appropriate citizen concerns beyond 911, fire, ambulance, and police responses, such as technology support and crisis management.
Google Analytics for Government
Cities could make the success of governance measurable and known. Rather than waiting for the next election to recognize and promote results (or lack thereof), cities could do it transparently. City stats, charts, and powerful infographics would provide a call-to-action for citizens.
Ped Shed over Drive Shed
Cities could close and re-purpose or retrofit parking garages to create incentives for walking or riding bikes, mixed with unique spaces for work, play, art, learning, farming, and other sustainable, entertaining, and productive experiences.
Citizen Recruiters
Every single citizen should be engaged in the city, valued, and respected. Citizen Recruiters are analogous to military recruiters who go out and get people “in the game.” They would issue a personal invitation to be involved, and help the recruits navigate the system to find the right opportunities to “play.” They could get involved in city services, learning, or apprenticeships. Supported by a technology infrastructure, CRs would invite citizens both in person and via social media technology. In addition every citizen (not only CRs) could and should be an honorary CR in some capacity. Citizen Recruiters would be part of city service corps, conducting outreach and providing tools and training that enable every citizen to connect with the people, things, and activities to be successful.
Prosper.org
The Ingenuity Ringmaster (blessed and supported by the city) would commit to a problem worth solving, and citizen innovators would submit ideas, and then the city would create a portfolio of projects with design criteria and guidance. Leveraging a micro-financing engine, citizens could vote with their dollars to decide which problems were solved. Personal investment would also drive involvement and contribution (anyone can volunteer to mentor the team, etc.). People would share, learn, and improve upon the idea. The Ringmaster would also ensure that the right courses were available online by cause or project, and would determine a curriculum and library for those innovators. The final concept would be reported across multiple platforms and key stakeholders in the solution would be consulted throughout to implement it properly. All the implementations are considered experiments to learn from, making additional “best practices” and learning content. Failures and successes would also be celebrated equally and openly.
Ingenuity Ringmaster
This official would set the tone for inhabitants through open leadership and a malleable infrastructure, encouraging opportunities for risk-taking, seeding innovation, suggesting process and projects, and rewarding innovators by supporting imagination and invention. This is the coach that blows burning embers of ideas into rising flames of success.
Free-agent Portfolio
Every citizen should be an entrepreneur and a free-agent. From the time you graduate junior high school, citizens would collect learning credits and acquired skills in a portfolio for every kind of demonstrable learning—from engineering and skateboarding to car sales negotiation and waitress skills. All learning would be applicable and a value-add to employers. The city would operate more like a talent agency, providing citizens with the infrastructure and resources to leverage and market those skills with the core belief that everyone has something unique to offer, and those nuances are often what make job performance great instead of just good. This would also be supported by a technology infrastructure to visualize progress, and create an open-source talent network for every type of trade and skill (like Etsy, CreateHere, and Threadless). Companies would also be coached to translate skills like waitress service into something like customer service, operation management, or negotiation skills.
Talent Districts
Cities could convert some neighborhoods into learning districts for personal, professional, and entrepreneurial development. They could provide a curriculum for development supported by the infrastructure (buildings, technology, services, mentoring, and community) within the district, and further provide certain non-financial “commitments” that families in these districts must meet to stay there. People would “win” or be granted a location in the district for 2 to 7 years depending on the development challenge and goal (DUMBO did this to get started). They would be provided things like office and meeting spaces, field trips, advisory boards, mentors, courses, market research resources (if applicable), etc. in exchange for showing metrics of growth and a percentage of return in new services for the districts (come back and mentor/be a professor), or a percentage of profit.
Decentralized Design Hubs and Work Centers
Neighborhoods could function as local “offices” by creating workplaces for citizens. Employers would therefore support and encourage employees to work in these hubs rather than driving or commuting to an employer-owned workspace. The employer instead “subscribes” to the pool of design hubs or work centers to enable employees to work there, much like a fitness studio membership. There are larger spaces for company and team meetings on occasion (weekly or monthly). There is also training for effective distributed working.
Pedicab infrastructure
Some streets could be zoned for pedicabs (and bicycles) only. Themed pedicabs would make alternate transportation more fun, and would make this method of commuting a “destination” instead of simply a mode. It would also provide healthy work for the employees. Pedicab themes could be anything from music, to luxury, to branded experience, to learning lessons (TED Peds).
Wide-walks
Cities should narrow streets to make room for wider sidewalks, which would provide spill-out space for businesses and restaurants; green space for landscaping, urban farming, and picnicking; jogging and bike paths; and noise reduction through elimination of “noise canyons.” Cities could also create a walking rewards program that would provide tax credits for those streets with the highest walkability, and offer citizen reward vouchers for food, entertainment, and public transit as calculated by the citizen pedometer (the more people walk, the more they earn). Wide-walks would also be learning opportunities if location-aware technology alerted walkers to fun facts, lessons, or historical tid-bits as they passed by various points of interest.
Street Activity Stimulation
Cities could mandate street-level space that was open to the public. Every building would dedicate their ground floors to retail or activities that invite citizens in, which would avoid activity vacuums along city streets. This would foster greater opportunity for small businesses through greater availability of retail stores, dining rooms, studios and working space, and community and learning centers. The goal is highly walkable districts with rampant “boredom snuffers” and magnets for happy accidents.
Learning Jobs
Cities could enable job descriptions to grow or expand to convert low-wage, low-value work into high-wage, high value work. For example, a “garbage collector” could become a “waste management consultant”—beyond the menial work typically associated with the job description, they would learn to be street-scapers, environmentalists, and more through job-relevant training. The expectation is that people can and should broaden the scope of their work to make an impact. Part of this program is reframing the language we use, and part it is creating the training infrastructure and promoting the increasing skills of those workers. These employees could earn college credit for their learning.
Google Analytics for Learning
Cities should measure the impact of learning more closely, because education reduces unemployment and poverty and creates a greater culture of ingenuity—producing jobs and individual entrepreneurs. The city and its citizens should use better analytics to make it clear why investments in learning and the learning infrastructure more than pays for themselves. Learning solves problems.
Served to Serving
Cities should enable people who traditionally need social services to provide other services. By understanding the needs of a community and matching needs with capable talent, cities could provide an opportunity for productivity, pride, and dignity through service, and solve many challenges in the city.
Mentor Matchmaker
A matchmaking algorithm and profiling system could connect people as cohorts in learning, as well as with mentors, tutors, curriculum options, and learning and career/apprenticeship opportunities. Almost anyone can be a mentor. A 3rd grader can mentor a 1st grader, a 20-year-old can mentor an 80-year-old. There would be something and someone for every learner through the matchmaker system.
In-field Accreditation
Old models of established university accreditation do not represent a city’s values for decentralized learning. Cities would establish new and frequent feedback loops for evaluation to allow every citizen student to track progress and achieve recognizable, meaningful credentials. These credentials would be an access point to apprenticeships of all kinds, from entry level and menial jobs to retraining experienced citizens for a new field without having to start all over.
Tech Missions
Tech Mission is designed for mid-size cities that don't have a particular strength in technology and would not be a logical location for a tech company to locate. The idea is modeled after the growth of the Christian church. The church did not expand to serve existing Christians. The church expanded by establishing missions that made converts to Christianity.
In the case of Tech Mission, a technology company such as Google would establish a "mission" in a mid-size city for some period of time -- 6 to 12 months. The company would establish a physical location at which pop-up classes are held, new projects are launched, and lectures, meet-ups, tweet-ups are regular happenings. The location is provided by the City. The brand and the intensity of activity is provided by the technology company.
The idea is to become a center of new capabilities, new ideas new activity, and new connections in a city. Like an arts district, Tech Mission is also expected to spawn new retail and restaurant activity in the surrounding neighborhood as people gather there regularly.
Talent Recruiters
As a reminder to citizens, cities would staff a team of talent developers who invite “people at risk” to adopt a learning program and work with them to design a curriculum and apprenticeship program. Learning would be accessible, ample, and affordable; these recruiters get people to join in.
Learning Rewards
Employers who donate products and services that could be used as rewards for citizens engaged in a city learning environment—or those who provide apprenticeships, career discovery opportunities, training, or time for employees to study—enjoy improved tax rates and a better relationship with the city. Rewards for citizens engaged in learned could include more classes, travel miles, cable and other utilities, electronics, and other things like help at home or babysitting vouchers.
Pop-up Education
Learning could happen everywhere through pop-up education. Much like TED Talks, pop-up education opportunities would be produced by experts, professors, and every individual based on something they know well and can train others on. They would pop up in locations like theaters, YMCAs, elevators, break rooms, restaurants, and wherever there is “wait time” or an equal opportunity for boredom, or when our technology infrastructure realizes an enhancement opportunity—like you might learn about safety while waiting at the DMV. In addition to lessons, the idea would be to provide study and learning tips to effectively train people to be better students at any age.
