Opinionated places

Most of the world’s best towns and neighbourhoods don’t exist yet.

Patrick Collison asks “why don’t we build nice neighborhoods any more?”

I have only come across two post-war neighbourhoods that are somewhat nice (and have lived in both): HafenCity in Hamburg (built in the last 20 years or so) and East Village in London, the “Olympic village” of the 2012 Games. HafenCity is visually striking but much like the rest of Hamburg — except for Schanze and the Reeperbahn on a weekend night — it is eerily quiet and devoid of life. The best feature of East Village is not letting cars into the central part of the neighbourhood.

One unsatisfying answer to Collison’s question is that all “central locations” in European cities are already occupied; when new neighbourhoods do get built, their inhabitants end up commuting out of them (say from East Village to the City, London’s financial district). In the US, building walkable is effectively illegal. Much of Asia is too hot; walking is low-status. Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei have buzzy, post-war neighbourhoods, but they are not as breathtakingly beautiful as the pre-war European ones. Another answer is that developers build bland to appeal to as large a segment of buyers as possible.

My bet: most of the world’s best towns and neighbourhoods haven’t been built yet. The winners will be opinionated — building a way of life, not just real estate.

Three I like, all just starting out:

Esmeralda is building a walkable new town for 1,500 residents in Northern California. Its vision is to emulate the experience of living on a vibrant college campus, for families.

Culdesac is a new car-free neighbourhood in Tempe, Arizona. Onsite coworking means residents commute less; when they do, a light rail station is at their doorstep. There are 350 residents; there will be around 1,500 at completion.

Network School is a live-and-work campus in Forest City, Malaysia. It bundles accommodation, community events, office space, gym access and healthy meals into a single subscription.

Once upon a time, nobody commuted. Home, work, school, shops, church, family, friends — all in the same place, all bundled together.

Then we pulled it apart. Cars and zoning moved jobs and shops away. The internet moved your friends and colleagues online. Where you live is just a place to sleep.

The places I like reverse this. New place products bundle what used to be separate — housing, work, community, health. Bundling removes friction: Network School makes it easy to exercise; Culdesac makes it easy to meet neighbours.

New places can incubate their own culture — culture in the same sense as ‘company culture’ — the unwritten rules, the defaults, the things that are normal here and weird somewhere else. What if your kids could safely run around unsupervised by age 6? What if every adult had a mentee? The best founders of new places obsess about culture as much as the best tech founders do.

So will opinionated places take off?

As I wrote in It’s time to build new cities, now is the first time in history people will move to a city without having a job there. New places don’t need to provide jobs; they just have to be the best place to live for 1,000 residents.

Where would you like to live?