Many urban places look nice but are frankly…“boring”! Many commercial areas struggle to succeed and have little or no sense of place or “brand location magnetism.” Many people do not really feel deeply “at home” in their neighbourhoods.
The conservative generic quality of the development industry’s response to the market creates a self-perpetuating “sameness” in most of our new communities.
Our current approach to planning and designing cities and development has given our urban places two diseases:
- The wax museum syndrome – where we try to make it look nice and like it should be full of people, but it isn’t;
- The baited city syndrome – where the only thing we can really think of for people to do in our public realm is “shop – thereby creating the predominant zeitgeist of the public realm as people and shop keepers preying on each other to get a good deal or to get our money.
… and yet we all dream of vital and authentic places.
The key to creating a vibrant authentic place is to focus on subculture activity groups (sports, food, dogs, etc…) and design places in the city to deeply attract them – and then the rest of us will come and watch.
For more on this idea, check out www.urbanmagnets.com.