Attendees
Jason, Mingming, Nikhil, Alpha, Rohit, Sadhana, Kriti, Harsha, Jose, Vanessa, Gordon, Isla, Dayo, Annie
Moderator
Context
Village Forecasting Club is a diverse community of people who are genuinely curious about understanding the world and the people around them better. We get together once a month in San Francisco for a moderated discussion on an important topic such as sustainability, health & wellbeing, and education. At last month’s dinner, we discussed creativity. You can read the full write-up on our previous discussion here. Learn more about VFC here.
This month, we discussed ideal cities. Neighborhoods and local communities are immensely important to everyone beyond just a place to live. Your neighborhood/community represents your identity and values, and influences the way you think about the world. Everyday you contribute to the growth and the evolution of your neighborhood. Earlier this year, we dove into whether or not SF is a livable city and how we could be better community members, taking lessons from how great civilizations have managed their urban centers throughout history. In September’s VFC, we went deeper into the topic of communities, neighborhoods, and cities to understand our ideal systems, the cities we grew up in, and how we could shape our future cities! Read our full notes below 👇.
What type of environments and neighborhood did you grow up in?
Group 1: Work / Living Communities
Some people, especially the VFC members from China, grew up in work / living communities that were essentially large compounds where people would not only live, but also work and go to school. The communities were extremely tight-knit and neighborhood oriented, but rather closed off from the rest of society and from other members of the same city.
Group 2: Rural, Suburban Environments
A few members grew up in less urban environments, such as the rural midwest. These members talked about the tradeoff between the lack of public transportation with the affordability of housing and accessibility of essential resources like grocery stores. These members talked about neighborhoods where people of dramatically different incomes were able to live together and have similar qualities of life. The staunch inequality of urban centers like San Francisco was surprising to these members.
Group 3 (Majority): Metropolitan Centers
Depending on where in the world people are from, the metropolitan centers varied dramatically
One member grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh where he was surrounded by water and the energy of growing up in an area where the ecosystem, lifestyle, cuisine, etc. revolved around the water.
Another member grew up in a central city in India with 3 million people that struggled with cleanliness when she was a child, but turned itself around and developed an extremely clean culture and system through the years.
One member grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and at the time he was a child, the infrastructure was extremely poor. His experience facing challenges with safety and lacking basic infrastructure such as plumbing and electricity greatly informed what he seeks in his neighborhoods today – instead of optimizing for non-essentials in his neighborhoods, he talked about prioritizing safety and basic infrastructure in the neighborhoods that he seeks out.
Someone talked about his experience growing up in a San Francisco that is barely recognizable today – parts of the city that weren’t that unaffordable at the time he grew up are astronomical in value now. He talked about the shift in careers and the tech industry booming, and how it shifted the culture of the city and dramatically impacted the cost of living. The urban center that it is now is not what he remembers San Francisco to be.
One issue that came up consistently in this part of the discussion was a focus on housing costs around the world, and how the American 30-year mortgage and focus on housing as an appreciative asset may have created a misaligned incentive between original residents of a fast-growing city and the new entrants. Existing owners view their homes as assets that should appreciate in value, and thus rally against new housing. In San Francisco, this has impacted the suburbs and made those even more expensive over time (in addition to housing costs in the city itself skyrocketing over time).
Out of the following options, which one is your ideal city?
Option 1: Garden City (Jason, Gordon, Vanessa)
Description: Garden city would house 32,000 people on a site of 9,000 acres planned on a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks, and six radial boulevards extending from the center. Garden cities are self-sufficient.
People enjoyed the idea of self-sufficient pods and communities with an orientation around nature and small groups. The biggest pull was how the Garden City model would be less crowded than any of the other options. Reduced transit time, easy access to nature, and familiarity with neighbors helps people achieve a higher quality of life.
Option 2: Monumental (Jose, Dayo)
Description: Everything is big in these cities. People live in “superblocks” that are 300x300 meters, with mid-rise housing. You have a lot of neighbors and shared open spaces that are large enough to be parks. Institutional architecture is huge – some of these buildings made their name in the history books due to their stunning sense of loneliness.
The pull for monumental cities for these members was primarily that all amenities and necessities were available, and because of the large super-blocks each neighborhood contained everything that someone would need to live their day-to-day life comfortably.
As a side note, these types of cities were seen as some of the worst examples in the history of urban planning.
Option 3: Radiant City (Mingming, Nikhil)
Description: Each block houses a few thousand residents, and would follow a mixed-use style of architecture with a laundry, restaurant, and daycare center on the ground floor with a swimming pool on the rooftop terrace.
For Mingming and Nikhil, Radiant City felt most like the middle ground between everything. A combination of having good transit, but not being jam-packed together with the accessibility of all important resources within your neighborhood itself. A convenient option that combines the best of each of the other options, Radiant City was a clear choice for these members.
Option 4: Transit Oriented Community (Isla, Rohit, Kriti, Annie, Sadhana)
Description: Living here means no private car ownership and you rely on walking, biking, public transit, and Lyft / Uber to get around. You are in a high-rise apartment and your units are compact, but nice and clean.
Members who chose this enjoyed the density of the layout and the fact that people in these communities could build close relationships with their neighbors.
Additionally, people liked more biking / walking options compared to some of the other options available to them.
To the members who chose this, it was clear that building a community around transit was extremely important, as compared to some of the other options that were centered more around housing or amenities.
Option 5: American Dream (Alpha)
Description: You wake up in the morning in your single-family home in the suburb, where your neighbors are like you and you all know each other. You drive 1-1.5 hours to and from work everyday. You have a large home that is spacious and secure. Nothing happens near you, so you have to travel for everything from shopping to entertainment.
For Alpha, the most important factor for him was that the American Dream is the least like a typical city. He quoted Tolstoy: “Cities are places where people come to be exploited.”
Closing thoughts
Everyone has a different view of how they would want to balance their priorities and achieve the lifestyle that they prefer in choosing their ideal city or neighborhood. It is possible that multiple types of these neighborhoods and layouts are accessible within a few miles of each other, so that people within the same region can find their desired community. It’s also possible that the preference someone has for a community changes significantly throughout their lives – maybe a younger person is more likely to prefer a Transit Oriented Community and as they get older shift to preferring the American Dream.
Some people were greatly influenced by the communities they grew up in – both in a reaffirming way (i.e. the community they grew up in was fantastic and they wanted to remain in that community) and in opposition (i.e. the community they grew up in was not ideal and thus they seek out specific differences).
We left with a few questions and some of the fundamental knowledge to ponder this topic more deeply. Some of the questions we’re still thinking about:
What prevents mixing and matching pieces of each of these models?
How about communities that need to support lots of different types of people (i.e. able bodied and not able bodied, elderly and young, etc.)
How are these neighborhoods impacted by zoning?
If this post sparked your curiosity at all, consider joining us for our next Village Forecasting Club dinner. Apply to VFC here.