Category Archives: Cities

Making cities easier to use

I always have a hard time explaining what we do at The Open Planning Project.  The front page of our website reads: “TOPP is a catalyst.  We empower civil society through software, media, and smart urban policy.”  While this makes sense if you think about it for a while, when I first say it to people I’m usually met with blank stares.  I don’t mean to dig on TOPP — a lot of effort went into writing that tagline, and believe me, earlier versions were more abstract and less punchy.

Prior to this current version, we had a different tagline: “Virtual tools for real-world change.”  That’s what our t-shirts still say on them, and I don’t mind it.  It has a skyline above it, implying a connection with cities, which I like.

But still, I don’t think we have a compelling enough elevator pitch — a description that doesn’t take five minutes and a walk-through of our org chart to explain.

So recently, I’ve been trying out something new.  I’m experimenting with the following explanation:

(standard disclaimer)  “We’re a non-profit software company; yeah, it’s a bit strange, I know.”

“We build software that makes cities easier to use.  You know, like, making it easier to get around, to interface with your government, and to connect with your neighbors.”

This morning, I tried this on a friend at the gym, and I got an “Oh, cool!  You mean like public transportation?  My friend in Seattle was telling me about GPS on buses there — how come we don’t have that in NYC?”  Bingo.

So, I’m going to test this out a little more.  Making cities easier to use.  I like it.  I just updated my twitter description with that; we’ll see if anyone notices.

To get a little more specific, here are some of the questions I think we’re trying to answer that fall under this larger goal:

How can we make it easier to…

  • get around? (ideally by foot, bike, or transit)
  • interface with government? (who reps me? who supports me?  how can I help?  how can I be heard?)
  • connect with neighbors? (who lives on my block?  what do we have in common?  how can we help each other?)
  • be involved in shaping the future? (combining the two above: connecting with neighbors and interfacing with gov)

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to make a city easier to use, that lots of creative projects (many of them NYC-based startups) are already addressing:

How can we make it easier to…

Given all of these questions and more, it’s highly likely that Making cities easier to use is still too broad; but there’s no question that it’s easier to explain, which is a start.

And for those of you struggling with similar issues of tagline-choosing, see Seb’s brand-spanking-new conjoint.py decision-making tool, which OpenGeo has been using recently during its own tagline discussion.

// Photo of crumpled city map by Emanuele Pizzolorusso via MoCo loco

January 15th, 2010

1 Comment

Cities, Strategy, Vision

Transit: uniter or divider?

Today’s post on Infrastructurist about the D-Train Murder had a line that caught my eye:

Cramming the population of a city like New York into a maze of underground cars creates a forced melting pot that’s a perfect breeding ground for class and race divisions.

There’s no question that the NYC subway is a forced melting pot — but it’s the assertion that it’s a breeding ground for class and race divisions that I take issue with.  In fact, I’ll say it’s the exact opposite.  Most (all?) of the above-ground city is actually divided by race and class.  It’s the subway where we all come together each day; the subway is perhaps the only place where people from all races, classes, and neighborhoods really mix.  In my experience, that is not cause for further division; rather, it’s a uniting force that gives us shared experiences on a human level.

One of the commenters on the Infrastructurist post summed it up nicely:

I think the necessity of sharing space with strangers is what makes cities the diverse, creative, wealth-producing places that they are. Far from being a necessary evil, it is the most distinctive feature of urban life. The elimination of this feature was one aspect of modernist city planning, but we reject that now. So we want mass transit for the type of civic interaction it creates, not just for sustainability and practicality.

Well said.

(Photo my moriza on Flickr)

November 24th, 2009

3 Comments

Cities, transit