Futurist Thomas Frey: Great communities are founded on great ideas. At the same time, our most admired communities become a magnet, attracting the brightest minds. The relational effect is clear: Bright minds make a community great, and great communities attract bright minds.
In the future, communities will be designed around ways to stimulate new ideas using such things as creative environments, imagination sparkers, and inspirational architecture.
They will also be designed around new ways for people to meet people. Future communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing positive human collisions.
Yet, at the same time, there is a diminishing value to physical proximity. In the middle of this relationship, with all things proximate, is where we can begin to comprehend how cities are changing, and how they will continue to change in the future.
We decided where to live, work, and conduct business based on proximity to key assets
The Diminishing Value of Proximity
To understand the city of the future, we must first understand the importance of proximity. As we try to uncover the driving forces of change, we need to look at the changing dynamic of our personal relationship with the physical community we find ourselves in.
In the past, we decided where to live, work, and conduct business based on how close we were to key assets. Very often that decision was based on things like:
- Income streams
- Goods & services
- Schools
- Friends & family
- Activity centers
- Weather
- Crime rate
- Airport
- Cultural opportunities
- Recreation opportunities
However, our need for physical proximity is changing.
We live in an increasingly interconnected society and, at the same time, an increasingly mobile society. Our ability to communicate instantly on a thousand different levels with people all over the world, coupled with an increasingly efficient travel network to drive or fly great distances causes us to place lesser importance on the community around us.
With more and more people figuring out ways to work from their homes, either through remote employment, project-based work, home-based or Internet-based businesses, their relationship with their physical community changes.
8 Dimension of Human Connectedness
When thinking about the city of the future, jobs and income streams are not the only consideration. But that is where we will begin.
The city of the future will form around eight dimensions of human connectedness, the interface created between people and their surrounding community. A well-connected community will be a vibrant community where ideas are exchanged, energies are exchanged, and people become extremely loyal to the networks that connect them to the rest of the world. While it is now easy to communicate with people all over the world, we can only physically interact with people and places locally.
Human connectedness involves much more than just communication. And it’s not just about business life, family life, or what we do for entertainment. It is all of that and much more.
For the purpose of this discussion, we will look at human connectedness from eight different perspectives, with the final part looking at the role of city government and how it is adapting within these parameters.
Eight dimensions of human connectedness
Every dimension of human connectedness is an information sphere that requires its own unique user interface.
There are many ways to look at the human interface, but for the purposes of this analysis, our dimensions of human connectedness have been divided into the following eight categories:
- Money & income
- Education & learning
- Culture, events, & entertainment
- Health & fitness
- Goods & services
- Sports & recreation
- Love & relationships
- Government
Before going into each of these areas in more detail, one of the key drivers is our move into an increasingly fluid society.
Flowing to Areas of Least Resistance
With transportation becoming easier, making us a more mobile society, and with cell phones and the Internet speeding up our digital communications, our cities are becoming a much more fluid environment.
Much like water that flows downhill using the path of least resistance, businesses and social structures have begun to move from areas we find less appealing to areas that are more appealing.
Using this line of thinking, we can envision many decision points where transitions are starting to occur:
- With so many obstacles in out paths, we tend to take the route with the least number of gatekeepers.
- As the cost of owning and operating a physical business continues to climb, many have begun to migrate their business operations into the digital world.
- Too many laws will force businesses to move some of their operation underground, or at least under-radar.
We buy where it is easy, we eat where it’s convenient, and we relax where it is comfortable.
It is easy to dismiss all this as general laziness. But it gets to a far more fundamental motivation driving human behavior – respect.
We patronize places that respect our time, respect our needs, and respect our status.
For each of us we set our minimum quality standards, and once those have been met we look for other attributes such as convenience, friendliness, and speed. When we hear words like “complicated,” “arduous,” or “painful” we tend to run the other direction.
We spend our time, our attention, and our money where it is most respected.
1.) Money & Income
Unbeknownst to most, the 8,000 pound gorilla hovering in the background of our economy is the shifting population base. Any fluctuation in the number of consumers changes the demand-side of the supply and demand equation.
The 1900s were a very fertile century where the earth’s population grew from 1.6 billion peopl