By Chris Fair, President & CEO, Resonance Consultancy
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As the global pandemic recovery marches on, city leaders and engaged citizens are back to work ensuring that their neighborhoods, cities and regions are positioned to benefit in a new urban reality.
What we’re seeing with the cities we work with around the world—from Pittsburgh to Brussels—is the reimagining of a more welcoming city. The shorthand is “livability,” or, as we define it, “quality of life and the provision of things we need to live there.”
But livability is just part of a city’s job to be done to future-proof itself and provide resiliency for its citizens, current and prospective. With the rise of remote work, talent can choose to live most anywhere it wants. But they don’t want to just live anywhere; they want to live somewhere.
There’s a fallacy and expectation that if we can just have more housing, or better healthcare or better education, that we will magically prosper as a result. While those factors are critical to a city’s quality of life, they aren’t the most important factors when it comes to attracting talent and businesses to a city.
The secret sauce? Lovability.
I’ll be exploring this new data and study at length in my “Lovable Cities Are Prosperous Cities” presentation at City Nation Place Americas this June 6 and 7 in New Orleans.
Until then, here are the six rules for creating a more lovable city. Too often we tend to think about a lot of these factors as nice-to-haves as it relates to our cities, whether that’s nightlife or culture or the arts, while in reality we’re seeing that it’s these factors that cause us to love places and contribute to their success long term.
1. Socialization
We’ve all heard about struggling central business districts, as WFH employees are fine working out of their kitchens and bedrooms. It’s a trend that’s unlikely to abate, so what about turning half-empty business cores into central social districts? If it’s being used less by office workers, how do we make it useful not only for residents but for visitors as well? I think this really requires very clear programming and activation strategy (one that I’ll discuss at City Nation Place Americas), but based on Resonance projects with different downtowns over the past year, placemaking and programming strategies that draw both visitors and locals can be a catalyst for development and demand for retail and residential in that particular district.
2. Retailtainment
In a world where bricks and mortar establishments are ceding business to online shopping, retail needs to think different. The answer that we’re seeing with our most successful city and placemaking clients is using entertainment to drive traffic back. We call it (if you forgive the frankenword), “Retailtainment.” The challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs and districts is the fact that most of our zoning and land use codes aren’t flexible enough to accommodate some of these mixed uses. So our work with cities reviews policies and considers creating zoning that’s more flexible to anticipate and allow for unexplored uses. Doing so can create the foundation and the enabling conditions for innovation within this space.
3. Wellbeing
After three years of public health warnings and battling illness and infection, wellness is on all our minds. At Resonance, we prefer to think about it even more holistically than wellness. Wellbeing considers not only our physical wellness, but our mental and spiritual health. More and more of the cities and districts we work with are thinking about designing the built environment and our public spaces to influence our wellbeing and attract people into the public realm. This manifests in natural light, gardens and often some of the things that we’ve overlooked within our spaces, like temperature and air quality and flow. Thinking with wellbeing in mind will not only make our buildings healthier, but more sustainable at the same time, which will hopefully be a catalyst and an advantage for buildings and properties to attract new tenants at better rates.
4. Rewilding
As urban beings, we’ve tamed public green spaces, and designed them to be very formal. Think gardens and lawns. But I think what we discovered during the pandemic is that we want spaces that make us more connected to nature and natural spaces. Compounding this is climate change and the need to incorporate climate proofing into some of our river banks, waterfronts and seafronts. We can also think about designing these spaces not only to make them more livable and lovable for people, but more resilient as well, to accommodate and anticipate some of the effects of climate change.
5. Nightlife
Based on our ongoing research, there tends to be more nightlife where Fortune 500 companies are located and in urban centers with a large population of young professionals. Indeed the nighttime economy is part of creating a vibrant and lovable city. In fact, many cities like London and Amsterdam are creating the role of a night mayor, not so much to steward the party, but more to steward the policies that foster a vibrant night-time economy. For example, Hamilton, Ontario, realized that they had to change the parking restrictions to make it easier for musicians to load and unload in the street fronts that were being blocked off for low-demand parking in the middle of the night. Even small changes in restrictions can help create an enabling environment to make it easier for musicians, performers, other cultural experiences, night markets, etc. So a lot of this is really just about understanding the policy and some of the changes that we need to make in most of our rules and regulations designed for a 9-to-5 world. The payoffs are massive.
6. Inclusivity
We can create all the livability and lovability in the world, but it’s worthless if not created in an inclusive way that allows a wide variety of residents to access those amenities, whether that’s healthcare, parks, education or nightlife. This access comes back over and over again to placemaking and how we design public spaces, which really needs to engage and have underrepresented groups participate in the design of those public spaces. That happens when we change our perspective from a 9-to-5 world view, or from our own entrenched perspective on things. How do we look at it from a variety of different perspectives in order to make our cities not just livable, not just lovable, but welcoming and accessible for everyone?
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I’d love to hear from you about the power of placemaking and place branding for your destination, city or development. You can find me at [email protected].
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About Chris Fair:
A futurist, facilitator and strategist, Fair holds a Masters degree in Studies of the Future and has married his tourism, economic development, real estate and and marketing expertise with futures methodologies to help a wide variety of clients envision and create development strategies, plans and brands that shape the future of places around the world.
As President, CEO and co-founder of Resonance Consultancy, Fair’s team has completed more than 150 visioning, strategy, planning and branding projects for developers and destinations in more than 35 destinations.
He has been featured in Fast Company magazine and is a frequent commentator on lifestyle and leisure trends for leading publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Globe & Mail, Los Angeles Times, The Economist and Worth magazine. Fair also designed the World’s Best Cities index, a ranking that analyzes cities based on a unique benchmarking model that blends core statistics with millions of consumer ratings and reviews across 24 categories. The result is a measure of relative “place equity”—attractiveness for talent, investment and tourism—for cities around the world. The Best Cities program today spans four annual rankings: World’s Best Cities, America’s Best Cities, Europe’s Best Cities and Canada’s Best Small Cities, with more planned in 2024.
