What Tech Hasn't Learned From Urban Planning | Hacker News Reader

What Tech Hasn't Learned From Urban Planning

nytimes.com

26 pointsgesticulator5 comments

Here I feel like it's the urban planners that need to learn more from tech. The article's entire point seems to be that the tech community is not acting like a community because its gathering spaces are not open to members of the local public. That strikes me as an incredibly facile and outdated understanding of the concept of "community". The whole point of globalization and the information revolution of the late 20th century is that location increasingly does not matter. "Communities" are stronger than ever - but they are defined by shared interests and ideals, not historical accidents of where you happen to be located. I personally care not a single more for my own neighbor than for some random individual living in China; in fact, I would probably care more about the Chinese person if he was a "Mozillan" and my neighbor was not. The local Starbucks the author praises is closed to everyone that is not geographically close to its location in Menlo Park; the public Mozilla coffee house is closed to everyone that is not close to Mozilla in the social graph. The latter actually seems like a much more of a real "community" than the former, which allows individuals to whom I have no interest in speaking. That is not to say open and non-discriminatory businesses should not remain the dominant type of commerce; Starbucks has provided me a truly invaluable service by providing a consistent experience of hours of personal office space with accessible free wifi in every city or country I go. But the author has it exactly backwards in his general point; "community" is the antonym, not synonym, of "everyone".

True, but having lived in NYC, which is also known for communities of shared interest co-habitating in a small geographic area, I totally related to the article.

I work in SoMa and think it sucks hard community-wise because despite having so much interest-wise with many of the employees of the companies in my building and most of the buildings within a 5 minute walk, I have few if any meaningful interactions on a daily basis. Yes, there are meetups, but there is relatively no serendipity with special interest groups. I don't want to know only the people within 1 degree of separation on the interest graph. That's essentially an echo chamber. I would like to meet many more people who are maybe 2-3 degrees away, e.g. still in tech, but working on completely different problems and with different technologies than I do. A lot of those people are nearby and there are practically no spaces that foster interactions with those people.

The only time I get those interactions farther than a single degree of separation is when I go out at night with people outside my daytime bubble.

In NYC, in contrast, it wasn't uncommon for me to buy my lunch and sit in a public space where someone might sit down at the same public table that I was sitting at.

I would love a public food-court style space in SoMa organized like a German beer hall, with large communal tables, where a large part of the draw would be sitting down and overhearing interesting conversations and having your conversations heard as well and maybe using that as fodder for meeting someone new.

SoMA strikes me as a place where people know the value of strong ties, but completely discount the value in weak ties [0] and mechanisms that foster weak ties, such as the lack of physical community spaces.

[0] Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties. http://sociology.stanford.edu/people/mgranovetter/documents/...

Good point about needing to meet people outside your echo chamber. Although I suppose that for me I get that sort of interaction from Reddit; I don't really see myself actually interacting with people in any of these spaces that are supposed to foster interaction. When is the last time you've actually talked to someone in a public cafe?

This is a psychologically perverse view. If you are well versed in psychology, sociology, urban planning, and child cognitive development, then I could consider it. But it is the statement that someone ignorant of those subjects would say as well. Have you read Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"? If not, then why should urban planners learn more from tech? Her book makes it clear that what you have said is brutally wrong. From the perspective of child development --- "I personally care not a single more for my own neighbor than for some random individual living in China; in fact, I would probably care more about the Chinese person if he was a "Mozillan" and my neighbor was not." --- is a destructive position.

As a member of the post-community generation, I am skeptical.

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