For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown. Here’s how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:
1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it’s the cultural creatives. Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize. Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the free agents. This is the
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Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.
When we think of ‘friends’, we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with. However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs. Either way, they typically aren’t very diverse.
I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques. Rather than asking the people in your
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Actually, the verdict isn’t in yet, but the way I’m hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday’s blog). Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go. June 3rd’s our first happy hour, so I’ll let you know then how it went. Update: How it went!
As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that’s a strength of where
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There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul. Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.
Here’s my recipe to get to know your neighbors:
1. As painful as it is for some of us, you’re going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them. This forms the ‘neighborhood core’.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most
It’s something many of us secretly ask ourselves, and there’s even a book written about it. Is it possible to create a sense of community where none existed? History says yes, and hopefully we can use that to build better communities in the very near future.
This week I’ll present places I’ve experienced that are known to have a strong sense of community, and how we plan to integrate that into CoolTowns. I’ll start with Hawaii, since it’s regarded by its residents as having an incredible
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At least that’s what the cultural creatives, the early adopters and today’s kids are saying. One may need to look no futher than Jane Jacobs to find answers.
In her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which by the way, has probably prompted the renaissance of more than several cities, she says if there’s any one word that defines success for a city, it’s diversity. To achieve it, she says you need:
1. A concentration of people. This explains why pedestrian malls without
