Global Culture

From my recent post “on global citizens and avatars“:

A global citizen is not the one that travels the globe rushing from one destination to the next at the furious pace its business demand, but the one that roams the roads of a city or the world open to the opportunities that serendipity will bring, architecting with each moment a fulfilling life devoted to creating value for the communities he touches, combining his skills with the resources available. Such a nice maxim for any traveller, you must be thinking.

It must be a sign of our times that at the peak of my professional career I find myself as a “free agent”, wannabe entrepreneur or as our governments label those in my situation: “unemployed”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m saying this with a very upbeat tone. I do no more than 25 hours of billable work per week, which allows me to devote the rest of my time to really productive ventures that nobody is paying for. Even better: I’m not alone and therein lies the radical change that is happening in our society.

While I keep meticulous track and invoice hours worked for clients, just as many hours are spent in other ventures that don’t pay with money but are perhaps more valuable to the future of the communities in which I live. Building powerful relationships with strangers that share a common goal, mentoring younger talent, building-up my local community, curating the endless stream of information, participating in open source projects or simply making sure that I’m a diligent digital citizen. Most of these task are off-the-record, produce no income, pay no taxes and yet I’m certain in the long run will have the most impact to society. So next time you read those scary unemployment statistics in the newspaper, rejoice.

Lately I’ve been having fun catching up on things like HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, Ajax, mobile platforms and how they have evolved in the context of location technology. Being at the top of my game has also given me a renewed confidence that bigger, more complex problems can be solved with less effort. And not only the technical, but the meaningful kind. For example, I came across Venessa, a brilliant blogger exploring the future of collaboration and with little concern for “getting paid” I devoted an entire session to offer insights based on my recent ethnographic adventures. By the end of it I had realized that although her article was meant as a “vision”, I was reading it as a specification that was technically feasible and within my reach. THAT would probably be very valuable to her.

We commute to work every day without realizing that perhaps the most powerful connections in our network are not those that await for us at the office, but those that we haven’t discovered in our communities. They are not about to offer you a new job or even give you money, but they are very likely to produce long term value.

Trying to figure out how we can alter our behavior to encourage the kind of social interactions that will produce meaningful connections with the potential to create value in our communities sounds like a massive challenge, but I just happen to be at the top of my game and confident enough to make it my next adventure.

I’ve been creating all sorts of technology for the travel space for the last nine years! Most recently I was the Technology lead at iStopOver.com, where we ventured into making the vacation rental process a lot more social. I’m proud to have been part of that adventure and I’m convinced that travel will radically be affected by this and other incumbent companies to the space. Immediately before that I was the Technology lead at PlanetEye.com, a little think tank specialized in pushing forward geolocation technology. We were early to a now very crowded space and had fun solving some of the most complex issues around visualizing location information as you travel.

A collection of map visualizations

As I’m planning my next move, I can’t entirely shake the travel bug (can anyone?) and so I’ve selected a few projects to keep me in good shape. One such project is The Traveler’s Way, which is starting as a traditional travel blog but will soon be the foundation for some pretty amazing experiments involving great travel stories, practical travel information and novel publishing ideas. For the time being, many of my posts on how, why and where we travel, have been republished under that blog:

• The Local Advantage
• Experience the Neighborhood
• New York’s Most Livable
• The Curse of Memorable Places
• Travel Stories
• The Greatest Destination
• Hiring Travel Writers…
• The Digital Nomad Test
• Meaningful Experiences
• Give up your Urban “devil”
• “I could live here”
• … and many other posts about the art of travel

So what is my next move? I’ll reveal the identity of the project shortly, but if you want a hint take a look at TinyWrld.com. Enjoy the videos.

As I’ve been announcing for a few months already, today we’ve finally launched the St. Lawrence Market guide in collaboration with the PlanetEye team (in case you haven’t heard, that’s my day job). I learned a lot over the last year trying to figure out how to bring this project to life and I’m pretty happy with the results. There are many ideas flowing through my mind about the significance of this project, but I’ll limit this post to brag about the guide itself:

St. Lawrence Market Guide

How is it different from other city guides? Well for starters is not a city guide, it is a neighbourhood guide. You know that neglected urban molecule that often defines the character of its citizens but it is rarely given its credit.

- Curated content: the fact that we limited the scope of this guide to a very small section of the city, allowed us to be thorough in our research. If you are from Toronto, you’ll find that our features are carefully selected and represent the best this area has to offer. If you have never been to Toronto, you probably don’t need to look any further to organize a nice little stay in our city.

- Great photography: Yes, there are photos in every page and every map. Some of them we took while walking around the neighbourhood and others were organized photo-shoots with pros. All the photos are geolocated and can be expanded so they can be appreciated fully.

- Super useful maps: Every one of the sections in the guide features a couple of interactive maps: one with the features written about, and another with a larger collection of places. The maps are fully functional and will allow you to explore the area without ever worrying about “too much information”. The best part is that the maps are powered by some really cool technology that allow us to continuously update their content as new places appear and others close. You can expect this guide to remain current.

- Essentials: travelling is not only about finding a good hotel, a nice restaurant and a photo opportunity. We tried to include a small collection of essential services that every traveller has needed at least once while on the road. My favourite? Essentials/Working Spaces will show you several locations that provide reliable WiFi or will even allow you to rent a desk for a day.

- Sustainable, Livable: above it all, we wanted to portray in good light a neighbourhood that has transcended the daily routine that is so characteristic of large cities and has created an interesting vital energy that is obvious while walking its sidewalks and crossing paths with the locals. Everything within a few blocks so you don’t even need to worry about transportation in most cases.

If you’re considering travelling to Toronto on business or pleasure and plan to spend more than a couple of days in our city, I can assure you this guide has everything you need for a memorable travel experience. At the end of the trip you may even find yourself thinking “I could live here“.

It is still going to take a bit more time to finish the guide to the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, but I’m so proud of the work that has been done to date that wanted to at least give you a flavour of what is coming.

St. Lawrence Market - our photoshoot

I’ll be giving away the guide online under a CC license, but you’ll have to wait a bit longer. If you’re a writer or photographer and would like to get involved in the production of a similar guide for your city, please let me know.

Picking the first few destinations for the Global Culture Tour is a matter of convenience. We think we’ll cover 4 or 5 micro-regions before the end of the year and we hope their variety and the fresh content will keep people interested while we produce more. As I mentioned in previous posts, the first one was a very simple decision: Coyoacán is very close to my heart as I lived there many years, but it has also been able to maintain its personality throughout the centuries (yes, it is that old). During recent visits I grew confident that although Mexico City has many things to offer, the global citizen would find in this particular area of the city an interesting retreat from all the fast-paced action that takes place everywhere else.

The second destination will be an area in my current city: Toronto. Deciding which particular neighbourhood, however, has not been so simple. Toronto has many faces and changes very fast. I’ve been looking back at my own notes about what makes an ideal destination for the global citizen and keep bouncing between two areas: St. Lawrence Market and Queen West. While one has been maturing for a century and has consolidated itself as a top destination for locals, the other one seems to be the hotspot for a new generation and while it lacks the infrastructure, acts as a magnet for very interesting people and projects.

A comparison wouldn’t be fair, but deciding which one of the two neighbourhoods is more likely to attract the global citizen I keep saying to myself that it can’t be too touristy. After all our global citizens have developed travel skills beyond the average tourist and are more likely to explore new areas of the city. But there is only so much time you would spend at a place that has an interesting strip of restaurants and galleries. Finding the right balance between edgy urban innovation and established Main Street must be done with the needs of our travellers above all.

The global citizen is likely to travel with a purpose and as such will require quick and easy ways to network, connect and set up shop. Sometimes he will travel for a few days and sometimes he will linger, falling in love with a location because of its spirit and variety. As a person who has mastered the art of working off-hours, he will set his own pace and will be able to mix a good dose of entertainment. Above all he will only be content with a place that because of its character will teach him something new about life and that is not something easy to accomplish.

I find that the problem with trying to be too edgy is that like any adolescent, you’re still working on your personality. It’s just a matter of time.

The following is an adaptation of the post by the same title appeared in el-oso.net, with a few of my own conclusions. In the original post “oso” explores some of the common patterns in the evolution of cities.

Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums

As Kevin Kelly rightly points out, “every city begins as a slum … a seasonal camp with free-wheeling make-shift expediency.” Cities are founded on economic opportunity, spontaneous slums, and lawless saloons. Eventually gender ratios equal out, churches move in, government takes shape, and urban planning is institutionalized.

Chapter 2: Hegemony Rules

During the transition from slum to civic center some social group usually takes power and dictates policy. It tends to be the ethnic majority though in the case of colonized countries that was almost never the case. In most cities in the United States power lied among the WASP community. Ethnic minorities were pushed out to the edges while the elite built Victorian homes around the downtown business districts and plazas.

Chapter 3: Suburbanization or scalability of the dream

This is the chapter that takes on different manifestations depending on the ethnic and class make-up of a city, but the basic concept is still generally applicable. During WWII in the United States there was an influx of black americans seeking work in urban centers. After WWII four developments (other than blatant racism) led to white flight from urban centers to suburban communities. First was population density. After the war soldiers returned home to urban centers, but those who moved in while they were gone also remained. Then there was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which began the process of desegregating the country’s public schools. White parents felt that their children would receive a lower level of education in a desegregated school, and so they moved to suburbs where neighborhoods and their schools were all white. Third, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 enabled the workday commute from suburb to city center. Lastly, suburban developers had large returns to scale as they could purchase a single large plot of land and build hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical homes.

Chapter 4: Urban Gentrification

While the majority of white Americans from my generation grew up in mostly white suburban neighborhoods, our schools and public institutions became increasingly integrated and multicultural. Television and mass media brought the Cosby Show, The Jeffersons, Fresh Prince, and Family Matters into our living room. And then came hip-hop. All of a sudden there was nothing less cool than to have grown up in the suburbs. Young people from affluent suburbs moved into lower-income urban neighborhoods where they opened coffee shops, art galleries, and cocktail bars. Awkwardness and antagonism between the newly arrived affluent and the established lower-income population were inevitable. In the worst of cases property prices increased and low-income renters were forced to move out to other neighborhoods. However, there has also been an effort by young people across different classes in gentrified neighborhoods to shape a common aesthetic around hip-hop, indie rock, street art, and skateboarding.

Chapter 5: Back to the basics?

For a long time one of the ideas that persisted across many of my posts was that in the future all cities would share a common global culture. I wasn’t predicting the future as much as I was describing what I believe to be the advanced society in which I have the honour to live. With one of the most multicultural societies in the world, Toronto does well in integrating such diversity. But often times the protocol to coexists without incurring into cultural mishaps leaves us with a very superficial relationship. I sense that many more people would want to get closer and more integrated. While it is difficult to predict how cities will continue to evolve, I’m suggesting there is plenty of interest in creating spaces where the spirit of spontaneity, chaos and lawless goodness can favour a far more amenable environment, with smaller communities of people more open to experiment with their relationships. All we need to do is figure out what factors will promote such an environment.

Courtesy TECchris @ Twitter

Our species’ survival depends on how fast we embrace the moral shift from “patriot” to “global citizen”. Chris Anderson.

Reminded me of a key post in the evolution of this blog: cosmopolitanism (or the implosion of nationalism)

Thanks to my friends at PlanetEye for the tools and the Mexico Tourism Board for the images, I was able to organize a collection of images depicting interesting regions that may not be as popular as the beaches. Again, just to make the point that tourism promotion is usually biased to send people on charters to the beaches, but there is far more depth to this and any country. At a time when everyone in the industry is wondering how to restore the glorious days, this is only one idea that deserves attention.

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For best results, use the zoom controls (+/-) to get closer on the map and click on the markers to preview the images within that area. This is a very cool widget that will continue to be updated as I keep adding photos to the collection.

Over the past few hours members of the Tamil community in Toronto blocked one of the main highways connecting downtown with the rest of the city. While I won’t claim any knowledge whatsoever of the situation in Sri Lanka, these demonstrations have me reading as much as I can about the current situation. I thought that was the least I could do, realizing that I live in the same city as 200,000 of them, according to MSNBC.

The protesters had been taking the streets of Toronto at least since January, in most cases in a very organized fashion. Perhaps too organized since I barely noticed them before. But only events like this one get the attention of the masses and quickly echo through the news, blogosphere and twitter-verse, generating an overwhelming voice difficult to ignore. The tools of civil disobedience seemed to have produced the results they were hoping for: attention.

As I got involved into the various streams of people commenting about the event, I realized there were two kinds of people participating in the online debate: the pervasive anonymous comment condemning the act and manifesting hatred for blocking a highway and the opinionated intellectual that has taken a position (for/against) the protests. This got me thinking about the role of a multicultural city like Toronto in the world scene.

Toronto is a diverse city. Over 50% of its inhabitants come from another country. What should the role of a metropolis like this one be in the international context? Is multiculturalism only a marketing tactic to attract more people or should it be a baseline for policy making and government action? On days like today, it feels like no one is prepared to see the big picture, yet I believe that the next few months will see a myriad of causes take the stage as minority groups face the consequences of the current crisis.

In a world that is posed to see radical changes over the next few months, flexing our participatory muscles should not be taken lightly. I’ve always believed that Toronto is among a very small group of cities that model what the future will bring us: a diverse population happily integrated into one very prosper society. Figuring out what our role is in events like this one must be a priority. For now, it seems that our civil role is to amplify the voice of these movements. I say that is good thing. But I suspect this is only the beginning.

Over the course of the years I’ve spent countless vacation days hanging out at some very charming towns where the rhythm of life seems to run at a different pace. I keep going back to those places every now and then with a good book and a mindset to let go and enjoy the moment. Days are long as nothing seems to really happen in these places, but somehow I always find myself recharged when I come back.

Well, I’m going back again, but this time I’m on a mission. I’m taking a few business plans, ideas, contacts, technology tools, even a moderate budget and I’m going with the intent to bring some of the big-city mentality of innovating to places that may not be used to it. I expect to come across people that will find this sudden change of pace motivating and will take the lead. If I can create one meaningful connection between this place and the city where I live, I will consider the mission a success. Then there will be other towns. Then there will be a global tour, a global culture tour.

In the ongoing discussion about the tension between ever-accelerating innovation on big cities and the craving for a slow urban way of life, I’m convinced that the best of both worlds can only be discovered when we mix them up good, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

A recent article on BusinessWeek stated that some small towns are finally realizing the value of entrepreneurs and are creating local incentives to attract startups, creating a very interesting landscape for anyone thinking about launching a new venture.

cities are beginning to recognize entrepreneurs as a “third leg” of economic development, as important as retaining existing jobs and attracting large corporations. While startup meccas like the Bay Area offer concentrations of talent and investors, new companies there face plenty of competition for those resources, and the cost of doing business is high. In smaller cities, new businesses enjoy lower costs and a higher profile to attract workers, and may be able to get government incentives to create jobs.

A complete analysis of small cities across the United States was commissioned by BusinessWeek and their entire list can be found in their Best Small Cities for Startups, but here are the top performers based on number of startups per capita with an average of 5.5 startups per 1,000 inhabitants:

• Boulder, Colorado
• Doral, Florida
• Sandy Springs
• Boise City, Idaho
• Bozeman, Montana
• Bend, Oregon
• Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
• Franklin, Tennessee
• Fairfax, Virginia

Intrigued by the idea? Have any suggestions about places that could use this kind of exchange? Leave a comment.