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.

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.

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“.

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.

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.

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)

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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.

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.

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.

All the trivia aside, this video is about investing in an education system that is quickly becoming obsolete.

In an effort to understand some of the key factors in the current hotel industry, I created a data set with the top 5% most expensive hotels and mapped their locations to determine which regions had the highest density of “exclusive” hotels. As it was to be expected the usual suspects are at the top of the list: London, Tokyo, New York City, Paris, Rome. The rest of the list has a good mix of modern, beach and historic cities: Venice, Miami, Los Angeles, Milan, Moscow, Florence, Cape Town, Osaka, Morocco, Maui, Cancun, Washington, Bali, Madrid. London has over 120 exclusive hotels while Madrid counted 20. Beyond that these exclusive hotels are scattered around the world. These images provide a general view of where in the world they are:
……

While calculating these “exclusivity hubs” I came across some other interesting facts:

• The five regions where the top 5% is far more expensive than in the rest of the world are: United Arab Emirates, Morocco, South Africa, New Zealand and Switzerland
• The currencies that will buy you more exclusivity for less are the Japanese Yen, Polish Zloty, Mexican Peso, Canadian Dollar, Indian Rupees, Chinese Yuan and Brazil Reais
• US$264/night will get you into one of these properties

It’ll be interesting to see how this group changes as the year advances and hotels fail to meet their quotas. I’m planning to release a lot more of this analysis as part of a new set of travel guides we’re producing at PlanetEye, but if you’re interested in the numbers behind please drop me a line.

Illustration credit goes to Tyler Lang

Interestingly enough, “Rethinking Urban Growth” is one of the few processes that acts as positive influencer in a world that seems doomed to end in food riots, although I find it hard to believe that this represents the full picture. At the very least there is one very important process missing from this picture: immigration.

Although only for the US, here is the Immigration Explorer, an interactive graphic of how different foreign-born groups have settled in the US over the last century.

• Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content: a paper published in IEEE’s Pervasive Computing exploring methods to uncover tourist movement using mobile networks data and geotagged photos. I have to say that this paper is particularly interesting given my current focus on tourism through PlanetEye
• Tracing the Visitor’s Eye: using a very large collection of geotagged images from Flickr, this project revealed patterns of tourists consuming important destinations.
• Real Time Rome: a MIT SENSEable City Lab project that created amazing views of Rome by using data on mobile phone usage.
• From Sentient to Responsive Cities: a compilation of various projects exploring the role of new technologies to gather information from the general population to uncover urban behaviour.
• Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE: includes an important collection of projects that use the urban setting as a canvas for their work, sometimes giving us a preview of the tools that will likely be used in the future to navigate the intricate geography of global cities
• Flickr Alpha Shapes: a Flickr project to reverse engineer shape files from their massive collection of geotagged photos
• Visualizar’08: Database City: a collection of projects developed during a workshop organized by MediaLab Prado, some of which had the objective of helping understand some of the processes that take place in an urban setting
• EveryBlock: is a web application that displays various sets of public records such as crime in a variety of visualizations, including maps

The experimental nature of many of these projects is obvious and suggests the early stages of a new discipline that has been labelled “Urban Computing” but could very well overlap elements of cultural anthropology and information architecture. With more projects exploring these areas a consensus for useful information will be built and it won’t be long before standard data sets are produced and maintained for cities along with their accepted visualization methods.

If you have knowledge of any other projects worth including in this list please leave a comment.

In a world where everything is starting to look more alike rather than unique, each person or company is an outpost that challenges convention and points to a new way of marketing, selling and building community.

This assertion based on the experience of their many correspondents dispatched around the world may be a sign of the times: as we grow aware of the world around us and educate ourselves in the ways of other peoples and cultures, we can’t help but notice that things abroad are not too different from things around the corner.

In the midst of a global recession it’s easy to panic if we are all doing things in the same ways, buying the same products, asserting the same way of live. After all when the entire boat is going down, you don’t want to be where the majority of the crowd is (pardon the extreme analogy). Instead each one of us will look at doing things a little bit different, trying to use all those lessons on global culture to create a unique mix that will allow us to become unique actors in a complex stage where the rules are about to be rewritten.

From the variety of our lifestyles and chances we take on unique ventures and projects will be born the post-crisis generation. And if the global aristocracy (those who have the privilege of roaming the globe for one or another reason) has any saying there will be a renewed attention on good, long-term value over cheap, short-minded pragmatism.

So look around, figure out what is that unique opportunity that you can devote the next few months to and embrace it. Indeed, as Tyler suggests, this is going to be one Happy New World.

In brief, comScore reports China contributed 179,710 unique visitors in December 2008, while the United States (the traditional leader) only 163,300. For China this represents barely 13% of their population while for the U.S. is around 55%. Using Gapminder we can compare the Internet penetration vs. Income to visualize the trend (even though only 2006 data is available):

Over two years ago I wrote the post déjà vu, forecasting that the total penetration of Chinese users would reach 35%, using a simple comparison with the adoption of a similar technology back in the 90′s: the telephone. Considering that there are similarities in the way the two technologies are deployed, it is reasonable to use the comparison. In the case of the telephone it took China about 8 years to reach that milestone. The baseline I had used for this comparison was 2004 so we still have a few more years to go, but imagine half a billion Chinese users (35% of their population) on the web! That is more users than the next 12 countries combined today.

As we get closer to this milestone, I think the following trends will be observed:

• Larger amounts of user generated content will originate from Chinese users, shifting the conversation to the East and carrying with it all the services associated with it. Forget China being a “resource” economy.
• Web sites will sacrifice features for the sake of simplicity in order to embrace such a large user base (think Twitter).
• We’ll see the surge of web sites ideated with the Chinese culture at heart. The rest of the world will be left out unless we make a serious effort to understand our cultural differences. Baidu is just the beginning.
• Demystification of China as a destination will accelerate its relevance as a tourist destination. Put Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Chengdu, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Tianjin and Wuhan in your places to visit within the next 10 years. We’ll hear a lot more about them.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

…the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, indeed.

While the article mentions the variety of factors that were considered, it is not clear what the evaluation methodology or how the scores were assigned, but there are plenty of notes about the various initiatives underway to make these cities worthy of their inclusion in this ranking.

Here is the list of the top 10 as ranked by their average score in 2020.

• London – 9.3
• New York – 9.28
• Singapore – 8.85
• Toronto – 8.75
• Melbourne – 8.51
• Curitiba – 8.3
• Abu Dhabi – 7.96
• Frankfurt – 7.9
• Hyderabad – 7.63
• Cape Town – 7.2

With such favorable prospects on any one of these cities, it may be worth investing a little time scouting them to become more intimate with their rhythm of life.

the tanking economy, eco-consciousness, millennials who have less money to spend and “want to be in a more social urban environment”, and the urban renaissance.

Downsizing must be in the minds of many citizens wondering how to adjust their greatly exaggerated life style to something more to par with the current economic landscape. Yet, according to Richard Florida in his article about rethinking our needs from the old order, a more profound change is needed, in particular when it comes to expenditures on houses and cars so more money can be diverted to emergent goods and services, likely those that will reconfigure the economy in the future. This reminds me of an architecture trend, a decade old, to create small houses. He then takes the argument one step further, suggesting not only smaller, but more flexible living arrangements are key:

…homeownership also ties people to locations, making it harder for them to move to where work is. Homeownership made sense when most people had one job and lived in the same city for life. But it makes less sense when people change jobs frequently and have to relocate to find new work.

Less ties to a place would create an incentive for people to relocate to the hubs where new opportunities arise. Which cities will become the magnets for the new economy? It is too early to tell, but they will have to be smart about reconfiguring themselves to make it easier for eager global citizens to seize these opportunities. This reconfiguration may start with updating zoning laws to enable high density areas around the industries of the future. People should be able to trade their old super-sized house for a tighter, leaner living space as long as the proper urban rhythm is part of the equation.

In my post slums of hope I suggested that slums (as another form of urban organization) had their own virtues:

the new urban paradigm may very well be based on the high-density of these slums. Places where humanity takes precedence over the material world, where luxury has nothing to do with the riches of the world, but with the knowledge on how to live a good life.

Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from those that have thrived amid almost impossible economic constraints.

As absurd as the question seems, that is the tone of the debate going on among the readers of celebrity-entrepreneurs Michael Arrington (Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch) and Loic Le Meur (Should Michael Arrington Be Invited At LeWeb Next Year). The word battle, taking place across blogs posts, comments, twitter messages continues to scale as people are quick to join sides and it seems there are only two ways of being an entrepreneur: you either kill yourself building a company and sacrifice all immediate personal satisfaction or give up trying to be successful in the business world but discover the joys of life.

What most people engaged in this debate are not recognizing (and I’ll admit I haven’t finished reading all comments/posts) is that everyone is really advocating the liberal ideology, where individual success is what matters the most. One could even judge from recent events, that individuals may feel entitled to succeed at the expense of others.

The American entrepreneurial spirit, driven by hyper-competition will not hesitate to take every opportunity to grow a business, which would be great if the ultimate objective of such business was to enhance the life of all the people that depend on it. But too many times we’ve seen greed triumph over the high ideals of the early capitalists, leading to an early sell without concern (more on this from Matthew Ingram) for long term prosperity. However, a life style without such ambition may lead to stagnation. Feeling entitled to long lunches, 35-hour weeks without producing the output that the world needs to overcome the current crisis, may be just as damaging, though.

In past posts I’ve explored the relationship between growing cities and their hunger for an accelerated rhythm. I’ve also quietly considered what is it that everyone wishes in the long term. Why are people attracted to quiet, relaxed retreats away from the fast-lived scene of the big cities?

It seems to me that putting the individual ahead of the collective is the cause of problems in any case. If the entrepreneur was every bit as considered when selling the business as he was while building the business, accounting not only for individual pay-out but overall society impact… and every citizen just as concerned for overall output, even at the expense of personal gratification we may have a new entrepreneurial spirit for our post-bonanza era.