I went back today and looked at the Future Melbourne wiki – a long-term planning project undertaken by the city’s residents. There were more than 11K edits from people there, and most of them thought the wiki was a useful tool. Melbourne wants to be a “bold, inspirational, and sustainable city,” and they started their ten-year strategic planning online.
I also learned today that New York’s tech Meetup is up to more than eleven thousand members. Their purpose: “On the 1st Tuesday of each month at 7PM, 6 people get 5 minutes each to demo something cool to New York’s tech community (geeks, investors, entrepreneurs, hackers, etc).” That’s a big group – and it’s just a fraction of the zillions of people all around the five boroughts starting new companies, finding new ways of making a living, and disrupting all the incumbent businesses in the city.
And my third data point today: NYU’s ITP winter 2009 show. The students were looking a little dazed – they had probably finished working right before the doors opened, and then they had to explain what everything was to all of us. But they were basically game. One of my favorite projects was Current, by Zoe Fraade-Blanar – mapping the intensity of Google queries over time to mainstream news coverage of the subjects of those queries. Basic finding: often the WSJ and NYT aren’t covering what people seem to be interested in reading about.
So if I were thinking about NYC’s future, I’d look to what Melbourne is carrying off – collaborative long-term planning, using online tools where possible – and I’d enlist the help of the NYU ITP students and the NYC tech meetup to drag this city’s planning into the 21st century. I’d bolster the role of NYU as this city’s MIT, because we know that universities catalyze and sustain regional innovation clusters (and because ITP is at NYU!). “Metropolitan regions—and regional industry clusters—represent a potent source of innovation and therefore productivity at a moment of national economic crisis,” as Brookings says. I’d figure out what new tech industries needed help to get off the ground, and I’d make sure that they had the connectivity to get there.
In the meantime, consider Melbourne. Nice beaches. Visionary planning capabilities.