YCombinator wants to tinker in the world of urban planning. But they’ve brought in the founder of I Can Has Cheezburger’, Ben Huh, and Adora Chung, the founder of the failed on-demand houseclearning service, Homejoy. Hmmm.
Fred Scharman of Archinect has some observations:
Like Cheezburger Network with its user-generated content, Homejoy and other “sharing economy”companies are uprooting the way traditional industries are doing business by serving as software-enabled middlemen and distributers—rather than creators—of content. “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening,” as strategist Tom Goodwin wrote in Techcrunch in 2015. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it more succinctly in 2011, when he wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled simply “Why Software is Eating the World”.
A man who got rich selling out his stake in a cat picture website is teaming up with a woman who founded a failed housecleaning company to imagine the future of cities. They’re backed by advisor and investor Peter Thiel, perhaps best known for his interest in—besides seasteading—using the blood of the young to extend the life of the old, speculating about whether extending the right to vote to women was bad for democracy, and secretly funding lawsuits against journalists. Sam Altman, YCombinator president, recently had to defend the company’s relationship with Thiel, when Thiel donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign a week after a recording surfaced of Trump bragging about committing sexual assault.
YCombinator’s project has moved to the site selection phase. They have a form online that requests suggestions: “We want to build a city. Know of a specific location that works? Tell us about it below.” One landscape architect friend on twitter dubbed Huh’s future city “Cheezburg”. “To call a city a system or a platform underestimates the complexities. We’ll be working on a project to develop a system for creating networks of systems,” Huh wrote on Medium. This kind of jargon and hubris is easy to mock, until we remember that these people are applying the same business model that’s putting taxi drivers and bookstores out of work all across the country. This would all be silly if there weren’t so much at stake.
The urban ambitions of technology companies are growing. The self-driving cars from Google and Tesla will change the way cities are planned. Elon Musk’s other companies are turning roofs into power generators and walls into batteries. He wants to build cities on Mars, and new high-speed floating trains on Earth. Researchers from Adam Greenfield to Keller Easterling are writing about the “Smart Cities” that IBM and others are designing. Architects and urban designers are engaging with these projects, but we’re still not doing it often or effectively enough. “Many will wonder why a guy known for cat pictures and memes is running a project to build the cities of the future,” Huh says. He’s right about this, and he’s right when he notes “What got us here won’t get us there. As technology advances, cities must adapt to new realities of life.” While we in the business are concerned elsewhere, people from other industries are defining how that urban technological adaptation will play out.
Just because someone starts building a city next week doesn’t make it the ‘city of the future’. And I’d like to mention that we don’t really understand how cities work and they aren’t ‘built’ like a cell phone or website. Cities emerge from the interactions between hordes of people, all operating to accomplish their own ends, making billions of interdependent decisions mediated by laws, customs, zoning regs, physics, and aesthetics. I don’t think the thinking behind Cheezburg is broad enough to incorporate all that, if it’s possible at all.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/152896647632
