This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Kevin Kelley, founding partner and principal at Shook Kelley. We talk about his book Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together. We discuss eliciting emotions, the debate between themes and authenticity, changing the meaning of cities, and embracing density.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: How are you seeing cities at the moment? You know, the pandemic kind of switched things on in terms of work-from-home for a lot of folks. It’s changed this kind of monoculture of downtowns into something that people are, frankly, afraid of, happening even more with the idea of a doom loop. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that move and the change that’s happening and the push to bring people back downtown as you’re trying to bring people into stores and create experiences.
Kevin Kelley: Yeah, if I could back up just a tad on that, because it’s such a great question. I didn’t have a guidebook for developing our approach. We had to pioneer our own system of convening and to try to put together an alchemy of business, science and design approaches to build a robust system of place. And that’s really what I like to think of in terms of a "system of place," because a lot of companies lack a system. The more I researched, just like anything, the more we worked on this, the more we realized that cities were defined by the ancient agora, the markets, the bazaars — not even as much the temples or religious facilities oe the courthouses, the markets really defined them.
The more I studied old world merchants, the more I realized they understood something that we don’t understand about bringing people together, about not only trading goods but also trading values and rituals and traditions and what I call "the great value exchange" in the book, to try to get away from that term "retail."
What was fascinating is most of the insights we had and our recommendations, I could track back a thousand years. What I mean by that is way the human body moves, the way people glance at each other, the way they connect when environments really encourage and foster community and when environments turn those behaviors off. But around 2008, 2009 and upwards — and that was the birth of the iPhone, social media, Facebook, Twitter — we started noticing a marked difference and how people behaved and it just escalated.
We started having alarm bells internally in our firm saying, oh, this is fundamental shift in our behavior. If people make eye contact less, if their necks are cranked down all the time, these send out different signals to us. To a child, a neck cranked down says depressed, even before a child knows the word depressed, they know that their parents are sullen. We started noticing this behavior and getting very concerned about the nature of community making. Add to that online shopping and our fixation with, you know, just screen time, which averages seven to eight hours a day, which is terrifying.
That’s 105 days a year that we’re fixated to a screen and not out in public connecting. All of that was already concerning enough. Then we hit the pandemic and then we watched — and I work with a lot of downtowns, I work with some global cities and as I mentioned urban districts — once that hit, I saw a much more long-term effect. While many other sectors — housing, retail is doing great, believe it or not, despite the headlines — many other sectors are doing well. The sector that is a super big problem are downtowns and urban districts, office markets. And that is a fundamental shift in our behavior that I think is gonna take 10 years to correct, and it’s going to be everyone’s problem.
There’s this kind of mentality, suburbia versus downtowns — where people think, not my problem. But it’s all of our problem, in terms of tax base, services. What is the solution? That is one of the things we’re working on with a number of cities. And I think you have to break it down into a lot of dimensions, but in short we have to change the meaning of the city from places of production [to places of] proximity. They were built on the idea of being close to the resources factory and close to the, you know, other workers and movers and shakers to really places of experiences, playgrounds, which isn’t all bad.
I think it will come back, as we get more people to live there, more people to hang out there. As many other authors have described, their kind of downtowns are marriage markets for young people, there’s a sense of discovery and adventure, of creation, of innovation. Cities have to really frame that value proposition. But what I find in a lot of the global cities I’m working with, they keep trying to sell old hat. And that old hat is not working anymore. You’re not gonna convince the best talent to go through the trouble of getting to a city for what the payoff is. And in the book I describe a lot of parameters around the amount of work we exert as humans and the payoffs we get.
The internet has wiped out these concrete linear payoffs of speed, efficiency, price, variety — all those things. They have just systematically attacked that, and will keep attacking that, but they don’t have a monopoly on joy or delight or coming together. S cities have to really focus on those aspects.
