Future of Work consortium

For anyone interested in the future of urban centers - and their alternatives - there's an important and insightful article in the current issue of Business 2.0 ("The next real estate boom: Dense settlements, not sprawling ranch houses, are the future of housing...").

Here's the image that Business 2.0 senior editor Chris Taylor opens the article with:

Picture the scene: it's 2025, and you and your family are living in a beautiful, leafy-green village that seems more 19th century than 21st, even though it has only been in existence for ten years and is just 20 miles from a major American city.

You know all of the 150 or so souls in the village; you see them at the market where you pick up a box of locally-grown produce once a week. You see half of them in the morning as they board the commuter train for school or work in the city; the other half are the network warriors who work from home or, on warm days, use the free Wi-Fi in the village square.

This is essentially the work-live neighborhood concept that we at Work Design Collaborative and Future of Work have been promoting for the last several years. And of course we're hardly the only voices calling for a fundamental rethink of how and where we live and work.

In fact, the most encouraging and exciting news in the story is that more and more Americans actually want to live this way:

The demand for such developments is real, and it's only going to get greater as consumer preferences rapidly shift away from the McMansions preferred by boomers. According to a study by the nonprofit Congress for New Urbanism, while less than 25 percent of middle-aged Americans are interested in living in dense areas, 53 percent of 24-34 year olds would choose to live in transit-rich, walkable neighborhoods[emphasis added], if they had the choice.

Wait, it gets better - and even more interesting. Another study by tne nonprofit Center for Transit-Oriented Development predicts that demand for housing within walking distance of transit will more than double in the next twenty years. According to their research, properties within a 5- or 10-minute walk to a train stop are already selling for 20 to 25 percent more than comparable properties further away.

I take all this as a genuine sign of progress and hope. There is a growing set of voices - backed by solid research and even political influence - all calling for new thinking (and action) about how we design and build the neighborhoods we live and work in.

And for good measure, here's one more. Recently Future of Work member Betsy Burroughs (founder of Future Catalyst and a genuine futurist if ever I met one) introduced me to Bobby Winston, the founder and publisher of Bay Crossings, a Bay Area monthly newsletter dedicated to helping promote the use of ferries in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ferries? How mundane, and how 1930's, you say. But wait, there's more here than meets the eye. Think about living in a mixed use residential/commercial community right along the water's edge, where you can walk to a ferry that will take you just about anywhere in the Bay Area you want to be.

And what if each of those ferry terminals included, or was right next to, one of our Business Community Centers^tm? That's a place where your membership would give you access to workplaces on demand, conference rooms to meet clients and colleagues, tech support, back office facilities, and a whole panoply of other member businesses offering every skill and service you'll ever need to assemble a world-class business of any scale. Sound pretty compelling, doesn't it?

Okay, okay, there I go again promoting our favorite concept. But the real beauty of this is how it all fits together. "New Villages" (to return to the Business 2.0 article) are environmentally sound (see my July 24 post "An Inconvenient Future" for more on that angle), they promise a much higher-quality, lower-cost lifestyle, and they just plain make sense.

So read the Business 2.0 article, check out the other sites I've referred to here, and get serious about helping make these visions of live-work neighborhoods turn into reality. And New Villages will be real (they already are - read the article!). The only question is whether you'll help lead the way, or come straggling along afterwards.

Posted by Jim Ware