Urban Prototyping

An interview with Jake Levitas, former Research Director at The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

A lot of GAFFTA’s work focuses on finding new ways for technology to improve urban quality of life. Can you start off by talking about some recent projects and initiatives that have focused specifically on improving interaction between neighbors?

GAFFTA has been located in San Francisco’s Mid-Market District since we were founded in 2008, and this context has shaped a lot of our direction as an organization. We want to build our community and help create compelling new work – but we also want this work to be relevant and accessible to our own neighbors, who come from an incredible variety of backgrounds and often do not have regular access to technology or digital culture. These connections aren’t always easy or intuitive.

Our Creative Currency initiative earlier this year was the culmination of years of outreach and relationship-building in the area, learning greatly from challenges and experience along the way to gain a better understanding of how our work could build neighborhood connections. We were fortunate enough to work with incredible partners on the project: Hub Bay Area, The SF Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, and American Express. We had a theory that bringing together the local community, the technology community, and the emerging collaborative consumption and social enterprise communities would result in new high-impact solutions. The outcomes have been incredible: four months after our initial hackathon, the four winning teams have conducted over 100 personal interviews, attended dozens of community meetings, and spent thousands of hours designing, coding, researching, and building. They presented their progress last night t at Creative Currency Demo Day and will showcase atSOCAP12 in October.

You have your first Urban Makeathon coming up in San Francisco; what’s that project about, and what do you hope to achieve with this street exhibition?

The Makeathon is one component of our latest initiative, Urban Prototyping. UP: SF is a design and technology festival exploring new open-source interventions in public space. We have a few outcomes in mind. First, we want to blend the creative technology, maker, and urban design communities to build projects together – blending the digital and physical in new ways. Second, we want to use the power of the web to make the designs and code from these projects openly accessible – so anyone can replicate them in their own city, anywhere in the world. Third, we want to work with city governments to institutionalize these ideas and make them formal parts of the city fabric. To that end, we’re opening up the model for the festival itself so that any city can cultivate urban prototypes that address their local needs.

We’ve found that hackathons and festivals – especially ones focused around making and creating – are a great way to build momentum for transformative ideas. The idea behind the Makeathon is to bring diverse sets of people together to rapidly build prototypes in 48 hours. This spontaneous format leads to teams and projects which may never have existed otherwise. We’re complementing that approach with a more curated open call for project proposals from existing teams who are ready to build new ideas over the next two months.

You focus a lot on how technology impacts cities, but flip that around — how do you think cities impact technology?

It’s completely a two-way street. Technology has to be responsive to, and continually learn from, its users – which, by and large, are also urban citizens. I think the tech-to-city impact is much more well-documented than the other way around, but that second shoe is going to drop very soon – it will always be a back-and-forth process. My friend Sha often tells me that his iPhone has changed the way he uses a city much more than any single urban planning decision, for example. By a similar token, Amazon and Netflix have changed the retail makeup of cities by leaving old bookstores and video rental shops vacant. Now we’re seeing tech-based startups and initiatives like SQFT (a Creative Currency project) which are shaping the way that technology might respond to these very real changes in cities.

More formally, city governments can have a huge potential impact on technology through their ability to scale solutions and make use of digital and physical infrastructure. Our Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath is doing great work to rethink the procurement process here and make it more open to new ideas, companies, and even citizens. SFPark is a great example of how pilot technology, in partnership with government, can spread across a city, gather data, and make citizens’ lives easier. The lessons we can learn from using the city as a platform are nearly endless, and are just starting to be uncovered.

Richard Florida argued recently in the Wall Street Journal that density of interactions between people is more important than physical population density in driving innovation in cities. Since you sit right at the intersection of creativity and urbanism, what are your thoughts on that argument? Does it ring true?

More than anything else, I live in San Francisco because of the critical mass of creative people here who want to make an impact. Density – in both senses – is the reason this area, and others like it, have a history of breeding world-changing ideas, companies, and movements. I would add a third layer – focus density. That is, density of the right interactions between the right people, at the right time. Every city can’t be great at everything. Technologists flock to the Bay Area in the same way that musicians have flocked to New Orleans, or actors to Los Angeles, and it’s these focused hubs that seem to really drive innovation. Density of interactions between people can be increased or decreased by the city environment itself, but also by the individuals and organizing bodies within that city. As a community organization, a lot of our work is simply about that – encouraging people to interact and make together.

Not every neighborhood can be a powerhouse innovation cluster. So how can people spark a culture of creativity & collaboration in their neighborhood, even if it’s just focused on finding clever solutions to hyper-local challenges?

Not every neighborhood *should* be a powerhouse innovation cluster. With a large supply of great success stories available online, it’s sometimes easy to miss the trees for the forest. To quote Parker Palmer: “Our real freedom comes from being aware that we do not have to save the world, merely make a difference in the place where we live.” I think everyone can relate to the stagnancy that often results from getting wrapped up in high-level discussions.

One thing I love about hackathons is that they hold stagnancy accountable. It’s unbelievable how quickly the discussion can shift and become concrete when you have a working demo of a solution on the table. The more neighborhoods and their residents can focus on making over talking, the better. Pick a problem, give yourself a deadline, and work to solve it as if your lives depended on it. And technical limitations shouldn’t hold people up – the answer to everything isn’t an app or a website. You might come out with a street awareness campaign, or a board game, or an art project at the end (which emerged from our Summer of Smart initiative in 2011).

What’s the one thing the top of your wish list for your own neighborhood in San Francisco? What do you want to change?

I live in NOPA (North of the Panhandle). There are a few incredible neighborhood organizing forces like The Wigg Party and Workshop who are taking the initiative in bringing people together to build community and make the area a better place. I’ve never met more neighbors, or felt more connected to my local area, anywhere I’ve lived, and it’s in large part due to forces like these. I’d like to see similar groups in every neighborhood. Otherwise, it’s a pretty great place to live – but if you can make the wall of fog stay away in the summer, that would be great!

Read more about Jake’s idea for more local organizing groups in San Francisco, and check out the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts to learn more about Jake’s work.