What We Can Learn From Urban Planning

As Russell keeps reminding me, I'm late writing this article.  I'm late because the start of the year has been a frenzy of nights on the road traveling from one faceless, soulless grey (or, as they tend to say here, plain vanilla) focus group facility to another look-alike meeting room in another city.  And this traveling has spurred a thought in me about why I enjoy some cities more than others and the implications for brands.  

When I first moved here, I thought I was an 'East coast boy' (I suppose East vs West coast is the American equivalent of North vs Sarf London).  I've realized this isn't the case.  I love some places on the East coast (Boston and Miami), on the West coast (San Francisco and Seattle) and some places in between (Austin and Chicago).  Conversely, a lot of cities I expected to love - Philadelphia, Los Angeles and, to my real surprise, New York - left me feeling a little cold.  

Stuck on a plane one night I began to think what it was about the cities I loved that made me love them.  It wasn't simply size (geographic or population).  Nor was it the average inhabitant you came across.  It was something to do with the way the city was structured.   

All the cities I loved had a similar structure to the way they were built.  They weren't cities with a consistent or similar culture.  Instead, they felt much more like loose confederacies where one part of town is completely different to another.  Take Seattle, for example.   One moment I can feel completely at home and in love with an area like Belltown, full of bars bursting with personality and a vibrant music scene (if you ever visit, go to Shortys a bar that is a mecca to pinball and full of interesting characters to people watch).  I can then walk ten minutes east to Capitol Hill and feel completely cold towards that area (and perhaps temporarily the city).  

This structure is true to all the cities I personally love.  They have distinct areas with their own rules, values, inhabitants and decor that are often the total opposite to their neighbour.  They are a complex system of sometimes contradictory values, look and feel.  They're a bit like an atom - although they are part of the same thing there is an inherent tension and contradiction between the particles that somehow holds it together into something meaningful and important. And this is what makes them interesting and grow with a certain luminosity.  

This 'structure' also explains why some cities left me cold (as well as, with hindsight, why I got tired with London).  Although geographically there are lots of districts and, indeed, 'locals' may claim there is a real difference between neighborhoods, to my eyes there in an incredible sameness and, as a result, blandness to the city.  They don't, at least to my eyes, have a rich, interesting culture.  Instead, they feel theyre rushing towards some vision of stereotypical, clinical uniformity and sameness.  And that doesn't attract me towards them.  Although they are in many cases dramatically different cities, they melt into one mass of sameness quickly in my mind.  

The same is true, to my mind, about music.  The bands that have built hugely successful long-term careers - U2, Radiohead, REM - have never been concerned about being consistent or single-minded.  They have contradicted themselves from album to album, even song to song and embraced complexity, even potential failure.  That's what has led to their progress and musical development.  It's what makes them surprising and interesting, and makes people eager to hear the next piece of their output.  

So, what the hell has all this got to do with brands, ads and planning.  Well, I guess it's this.  When I began to think about the brands I love - the ones I buy and would love to work on - I began to realize they exhibited many of the same characteristics of the cities I loved.  They're three-dimensional, have rough edges and are often full of contradictions.  Not everything marches to the same beat of the same mindless vision drum.  

Yet, the tools and training that are handed down from generation to generation of ad practitioners teach us the skills to build blands, rather than brands.  Were taught to keep it simple.  Make it consistent.  Be single-minded.  And at all cost, avoid anything that seemingly contradicts.  Yet this does not lead to rich, interesting brands.  Brands that you get passionate about.  Brands that glow through a fog of inertia and indifference.  We spend too long smoothing off the rough edges making the potentially rich and interesting uninteresting.  

So, here's my call to the planning fraternity.  Learn from the urban planners who built the cities you love and the bands that have built huge, passionate followings.  The ones who embrace complexity, depth and richness.  The ones who celebrate and encourage seemingly inherent contradictions.  Because I believe it is this richness that makes things interesting.   

Just because you can't define it in words or articulate the contradictions doesn't make it wrong.  So don't try and fix it by smoothing the rough, interesting edges away with the often blunt tools of the planning toolkit.  Let's take some risk and begin to embrace the complexity that makes the world an interesting place.  Maybe then, people will care about your brand, a rare thing in today's over stimulated world.

garethk@modernista.com