{"id":2270,"date":"2012-12-03T10:40:02","date_gmt":"2012-12-03T17:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2270"},"modified":"2013-10-12T09:47:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-12T15:47:03","slug":"millennial-urbanology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2270","title":{"rendered":"Millennial Urbanology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like the question about what constitutes good urban placemaking<\/a>, the question about the lifestyle tastes and desires of the particular demographic that creative placemakers seek to attract\u2014the Millennials<\/em><\/a>\u2014is a major preoccupation for urbanists.\u00a0 Yesterday\u2019s Denver Post<\/em>, for example, contains an op-ed piece by Neal Peirce<\/a> that notes the widely reported Millennial desire for \u201curban communities with active street life, entertainment, and stimulation.\u201d \u00a0Peirce uses Jeff Speck’s recent book Walkable City<\/em><\/a>\u00a0as an entry point for arguing that the cities we need to create must be\u2014you guessed it\u2014walkable, bikable, green, and public transit-oriented (for a\u00a0summary and review of Speck’s book, go here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

One of the advantages of teaching urban studies<\/a> to a college audience is that we can take something of the pulse of what Millennials want in urban places. \u00a0In future posts I’ll report what I learned about Millennial tastes this past academic term from having my students analyze contemporary urbanism in Denver. Denver is one of the cities\u2014along with New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Minneapolis\u2014that \u00a0Peirce says is making good progress toward creating active and sustainable urban environments (see also here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The in-class preparation for urban fieldwork includes playing and discussing the BMW Guggenheim Lab\u2019s Urbanology game<\/a>,\u00a0as well as discussing films like Gary Hustwit\u2019s Urbanized<\/a><\/em>\u00a0[Note: Urbanized<\/em>\u00a0took us three class meetings to finish watching because of the animated discussion it stimulated. We kept coming back to its themes throughout the course of the term. I should write something up about this soon]. The Urbanology game asks players to make choices about urban issues, producing some quick findings based on the choices. The player assumes the role of a decision maker and answers questions to determine the priorities of his or her city. By answering \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d to 10 questions like \u201cWill you double the cost of public transport to fund its conversion to a carbon-neutral system?\u201d or \u201cWill you pay for a free bike service in your city?\u201d players build a future city that best matches their indicated desires and needs. Then, the player is told what real city most closely approximates their values as an urban decision-maker.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a previous post<\/a> I discussed the results of Urbanology game-playing by my Fall 2011 class.\u00a0 The top two values for that group of Millennials were Livability<\/strong> (investments in security, recreation, and individual comforts), with 38% of the mentions by students, followed by Health<\/strong> (investments in general physical well-being) with 26%.\u00a0 Sustainability was the third most frequently mentioned value, at 22%.\u00a0 These results would seem to be consistent with Millennial tastes as defined by Pearce and others.\u00a0 Perhaps predictably, these Millennial values differed from my own Baby Boomer<\/a> values. In the twenty times I played the game Sustainability<\/strong> (investments in \u201cgreening\u201d the city) was identified as the top value 30% of the time, with Lifestyle<\/strong> (investments in arts, sports, culture, and tourism) a close second at 25%.\u00a0 At the time I explained this Student-Instructor difference by appealing to generational factors: at this point in my life I\u2019m much more interested in the quality of the urban community that will be inherited by my middle school-aged son, and much less interested in the individual personal comforts and amenities we might reasonably expect to be of great interest to college-age Millennials. Curiously, however, Student and Instructor values produced the same list of real cities, albeit in a different rank order.\u00a0 The top city for students was Berlin<\/strong> with 30% of the mentions, followed by Toronto<\/strong> with 27% and Shanghai<\/strong> with 26%.\u00a0 My list was topped by Shanghai with 25% of the mentions, followed by Berlin and Toronto with 20% each.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Game-playing by my 2012 class of Millennials generated the same three cities, but in a slightly different order.\u00a0 Berlin got 31% of the mentions, followed by Shanghai at 27% and Toronto at 23%. Interestingly, the urban values generating this list in 2012 were decidedly different from 2011. \u00a0In 2012 Sustainability was identified as the top value with 35% of the mentions, followed by Livability at 23% and Lifestyle at 15%. \u00a0Health dropped off to 12%. \u00a0I played the game another ten times and the results were consistent with the first time I played. Shanghai is still my top city with 30% of the mentions, with Sustainability and Lifestyle sharing top-spot value honors with mentions of 30% each.\u00a0I\u2019m not sure what to make of these numbers. \u00a0Minimally, they suggest that my values as an aging Boomer are understandably stable, while those of my young Millennial charges\u2014also understandably\u2014are a bit more in flux. \u00a0The latter might imply that we shouldn\u2019t be too confident of our ability to predict what Millennials want in an urban setting.<\/p>\n

For reasons discussed in my original post, results of the Urbanology game can leave you scratching your head.\u00a0 They raise student (and Instructor) suspicions that the game is \u201crigged\u201d in a way that guarantees certain results. Yet at the same time students really enjoy playing it. \u00a0One student comment on the anonymous end-of-term course evaluation captures, I think, the consensus of the class about Urbanology’s<\/em> virtues:<\/p>\n

The <\/em>Urbanology game fit the class well. It was a useful tool and timed well as it was used early in the course, and was very fun and stimulating.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The game clearly puts students in touch with compelling urban questions and conundrums that they\u2019ve never thought about before, as well as with their own personal values and politics.\u00a0 They express a near unanimous desire to see the game developed in such a way as to add more complexity, context-sensitivity, and nuance (i.e., getting away from having to answer \u201cyes\/no\u201d to difficult questions).\u00a0\u00a0 If nothing else the game is \u00a0a terrific conversation starter about the kinds of choices and compromises that have to be made in designing and developing a city. \u00a0\u00a0More bankable insights about what Millennials want, however, come from putting \u00a0them into the field to study what urban planners and architects are actually doing<\/em> with infill sites and public spaces like urban parks. \u00a0More on that to come.<\/p>\n

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Like the question about what constitutes good urban placemaking, the question about the lifestyle tastes and desires of the particular demographic that creative placemakers seek to attract\u2014the Millennials\u2014is a major preoccupation for urbanists.\u00a0 Yesterday\u2019s Denver Post, for example, contains an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-sustainability","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-AC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2270"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3048,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions\/3048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}