Big Idea: Intentional Subcultural Districts
i think cities or developers should try planning a new district or business development around the idea that for say 5, 10 years the properties can only be owned/rented (depending on who's setting this up) by local small businesses. i watched a video about how akihabara built its cultural cache by just being a place where local people went to see local sellers. these days, the top-down vision of landlords and cities is so generally oppressive to localized culture that it is impossible for new cultural boons like this to develop. a lot of people in the younger generations lament the loss of subculture and blame themselves, or social media, or whatever. but if kids have somewhere to go, they'll go, and they'll invent cool new cultural ecosystems when they get there. it's regrettable that subcultures always are chewed up and spat out by commercialization and gentrification, but at least that process becomes sustainable if there are new places for young people to go that aren't cringe and landlord-brained.
the benefit here is controlled chaos. having a designated place for people to go and create culture can also allow people to decide how close or far they want to live from that site of experimentation, rather than there being a conflict every time a witch shop or a new venue or whatever cool new shit tries to open in a random strip mall. having a target demographic of people who are open to adopting new things and making them their own also allows for experimentation with urban design. it's a space of experimentation that i think could be even a regional hub in areas of the U.S. that have so few cultural spaces that the kids are roving town to town looking for shit to do.
I think that this would probably work better from a developer perspective than a city perspective, because the city is kind of beholden to its people, and i've found that nimby ass people in these growing towns will destroy their own towns by digging their heels in and refusing to allow their downtown to change. Meanwhile, all the makings of new cultural production are there, but they're stifled under the refusal to wake up and meet the future. When you try to defeat the creative direction that society is moving in, you don't create something new and better, you just create a new enemy to cultural production. This is why decades are frequently remembered by their subcultures or their new cultural movements. Attempts at authoritarian control over cultural production doesn't result in actual control, it just results in new motives for resistance to that control.
Intentionally developing a cultural district from the ground up and allowing only locals to run their businesses there is something that I'd expect developers to be terrified of. I think that they'll need to get over themselves if they plan to be the owner of the place that becomes the most valuable cultural hub in the region. They'll also need to hire private security for the development and have that private security get to know each tenant and their patronage. The private security is to basically make policing unnecessary. Local police, especially in regions where nimby ass uncool old fucks are genuinely terrified of anything new, are generally more of a problem than a boon. They're useful for real emergencies, but if our new cultural district is heavily policed by local police who don't agree with the property owner's vision of creating a place of cultural value, they'll likely criminalize the patrons of the area and ruin the project before it begins in earnest.
I don't expect it to be popular with cities or Elon's current base if he's like "yeah i'm hiring private police for my planned downtown to reduce overpolicing!", but overpolicing can doom a cultural center. I think that framing it as a self-policed private development and sort of making the NIMBYs and the cop-lovers feel like the area is already policed and controlled could ratchet down the tempurature. In the long run, businesses and their patrons would feel protected by the landlord in that case, knowing that they aren't subject to the unfair rejection of anything new.
With that in mind, something will have to be done about Fire Marshals. I've lived in multiple mid-size, growing cities, and whenever anything new or interesting comes up, a tyrannical fire marshal will set about shutting the place down. It seems worthwhile to do this when the big fish in the small pond pitch a fit, but the pond is small because the big fish for that small pond keep the pond small. These big fish, small pond people are the beating heart the horseman of cultural and economic death in America. They want what's best only for themselves, stifling their growing city's capacity to put itself on the map as a place of immense cultural value. Cultural value is what makes people flock to a city. I truly believe that if you create a space that allows the local thinkers, young people, entrepreneurs, and different diverse grouups to interact and create new culture, you are sourcing a completely new and original brand image for the city. This new district will become what the whole area is known for, regardless of the wishes of backwards people who want to dig their heels into the middle of the previous century and die there while the world moves on around them.
What's the relevance to Elon?
Though Elon is largely invested in solving problems with transportation solutions, there is an irreplaceable value of storefronts and foot traffic that is so strong that that is most of the appeal of Disneyland. Honestly, I could see Elon's path as a leader in public life changing to become more similar to Disney's, where Disney worked on creating communities around intentional planning. While the vision of Disney is heavily dated, his efforts are remembered positively. Not just because he drew the funny cartoons. There is a massive cultural value to a constructive futurism that consists of planning around the daily lives of regular people in a way that appeals to those people and makes them feel more free in the context of that planned environment.
I think that, in the context of a broader development, like a planned city, there would be a need for a subcultural district intended for local business and the cultivation of what the kids these days refer to as third spaces. This kind of district would be a controlled release valve for the kinds of rebellious human impulses that lead people to buck up against intentional top-down planning. It would not only be useful for making people feel happy, free, even loyal, but it would also have the potential to create a historic hotspot of action that could define the region, or the even that decade in the world's cultural memory.
The people hunger for subculture, but subculture can't develop without new, small, exprimental things being build by new, young, experimental people. You can either intentionally create the space for that and protect that space, or you can deal with the fact that your community will be born uncool and perhaps never become cool.
sources?
I'm right, but here are some videos that inspire me. You'll have to stomach the fact that this is a cultural issue and therefore there will be vague or emotional discussion about vibes. Just know that these emotional discussions about vibes or feels are things that can be described and discussed in specific ways by people who are versed in design. When you hire design experts to help you plan the community and share the idea you have in mind, the "dos" and "don'ts" of the vision, they can definitely help you determine the specific technical traits necessary in the creation of these spaces. I might write more on this myself later, but I have to go work now. When having discussions about what is desired by people and what is cool and what satisfies the current cultural needs of society, you kind of have to deal with the fact that the people who want these things don't have the language to explain what they want, so they'll insist that it's inexplicable. It's up to the planners and designers to extract the specifics of the complaints and demands of people who don't have the terminology to explain their needs and then fill those needs with a product, a place, a thing that they are hungry for.