How does a city get its identity?

How does a city get its identity?

As a Vancouverite living in Montreal, you start to question a lot of things about how a city gets its identity.

In Vancouver, you take things for granted because it's beautiful more often than not, and you drive a lot.

In Montreal, you can't believe it's winter again, but you're astonished at the contrasting beauty of spring.

Above all, the biggest thing I've noticed since moving east is the walkability of the streets, and how much that shapes a neighbourhood. (Which is funny, because it's something you learn about in school through diagrams, but when you look back and think about your own experience, you realize how true it is.)

Seeing things happen around you, whether that's someone gardening in a shared space between two buildings, kids growing up next door, or balcony-to-balcony chats, its a sequence of small details that add up and become the backdrop of your experience in a place.

One of the first things we learned when working on Bucky is that developers, when trying to identify a place to build, would often say: "I need to just drive out there." That's because when cities are explained to people, they're explained in maps and diagrams.

But unless you gather the experience of a place and walk its streets, you'll never truly understand it the way a long-time resident does. Which is why a small group of people build most of the cities we live in, they're the only ones who understand how to build locally and navigate complicated bylaws, and have the capital to do it.

I'm a big believer in going to a place to really understand it. But even then, I'd argue it's the conversations and the history that developers are actually interested in: talking to shop owners, understanding who's been moving into the city, figuring out the story of a place.

The leaders who build our cities can't rely on maps alone, because maps don't tell the full story. They need to make the most of their time when they go assess a city in person. There’s a way to connect the data with the experience, to place-building more human.