Happy Monday! Welcome back to the best place for anyone thinking about how tech is changing our cities globally, both in good and bad ways.
After having many conversations with people way smarter than me, I feel like I have a good idea of what's next for the Urban Tech product we are launching.
I'm working with a professional designer behind the scenes to help me evolve the brand and messaging to fit the new mission for a paid Urban Tech product. I'm also just having many conversations with the folks who read this newsletter to understand what they want this product to be.
Simultaneously, I'm working on getting everything in place to launch a pilot/beta of the product later this month or early next month so we can start testing and iterating on it together. Some technical friends are luckily helping me spin up a website and building out the tech stack required to run a subscription media business.
A big part of the next few months will be a beta/pilot phase for the product that will launch later this month or early next. This approach allows us to start testing the product before we fully launch to the public in early summer.
So far, over 110 people have signed up for the beta waitlist, and many of them are my personal heroes in this space, so I'm feeling energized about what we are about to do.
We have folks who work in government, education, tech, nonprofits, and more, who are engaging with how tech is impacting our cities. We also have many students and young professionals signed up as well, a cohort that I'm particularly passionate about building this for because they are my peers!
Some are even my good friends who I somehow convinced cities and tech are an important space that they should be watching.
My plans before February were to bootstrap a paid product for Urban Tech using my personal savings from the government and PR jobs I worked before I decided to head back to school to pursue my next life thing.
The biggest reason I took outside money to accelerate Urban Tech's mission is there are so many talented people telling stories and exploring this fascinating space. I want this media co. to be a platform for them to have a voice. I don't have any aspirations of being a one-man-band.
I don't feel like that's what people want or what the urban and tech sector needs right now. Seriously though, this space and media, more generally, don't need a 25-year-old cis-gendered upper-middle-class white guy pontificating on what he's curious about. There are plenty of places on the internet where that stuff happens -- this isn't going to be one of them.
I plan to quickly bring in folks to help me tell these stories more effectively as soon as I can afford to pay contractors a fair compensation, and eventually, I want to hire full-time employees to give them the reigns and let them run with it. I'm a hack storyteller anyways lolz.
More to come on that in the weeks to come, but I know we are about to build something really special here. We are going to do this together, and thanks for helping get this all started. 🙏
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 Axios Re:Cap: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on his company's post-pandemic future
🥈The San Francisco Chronicle: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning, but will it create more housing?
🥉 Glossy: California's congested ports expose the root problem of shipping delays
Urban Tech Archives:
🎙 Podcast: Journalist and Urbanist Greg Lindsay explains the rising trend of ‘nomad’ cities
📝 Newsletter: How Culdesac is building the first car-free neighborhood from scratch in the U.S.
📝 Newsletter: 📈 Why Ghost Kitchens' Future Looks Bright
Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.8.21
🏢 NextCity: Boise’s Affordable Housing Land Trust Strategy Includes Office Conversions
📚 CityMonitor: Bookstores should be an essential part of the 15-minute city
🗞 The Information: How Katerra's Facade Crumbled
🔊Mashable: Lime e-bike batteries are being turned into portable speakers
🏢 NextCity: Boise’s Affordable Housing Land Trust Strategy Includes Office Conversions
The conversion of office space into more housing stocks is unfolding across the U.S. including a big debate in New York City on what to do with office space in midtown Manhattan.
Next City's Housing Correspondent Jared Brey writes on how the conversation is developing in Boise:
City officials in Boise, Idaho, are in the process of reviewing a plan to buy a small office building on the western edge of the downtown area and convert it into long-term affordable housing — part of a push by the city to create below-market housing as rental prices have continued to climb throughout the pandemic. The plan, which was recently approved by the city council, as BoiseDev reported, is to purchase the building for around $800,000, and place it in the city’s affordable housing land trust. From there, the city would partner with a developer to adapt the building into a dozen or more reduced-rate apartment units. The project comes as more cities around the country are looking into the possibility of converting unused office space into affordable housing. But it’s one of several acquisitions the city is pursuing this year, and not all focused on office space, says Leon Letson, the manager for Boise’s Grow Our Housing program.
📚 CityMonitor: Bookstores should be an essential part of the 15-minute city
The 15-minute city is one of the most popular themes in urban policy right now. Leaders around the world are trying to figure out how they can create their own version of the ideal within their communities.
Writer Stefania Frustagli explains in City Monitor why bookstores should be an essential part of our vision for the future of cities:
Milan is one of the liveliest cities in Italy, not least because of the multitude of independent bookstores distributed throughout the locale. Books are a prominent part of the urban scene and, despite technological progress, are still considered irreplaceable by most Italians. And bookstores contribute to the sociocultural and economic growth of the city.
Indeed, there is a belief here that paper books and those who sell them have a role in shaping the future of citizens. A law passed in the city last March supports this notion and hopes to help bookstores remain a vital part of the urban realm.
Broadly, the law (Legge 13 Febbraio 2020, n.15) helps booksellers combat competition from big e-commerce. Specifically, it covers various aspects of culture and reading, such as initiatives for promoting literacy, particularly in schools, and enhancing the status of books and bookstores. It also aims to reduce the unfair competition in the book market that has contributed to the crisis experienced by booksellers.
🗞 The Information: How Katerra's Facade Crumbled
The Information’s Cory Weinberg wrote an incredible piece chronicling the difficulties facing construction tech company Katerra over the last year.
The piece is a must-read, but this part really jumped out to UT:
Not much was going right early last year at SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra. Money was drying up, and board meetings sometimes erupted into shouting matches. Anxious about missing financial forecasts while the company was trying to raise more money from investors, at least one Katerra employee told others in its relatively small but profitable apartment renovations division to find a way to boost revenue.
Heeding the suggestion, the division prepared exaggerated updates on how much renovations work had been completed so far on certain building projects. Katerra employees then used the misleading project updates to front-load revenue by millions of dollars in financial reports submitted to investors, the company found in an investigation last summer, said four people familiar with the matter, including two with direct knowledge of the probe. Last August, a law firm hired by Katerra sent a letter to then-CEO Michael Marks saying that an investigation into the matter found that the company’s financial statements likely had been “intentionally misstated” during Marks’ tenure, according to a copy of the letter viewed by The Information.
🛴 Spin: Bringing Micromobility Equity into Focus
I try to be cautious when including news from company channels in Urban Tech, but this piece from Spin was one of the rare exceptions:
As micromobility becomes an important part of urban transportation networks, it is essential that companies center equity in their approach to providing mobility services. To do that, companies need to work with cities and communities to design equity programs that extend beyond simply offering discounted rides. We need to think about the systems, the history, and the community context in which we operate.
For us, the first step was to talk directly to people who use or may qualify for our Spin Access program.
In late 2019, we began an in-depth analysis into how to make our service more equitable and accessible. In our equity case study, you can see in more detail our findings and the collaborative process we undertook to get there. Gehl led the project, supported by the design team at D-Ford and the transit advocates at TransForm. Through TransForm, the project was leveraged by critical contributors including Dr. Destiny Thomas and Keta Price, who served as our Community Advisors. Toole Design provided best-practices and conducted an “equity audit.”
Equity issues are all around the urban policy space and I love that the Spin team is embracing the conversation and dealing with the issues proactively.
🔊Mashable: Lime e-bike batteries are being turned into portable speakers
Finally, for today, a little more fun story coming from Lime:
A British sustainable design business is set to upcycle battery packs from Lime e-bikes and e-scooters and turn them into slick portable Bluetooth speakers.
Based in the creative hub of Brighton, England, Gomi has been upcycling plastic waste for several years. In 2018, the company released the world's first portable speaker made from non-recyclable trash and powered by 100 percent reclaimed battery cells (each unit holds the equivalent of 100 plastic bags worth of non-recyclable plastic, the team says), and since then have added portable chargers and wireless mag chargers to their arsenal.
Now, Gomi is working with Lime to produce portable speakers using the same plastic repurposing method, but also powered with rechargeable second-life batteries from the micromobility company's e-bikes. The 25W speakers, which can be paired with each other for a stereo effect, will be available in different colour schemes — Birthday Cake, Black Mono, Blue Ocean, and of course, Lime Green — and will be sold through Kickstarter. Each speaker costs £99 ($137) for super early birds then increases to £149 ($206) for general sale.
I’m all for electrification but the battery waste is still a MAJOR issue that we need to figure out as more and more vehicles shift away from combustible engines.
Several Interesting Social Posts
As always, thanks for reading Urban Tech and helping me get to do the most exciting work of my life. Talk to you on Urban Tech Thursday.
✌️ JT