Hospitality Design - December 2012 - 64

perspectives

trends

making cities well
wrapper around it that allows you to partake of it in whatever way you want to.

is accelerating. There are cities like Bilbao that have done remarkable transformations; cities like Helsinki that have a chief innovation o cer. And more and more these days we think about visiting London rather than England, or New York rather than the U.S., or Rio de Janeiro rather than Brazil, because cities have an idea of their own, which begs the question then of ‘What do we mean by a healthy town or healthy city?’ All of you I am sure are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy. Remember that? If you don’t have oxygen, you die; you don’t have food, you die a li le later. Then you want to have human contact, and then at the top you have meaning, or self-actualization, and I think the same matrix might be really useful to apply to cities. Think about all the bad things about cities: pollution, congestion, accidents, unhappy people, roadside shootings. So how green can a city be? Can you put hundreds of roo op gardens up? These kinds of developments we have been talking a li le bit about are very interesting leading indicators of where I think there is going to be a seismic shi in new service o erings, because baby boomers aren’t going to go to retirement homes. Retirement homes are really bad, you know? They may have been good for a certain era of history, but Jung talked about how in your lifecycle it was kind of like the sun transiting and then beginning to set, and then in the second half of life, he said, this is when all the stu that you didn’t do earlier in your life came to the fore. It was like the return of the repressed, in a way. So if you think about this in a lifecycle sense, and you think about where people are going to want to go for enhanced health services, medical support, optimal stress environments, they are also going to want to be in a place where they can make meaning. Now, it doesn’t mean that they want to have meaning shoved down their throats, but there are plenty of ways for architecture, public spaces, amenities, culture, media, and technology to be able to create a kind of rich urban or town-like urban experience for people that will be highly desirable. So it is kind of a wicked problem, but it is also a wicked opportunity.

JK: I think one of the challenges there, especially if it starts to scale and

you get a lot of these healthy towns or whatever they are going to be branded as, is to make sure that there is some way of ensuring there is a kind of authenticity and some gravitas, so that it isn’t just Levi own with a hot tub or clinic.

PR: One of the reasons I liked the Mayo idea was because I thought it gave
it a stamp of legitimacy that said that these are real guys and this is really serious and that it is not just some place to lose weight.

PB: I was giving Denver as an example of what would be the components of a healthy town, so what do you think are the key components, beyond the Mayo Clinic or this stamp of legitimacy and seriousness? PR: One of the evergreen facts about golf course communities is only about
thirty percent of the people who move in play golf. The other seventy percent are there because they like the other people that are there, they think there is going to be long-term value creation because the golf course adds to the real estate value or it is near their kids. And so one of the things I think you have to do, if it is going to be successful, it probably can’t be so pervasive that it overpowers you.

JK: I am not saying this is the most important factor—but it is certainly

PB: I would like to mention Denver. We are going to have the governor of Colorado here in a short while. He was the mayor of Denver before, and he and his predecessor have done a very good job on the above things, and one of them is a pedestrian mall in the middle of Denver, which is really very, very well done. At every corner of the street you have a piano. At every other corner of the street you have a chess table. At every three corners of the street you have a li le park, or a basketball eld, or an ice skating rink in the winter, and this is where it starts in my view. It is not only living healthy, it is not only being able to practice yoga in certain places in the morning, or a place where the architecture of the planning calls for more meditation. PR: I just think Denver has taken twenty years to happen and Helsinki is
probably the same. I think there is an opportunity to do something that is reasonably small and contained, that is a proof, if you will, that the idea has legs, and if the idea has legs, then the be er parts of it can be picked up and taken to Denver or Helsinki or any place you want to go. I think it would be a mistake to try and start this as a second home community. I think it wants to be a rst home, it wants to be a real place, it wants to be a place with families. But I think it could be a suburb some place, or a self-contained area of some kind, that somehow has this

potentially a very important X- factor—is curation or in a sense, experience management. We can call it a concierge function, but just having the hard infrastructure and the amenities and the facilities is necessary, but maybe not a su cient condition for the kind of magic. What is the function within the service delivery concept that creates surprise, that creates events, that opens up possible ways of using the facilities that you as a resident may not have thought o ? You run into a problem: How do you develop a relationship between the inhabitants and the place that is more than just a connection to the bricks and mortar?

PR: So it wants to be a menu of some kind, of things that are available to

you, and there needs to be a series of exposures, so that you can understand why yoga may have some value, as opposed to being forced to it at seven in the morning. If you do that enough, and you see your neighbors do it and other people do it, then you might give it a try.

JK: I think there is that coaching component, optimizing the use of the

facilities. We were talking with our friend from Costa Rica last night and he was telling us this amazing story about the mayor of Bogotá. They had big tra c problems, there was a lot of road rage, people got hurt, and it was a real problem. So he did a pilot and hired ten mimes to go out into the street and slow down tra c, and then the program caught on, and ultimately he had two-hundred mimes, all over the streets of Bogotá, kind of directing. It was a roaring success: road rage went down, accidents went down, injuries went down. Now, that is really out of the box thinking. That had to come from somebody who saw their job as creating magic, not just creating e ciency or a basic high quality experience.

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