Popularizing Development

When I was a kid, I loved the video game SimCity. You grew an entire city, planning out what should go where and dealing with crime rates and traffic congestion. At some point, Godzilla would terrorize your budding metropolis. I imagine it is similar to working in the Zoning and Planning Office for any typical city government. Except the Godzilla part… that’s what the police are for.

I am slowly returning to my love of city building, but this time, I have replaced the virtual world for the vicarious world, as I am just reading a lot about it. From trains and subways to development plans and forgotten ideas, I just think it is all pretty neat stuff. Recently though I stumbled upon the coolest thing yet.

Popularise.com is a new website that takes an empty storefront in a decent neighborhood and lets people vote on what should go there. What a great idea! The aim is to prevent the cookie-cutter neighborhood models that work for town X so they must work for town Y. It is brilliant and I hope that people embrace it. Neighborhoods should have their own identity and offer something unique that helps drive that identity. This method of development, if successful, seems to lead to that.

This might be more appealing to me than most as I live in the suburbs where our “downtown” area of shops and shoppes is all owned by the same company. That same company is building another towncenter which many folks are pretty excited about. This new development is bookended by a movie theater and a BJ’s Membership Club (think CostCo) and will include a PF Chang’s! Yeah!

I’ve never been to a PF Chang’s, but a new movie theater should be nice. Although it does make me wonder if the other planned movie theater, which is one mile from my house rather than the three miles to the one under construction, will ever be built. It is part of another planned towncenter that was supposed to be the nicest of the bunch… even nicer than the planned fourth one I would have to drive past to get there.

For what it is worth, I have wild visions of farming the vacant land of that fourth planned development. I would gaze proudly over my rows of corn stalks and tomato plants, bean sprouts and potato patches, wearing a big straw hat and squinting into the sun … it would be great. Farming, however, is not part of SimCity, so my wild visions are primarily of me wearing over-alls and being interviewed by the paper.

The headline would read “Local Man Farms Land for the Hell of It.” It would make me a minor celebrity for fighting off officials from the Zoning and Planning Office, who don’t allow farming on land zoned for commercial. I could get half-off tickets to the local movie theater! Of course, the story of my agricultural success would be pushed to the small column on the side of the front page as the big story that day would be “Godzilla Terrorizes Towncenter! PF Chang’s survives.”

Anyways, popularize.com. I don’t know the guys running it but I like what they are doing.