By Matthew Lister, Partner and Managing Director, Gehl Studio NY; 2022 Midtown Alliance Annual Meeting Keynote Speaker
Greetings Midtown Atlanta. I couldn’t be more excited to be speaking at the Midtown Alliance Annual Meeting next Tuesday, March 21st. The title for the event is All Together Now.
All Together Now… Finally! After spending two years in my pajama pants doing events like this from my kitchen table, I am excited to see all of you. I’ll do my best to not make it awkward.
I work for Gehl, an urban strategy and design firm, and have spent most of my professional life learning how we can make cities into places that nurture human connection and foster vibrant public life. I’ll be speaking more about public life and why it’s important for the health of our cities on Tuesday. But to put it simply, public life is the thing that we create together when we live our lives outside of our homes and businesses and cars. Public life — when we discover, shape and share experiences with one another — creates the social connective tissue that makes communities thrive. Public life happens at eye-level, at the human scale and it doesn’t happen by accident. Public life happens when places are comfortable, safe and desirable enough to invite people in to connect with one another.
I care deeply about creating the conditions that support public life in cities. Nurturing human connection is kind of my thing. So, I was particularly flummoxed two years ago (almost to the day of this writing) when we all found ourselves in a world that said, “Stop! Stop nurturing human connection! It will kill you!” Like everyone else, in a bit of a daze, I put on my sweat pants. I taught my then 4-year-old how to Zoom into pre-school (sort of). I baked sourdough bread. I hand-washed my groceries. My team and I convinced ourselves and many of our clients that we could do everything we had been doing before, but remotely. Mostly though, we isolated ourselves and we stayed put… for a little while.
At Gehl, we have always learned by observing people in cities, and so after the initial shock we got back to work and we observed the hell out of our cities. As it turned out, even a global pandemic couldn’t reduce the desire, the innate need within us to connect with one another. People just had to find new ways to do it and in doing so changed everything all around us. Overnight all the places where we used to connect, to eat, to drink, to work, to worship, to work out, to laugh and cry with one another, all of the places where we made our lives together were suddenly off-limits — except the public realm.
We learned that we could be together safely if we convened outdoors. Over the course of only a few weeks and months our streets, sidewalks, medians, patios, parks and plazas became our restaurants, our bars, our gyms, our places of worship, our jazz clubs, comedy clubs and theaters. At first these transformations were make-shift, temporary, and hastily executed, but they quickly became our new reality. I saw interventions in the public realm that would have been inconceivable on March 10, 2020, but only a few weeks later seemed inevitable. With these changes came surprising culture shifts (“Sure! I’ll meet you for a drink outdoors even though it’s 20 degrees outside!”), all driven by the same desire to connect with one another. We saw an enormous amount of creativity and experimentation occur in a relatively short period of time, and our cities will never be the same again.
Meanwhile, the rhythms and routines of professional life changed as well. Countless hours of kitchen table Zoom sessions created the space for people to question their pre-pandemic 9-5 routines. While people are genuinely eager to work with their colleagues and connect in person, they also value the flexibility that was on hand during the pandemic. Having choices about how they work, when they work and where they work has changed what people prioritize when considering their office location and environment. So, what does this mean for Midtown Atlanta? Let’s talk about it on March 21. But in the meantime, I’ll leave you with this headline:
Mixed-use districts with human scaled public space networks that collectively commit to becoming places that nurture human connection and invite for shared experiences are the places that were most resilient during the pandemic and are going to be the places that are most attractive and successful in a post-pandemic hybrid work world order.
And here is the spoiler…
Midtown Atlanta is uniquely positioned to be one of these places.
Join me next week, and I’ll show you why I believe this — with stories, real world examples, pictures and some jokes. I can’t wait to meet you.
