8 Things Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Building Digital Spaces

8 Things Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Building Digital Spaces

By Sam Liebeskind for Sublime

This piece is excerpted from Sublime's new print and digital zine , "Can You Imagine? A Library of Possibilities for Reimagning the Web."

If you’re designing a tool like a calendar or recipe app, you think about how people will interact with the software. But if you’re designing a digital social space, you have a significantly more complex challenge on your hands: thinking not just how people will interact with your thing, but how people will interact with each other given the design of your thing. Much harder.

Fortunately, we have not only ~40 years of experimentation in digital social space design but also thousands of years of urban design to look to for inspiration and lessons of caution.

Because when we create spaces where people come together – whether it’s IRL or online – many of the dynamics are the same. In his 2019 talk, researcher Eli Pariser nails it: “Spaces shape behavior, partly by the way they're designed and partly by the way that they encode certain norms about how to behave. We all know that there are some behaviors that are OK in a bar that are not OK in a library, and maybe vice versa.”

As big questions around AI and algorithmic choice and the implications of billionaires buying ‘digital town squares’ swirl, some evergreen concepts from urban planning may prove instructive for all of us who are designing the future of digital social spaces.

  1. Avoid centralized command and control: While it’s helpful for a new place to start with a vision or a set of principles, cities and digital social spaces are both too complex for one person to mastermind. While too much leeway leads to chaos, too much control creates boring spaces and a more existential risk. The best urban planners think about building with communities, not just for them, balancing structure and order with space for spontaneity and emergence – movable chairs in a park instead of bolted down benches, for example. Digital designers should look to do the same. Open social prototols like AT Protocol and ActivityPub are a promising step in the right direction.
  2. Lean into placemaking: Unique neighborhoods with a strong sense of place – think New Orleans or Santa Fe or Newport – are way more fun to visit than interchangeable downtowns overrun with multi-national coffee chains and retailers. But most big digital social spaces don’t give communities a ton of wiggle room to set their own dynamics or express their own identity. The next wave of community platforms will optimize for community customization and control; more MySpace eccentricity than Facebook monoculture.
  3. Grow safely, and no faster: Maintaining the safety of your citizens – both from external threats and internal disharmony – is arguably the #1 job of a place’s designers and leaders. Urban planners have long known that different scales of spaces and gatherings need different ‘safety’ features – that’s why things like fire codes and business permits exist. So while it may be tempting to open the gates and allow a huge influx of people into a digital space that’s working at a small-scale, keep in mind that this is almost always a recipe for danger.
  4. Create funding for public spaces: Most cities and neighborhoods have public parks and plazas and schools that help bring people together and help the community see itself in full. These are operated for the good of the society – not extractive for profit – and play an important role in democracy and social cohesion. We need more digital equivalents. Open-source projects like Hylo and Matrix and the emerging Dutch community network PubHubs are paving the way here. Because as much as we need innovation in product design, we also need experimentation around business models and governance structures for our digital social spaces.
  5. Play with limitations: Many of the world’s most special places are so because they don’t have something we take for granted elsewhere. No roads in Venice. No cars in many urban centers, or developments like the new Culdesac neighborhood in Arizona. Unique spaces, offline and online, can be created by removing something that’s generally assumed to be necessary. What would it feel like to have a social network without an infinite number of connections? Without a persistent post history? Without profiles? Platforms like 150, Front Porch Forum, and Minus are all provocative experiments in this direction.
  6. Celebrate the stewards: Good urban planning is sociotechnical. It’s not enough to just create the built environment – we need to think about the people and programs too. Libraries don’t work without librarians. National Parks don’t work without rangers. The same is true for digital spaces. There’s a whole design territory to be explored around equipping, celebrating, and rewarding the digital community stewards who maintain and care for our online spaces, not just treating these folks as faceless administrators or moderators that can be replaced on a whim.
  7. Make money in multiple ways: Most flourishing IRL civic spaces are funded through a mix of public taxes, private philanthropy, and people paying directly. Think of libraries that receive government funding and philanthropic support or public transit systems that are fueled by taxpayer money plus fares and ads. The most resilient social platforms of the future will have a sustainable mix of revenue streams, helping to avoid the pressure to optimize for a single stakeholder or metric.
  8. Don’t just throw tech at big problems: Ideas like the Friendship Bench, a program started in Zimbabwe which simply uses a bit of wood, some paint and some loving grandmothers to help community members handle mental health challenges, show that sometimes the best solutions are also the most rudimentary. Many people talk about crypto or generative AI as the panacea to big challenges in digital spaces, and while these technologies are probably a piece of the puzzle, replacing people with more machines isn’t always the best path forward.

While there’s a ton that we can learn from urban planners and the history of cities, it feels important to recognize that most cities are far from perfect and the field of urban planning has its challenges too. And the internet, of course, also has different ”physics” than IRL spaces do, so there are a whole set of challenges that only exist online, and vice versa.?

But with a little creativity, we can learn together as we create better cities and a new wave of digital spaces that feel as wonderful as strolling along the peaceful canals of Amsterdam, the bustling streets of Manhattan, or whatever place in the world makes you feel most inspired and at home.

Sam Liebeskind is the Head of Product Partnerships at New_Public , a non-profit community and design R&D lab helping to build a movement of healthier digital public spaces.

Special thank you to Eli Pariser, Deepti Doshi, Angelica Quicksey, Adit Dhanushkodi, Spencer Chang, Harry Rosenbaum, Katie Banaszak, and many others who’ve had fun conversations with me about this!

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