Extroverted Spaces: A new way to think about cities

I was recently on Iain Montgomery’s Challenger City podcast, talking about how Toronto could position itself to be a family-friendly city. His ‘challenger’ concept is inspired by challenger marketing, where companies make unconventional choices to be seen as more desirable and feasible by potential customers.

This puts me in rarified company with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was on the Hard Fork podcast not too long ago and hit the topic pretty hard himself. His pitch was that Toronto's a dreamy place where you can be part of a business community that’s doing cool things, enjoy an arts/culture/sports scene that's worth your time and still make it home for dinner with your kids most days.

If we really lived up to his hype, it would indeed be a dream.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t get here from there.

When I was thinking about Iain’s challenger city concept, and how Toronto could be more family-friendly, I kept circling around two ideas. First, I was thinking about Priya Parker’s book The Art of Gathering, because what is a city but a large gathering of people making their home in the same spot, right?

Parker tells a charming anecdote about attending cotillion classes as a kid to set up the case for rules-based gatherings. She broadly characterizes the classes as imparting “Random knowledge of how old rich people want you to behave” and points out that the “positive features of etiquette work particularly well in stable, closed, homogenous groups… The problem is that more and more of us do not live in closed circles of like-minded, similarly raised people.”

When we expect everyone to know their lane (literally and figuratively) and stay in it in public spaces in Toronto, we’re committing the same sins Parker ascribes to old-fashioned etiquette. She offers the idea of pop-up rules for gatherings as a more useful and inclusive option: “If the standards of etiquette are fixed, imperious, and exclusionary, pop-up rules have the power to flip these traits on their head, creating the possibility of more experimental, humble and democratic - and satisfying! - gatherings”.

Doesn’t this sound like exactly the kind of city we want to live in?

But too often our city spaces are ruled by institutional knowledge, byzantine by-laws and in-group traditions that make it hard for outsiders to follow along. We are way over-indexed on ‘hidden gems’, and it’s actively making our city worse.

Thinking about how we could welcome more participation in public space, I kept coming back to the idea of spaces as Extroverted or Introverted depending on how they’re designed and used. The most well-known attribute of the Myers-Briggs personality framework (if you somehow aren't aware of it, catch up by listening to this ep from the Maintenance Phase podcast), I’m skeptical of the introverted/extroverted binary as it applies to people, but when I thought about it in the context of Priya Parker’s pop-up rules for a gathering, there was a natural parallel between rules-based gatherings and extroverted traits that extends to public space as well.

Imagine Toronto’s PATH system. Now think of the opposite of that. That’s what we’re going for with an our idea of Extroverted Spaces.

Extroverted Traits:

·         Warmth & openness

·         Sociability

·         Action-oriented

·         Enthusiasm & cheerfulness

·         Curiosity & openness to new experiences

·         Ability to make friends and meet new people

“Extroverted spaces” is an easy shorthand for the environments that support community building not just for families but for all residents. In an extroverted urban community, we default to looking outward from our home to shared resources to meet a lot of our needs. Big parks, not big backyards. Public transit instead of a multi-car garage. Accessible local shops rather than door-to-door delivery. Recreation centres instead of overflowing basement playrooms. We’re not eliminating those single-serve, inward-looking solutions, but we aren’t privileging them as the first choice for everyone in all situations.

Though Iain invited me to represent the minivan majority, there’s very little I said that’s specific to families with kids, let alone young kids. Sure, modern families with two working parents are particularly ill-served by suburbs requiring endless driving and labor-intensive, single-family homes. But urban-oriented solutions are relevant across life stage and relationship status. We all deserve to be safe from vehicle traffic. We all should want our youngest Canadians to be raised thinking about their neighbours as well as themselves. We should all be committed to supporting vulnerable community members.

For people who want to look inward by default, let them build a private fiefdom in the suburbs. In the city, proximity is inevitable. We might as well make the best of it by making ourselves a community.