Incremental Development
How did they figure out how to build this? It’s simple. They just copied what they knew worked.
Music: Illusions (Instrumental) by Keen Collective, licensed through Marmoset Music. Archival Footage: From Prelinger Archives and the Internet Archive (www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php): "San Francisco Scenes" - Published 1929 "San Francisco, California street scenes" - Published 1922 "A Drive Through Bunker Hill and Downtown Los Angeles, ca. 1940s" From elsewhere on archive.org "Fires of the Past" by Telenews Theatre - Published 1917 "Homes for Veterans" by National Archives and Records Administration - Published 1946 "The Woodworker" by Holmes (Burton) Films, Inc. - Published 1940 "Recovery In Michigan 1937" by Works Progress Administration - Published 1937
We like our places to emerge fully formed and then we expect them to never change, but that's not how life works. Cities are like living things. They need to be able to change and adapt, to start small and mature incrementally over time.
We can't wait around for a big developer or a mega-project to fix our cities. The kind of development we need today happens at the scale of a Strong Citizen, someone who cares about the place they live.
The traditional development pattern has tremendous financial upside and limited financial downside. In contrast, our new, experimental approach is incredibly fragile with limited financial upside and a downside that can literally go negative. We can learn from the past in order to stop making the mistakes that will condemn our future.