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The Art & Science of Making Places Into Living Spaces with Alberto Mattiello – Ep. 51
About the Guest
I am extremely excited to share this next conversation with all of you. Today on the show I have Alberto Mattiello, the Creative Director of the Placemakers Group of Companies and Founder of Eitherland. Alberto is an award-winning entrepreneur, business futurist, author, and keynote speaker. Author of ‘Mind The Change’ and ‘Marketing Thinking’ and curator of the local edition of the MIT Sloan books, he is a technology and business innovation expert. As Creative Director of the Placemakers Group, Alberto guides the design direction of several companies that all revolve around enhancing public spaces. As you’ll hear in this episode, he is also the Founder of Eitherland, a company focused on outdoor workspaces.
The Placemakers group is the world’s biggest street furniture manufacturer group. They are exclusively committed to anticipating future trends and designing urban spaces that enhance interpersonal connections, citizens’ wellbeing, engagement and performance as a whole. The group consists of six companies currently. They are Metalco, Bellitalia, CityDesign, MyEquilibria, 1984, and of course Eitherland. The Placemakers mission is simple: start with a beautiful public space and transform it into a living place that brings immediate and tangible benefits to communities, municipalities and people who use it.
In this episode, we are going to dive deep into the ideas behind effective placemaking, understand how being outdoors can actually reshape neural pathways in the brain, and a look into the future of public spaces and the various activities that will be brought back into the public realm. There is loads of great information in this episode and I greatly appreciated Alberto for taking the time out of his tremendously busy schedule to discuss this topic of the art & science of making ordinary places into truly living spaces with me.
As always, if you have enjoyed the show, please subscribe to the show and share it with your friends in the industry. There will be more exciting conversations on the shows to come.
Main Take-Away’s From This Show
This was another enjoyable episode to record. I honestly threw out the topics I had written for the show and just began diving into various topics as they arose. Alberto really understood the built environment and was in tune with how people interacted with the public realm. The way the Placemakers group is literally re-shaping the public areas is unbelievable. There were so many great talking points that Alberto made throughout the discussion, so it is hard to just pick three for my main take-away’s this week. The following main topics of the show come from an understanding of placemaking that they both possess.
- Citizens are no Longer Loyal to A Certain City
- The Pandemic and Theory “U”
- The Best Way to See How People will React to your Placemaking Ideas is to Actually Implement them
As always, I will dig into each of these “take-away’s” every week on the blog. So, without further a due, here we go!
Citizens are no Longer Loyal to A Certain City
This first point is one that we in the U.S. probably don’t always relate to but at some level we do have a loyalty to our hometown. The same is true for most around the world. However, with the globalization of the world, we are seeing less and less loyalty to the places our family is from or where we grew up. As Alberto mentioned, this trend is becoming more apparent in Europe where there was often a strong tie to stay “close to home” when starting adulthood.
This point was brought up due to the fact that cities are changing. People are moving to cities they actually want to live in. Employment locations are not as big as a factor as they once were due to the great reshuffling that is occurring in this pandemic. Now that there is much more flexibility in some sectors of the job market, people are relocating to places that provide more opportunities for leisure activities and amenities to do in their spare time.
Now that a greater majority of jobs are partially or fully remote, people are able to move to further locations from their original employment and still travel to visit family without needing to necessarily request time off due to travel. This gives cities a greater opportunity to attract talent without necessarily needing to lure in massive corporations to locate their headquarters in their city or surrounding areas. Cities can focus more of their efforts on providing spaces that truly provide health benefits in all forms at a minimal cost to the City (compared to tax incentives for corporate relocations). It will truly be interesting to see where this goes in the future.
The Pandemic and Theory “U”
Now what is Theory “U”? I had to do some research after our discussion to find out more about this myself. According to OttoScharmer.com, “Otto Scharmer introduces readers to the theory and practice of the U process, based on a concept he calls “presencing.” A blend of the words “presence” and “sensing,” presencing signifies a heightened state of attention that allows individuals and groups to shift the inner place from which they function. When that shift happens, people begin to operate from a future space of possibility that they feel wants to emerge.” As we unpack this a bit, we can begin to understand why this is relevant to the current events going on with the pandemic.
Essentially this pandemic has been a giant reset for most, bringing us back to our critical needs. By shaking things up and for most, living in isolation for some time, we began to see what our needs really were. So, what does this have to do with urban design? As more and more of us began spending more time in nature and in solitude, some began to experience this type of “presencing” by being more in the moment and living in the present. This created a heightened state of attention for some and those that were able to have more of these moments began to increase their cognitive ability. Alberto and his team are pursuing powerful solutions that will boost others’ exposure to this phenomenon by providing various design options that bring people out into the public spaces and allow them to thrive.
The Best Way to See How People will React to your Placemaking Ideas is to Actually Implement them
This last main point is one that is almost too simple, but often overlooked by those in the real estate industry and potentially even harder to actually adopt. Trial and error are the best methods to truly understand the impacts that an idea will have in the community. You really have no idea how people will react to new and novel structures within their environment. You can see this happening in towns across the U.S. where groups of individuals decide to create parklets in the public space near their businesses or create new temporary bike lanes in the street.
This kind of experimentation is necessary to continue to push the boundaries of what can be created in the public spaces we inhabit. Alberto and his team continue to do this as part of their creative design process. They continue to observe people in the public realm and take note of any peculiar activities or reactions. This is how Alberto recognized the profound impacts mirrors have on people. He observed how people reacted to large mirrors at an event he attended and thought about how mirrors could be potentially used as outdoor workout studios or even picture opportunities. The best way to truly understand how people will interact with your ideas is to create small scale models and test your theories in public. You may be surprised by the outcome.
As you can see from the take-aways above, this podcast episode was absolutely full of great information on the art and science behind creating truly great spaces. If you have enjoyed the content and the show, please subscribe to the show below and share it with your friends in the industry! We’ll have many more great discussions on the shows to come.
To Learn More About Alberto Mattiello and The Placemakers, Check out the Following Websites:
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