At the Heart of Innovation

Since 2020 is the Year of Infrastructure, I figured I’d share a big plan that I’ve been working on with you. In April of last year, I came back to visit NC for the first time since I moved to Colorado (and then Reno)- it had been several years. Anyway, when I got here, I ended up meeting a friend for lunch, Sunny Su, and we briefly discussed some of what we were interested in working on.
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Within five minutes, I had decided to move back. What was the project?
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NOVA.

If you’ve read what I’ve written about recently, you’ll know that I’m obsessed with the concept of community. Somewhere in the last century, we decided to throw out the ways of building community that worked for centuries in favor of building cities for cars. Don’t believe me? Show me a modern city with more space for people than for driving or parking.

In the past, people like Walt Disney (seriously, not a joke) and Frank Lloyd Wright (his Usonian homes) put lots of thought into what the living situations of the future should look like. Disney was far-sighted enough to even route cars under his EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) concept, and instead used only public transportation for people living in the city. We, of course, ignored these novel ideas and instead built the inhuman, sprawling urban messes we have today.

If you ever see what an old city looked like, whether it’s ancient Rome or historic Paris, you realize that the entire structure is drastically different without cars. (I don’t mean to harp on cars specifically here, that’s just one of the bigger concerns.) You could be close to everyone you met, and you could walk basically anywhere in town. Now, we design cities with our transitory lifestyles in mind. We don’t know our neighbors, we commute 45 minutes to work, and suddenly, we’re surprised when depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses are on the rise.

What gives?

Cities are not built for humans. Most things, aren’t, actually. Currently, we build our living spaces for efficiency- how many people can I legally cram into this apartment building without running afoul of the fire code or local government? Frankly, they’re cubicles for people, and while everyone understands that cubicles are bad, we still think isolated flats in cheaply-made high rises are some kind of ideal.

People are meant to live together, and our buildings should reflect that. Sunny and I spoke recently with Souheil Al Awar, an architect and all-around brilliant guy who recently completed The Saint townhomes, and he mentioned his childhood in Beirut. Everyone knew everyone else in the building, from the people who cooked to the workers in the building.

I was struck with nostalgia for something I have never experienced.

Enter- NOVA.

What if we could design a living, working, learning, and playing space that was centered with community as its first goal, not an afterthought? That’s the question we’ve asked, and what we’ve come up with is a combination space that mixes coliving, office space, coworking, and publicly accessible resources like a cafe, gym, and restaurants- all centered around being the hub for innovation and creation in Raleigh.

I’ve worked in a few malls in my life, and one of the things I noticed (and even used to do myself) was that people love to walk around aimlessly, sometimes not even for shopping reasons. We used to have marketplaces and other locations to meet and be a part of the city, and with NOVA, we’re going to bring it back. The public space can host movies with a local theater, or bring in speakers from around town. Maybe a workshop with artists or craftsmen in the area? How about weddings or charity events? The goal is to make a place where everyone wants to be involved in their community.

If you’re familiar with the origin story of the cafe, you’ll know that when we first discovered coffee, cafes created an environment for intellectuals and creatives of all sorts to come together and share ideas, resulting in some of the greatest improvements in society we’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, we’ve lost that with the explosion of coffee shops across the country, but I think we can bring it back.

Let’s give people a place to think. Let musicians come play on a small stage, give artists a place to share their work, give comedians and poets somewhere to speak to the crowd, and ultimately, build the foundation for a new kind of community to coalesce around.

Let’s show the world how to do living right, in a way that combines the old ways and the new.

This is what I moved back to work on, and this is something I’ll be talking about a lot more here going forward. Get ready for NOVA- at the Heart of Innovation.

Stick around!

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