An Intro to Urban Underpinnings

The story behind Urban Underpinnings and a look at how to move our cities forward through the communities who innovate daily.

Welcome to Urban Underpinnings, a newsletter on urban innovation highlighting the ideas, trends, stories, and technologies championing creative community resilience and place-based innovation.

I am thrilled to welcome each of you to this space which will consist of a lot of thoughts, ideas, and hopes I have been pondering on for the past few years as I’ve worked to scale products and technologies for cities. From early-stage to growth to established companies, many of these companies are solving some major problems spanning everything from the built environment and infrastructure to mobility, agriculture, and real estate. During this work, I became fascinated with what it means to innovate around solutions that aim to solve such complex problems impacting diverse communities in dense areas. 

Urbantech is a $65 billion industry? Did you know that? I certainly didn’t when I started doing this work 4 years ago. In a lot of ways, it slapped me in the face. I have always cared about what it means to both build and support community. I come from a family of public servants who have each always operated from a place of improving the lives of others. My grandmother was a civil rights activist and to this day at 82-years-old, she still attends protest (yes, #BLM) and works to register voters in New Jersey. 

A BIT MORE ABOUT ME

I like to say I’m an urban innovation and civics champion and have worked to scale nationwide campaigns, technologies, and ideas from the Obama Administration toFortune 500 companies and startups that prioritize community and solve complex urban problems.

This means I think a lot about the intersection of policy, urbantech, circular economy, and impact. Some questions that keep me up at night include: 

• What are the impacts of data-driven decisions for the future of urban environments? 

• What would it look like for the government and policy to react less to technological advancements and be involved in their creation? 

• How do we reimagine and reinvent the design and product development to think about the market opportunity of all users particularly those that are overlooked? 

• Where are the best solutions and are they receiving the funding and resources they need to thrive? (I think we can all imagine what the answer is to this question)

Then there’s how do we honor the existing ideas and solutions in communities that have always had to innovate for survival? What would it look like to start there? 

CREATIVE COMMUNITY RESILIENCE

Creative community resilience is based on the idea that those who are directly and disproportionately impacted by the lack of reinvention and investment in cities are building the most innovative concepts and technologies for the future.

Much of my work has stemmed from a realization I had quite early on: the unique knowledge of community can be a major source of benefit to identifying and funding the best innovators, successfully deploying companies’ products across industries, and positively impacting those who reside there. I believe that this is fundamentally how we ensure innovation in urban environments thrive. This requires the proactive participation of policymakers that regulate their existence.

Does this seem groundbreaking to you? Maybe it does, it wasn’t to me but over time I recognized a pattern suggesting that working in conjunction with community is and will continue to be one of the biggest assets to innovation in cities

Some topics that currently excite me and I plan to explore further include:

• Implementing technologies like machine learning and AI into and to inform how we design public spaces for human interaction. Check out an experiment from Google Creative Lab exploring the intersection of art, technology, and identity. 

• The overlap of policy, tech, and impact. It is a lot more evident these days than it was 5 years ago even. I had the opportunity to interview Deena Shakir, Partner at Lux Capital about her nontraditional path to VC, how to navigate pivots across different sectors, and the power of relationship-building (scroll to the bottom).

• Garret Morgan, the inventor of the three-light traffic light. As a result of the success of his other inventions, Morgan became the first black person in Cleveland, Ohio to own a car. He witnessed a severe car accident at an intersection in the city. He then decided to expand on the current traffic light by adding a “yield” component in 1923. What other urban innovators of color do you know of?

Of course, there’s a lot more but I’ll save that for subsequent newsletters. 

A special thank you to Sarah M. Kaufman of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation who invited me to share my ideas around creative community resilience with the rockstar group of women in mobility that she is cultivating. 

I’m looking forward to furthering my mission to encourage and fuel creativity in others to build more resilient, innovative communities. Please comment if anything in particular stands out to you or you want me to dive into further!