50 min
James Johnson-Piett: Leveraging local knowledge to generate lasting impact Parallax
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- Diseño
James Johnson-Piett is the Principal and CEO of Urbane Development, a development initiative which cultivates innovative solutions and hyper-local analytics to build dynamic neighborhoods and positively impact underserved communities.
Urbane places focus on deep local knowledge as the lever to generate real, lasting change.
For Johnson-Piett and his team, the revitalization process begins with identifying community anchor institutions, small businesses and meeting places where people convene, trust is key, and informal transactions take place — like bodegas.
“The bodega owner is way more than just giving you food,” Johnson-Piett points out, “When you walk in the door everyday, you’re establishing a credit relationship with that owner.”
If invested in, and supported, these anchor institutions can become hubs for local development, enabling micro-scale changes to occur within a community, and larger-scale transformation to happen over time.
Additionally, a network of these businesses can provide a significant data set of informal and formal market information, layered with demographic, ethnographic, and cultural data. This kind of deep community profile is not available to financial institutions at present, but can be a game changer.
“If we could understand the dynamics of a neighborhood and the various data points that come from it ,” says Johnson-Piett, “ we could show what the future of investment, analytics, and place-making could all look like and scale.”
These data sets start at the micro scale, with deeply personal relationships, but add up to systemic knowledge, through which opportunities for neighborhood growth can attract investment.
In this conversation, Johnson-Piett talks about Urbane Development's approach in further depth, his deep Philly roots, and how COVID-19 has increased insecurity for many Philadelphians, but possibly opened new opportunities for local innovation.
James Johnson-Piett is the Principal and CEO of Urbane Development, a development initiative which cultivates innovative solutions and hyper-local analytics to build dynamic neighborhoods and positively impact underserved communities.
Urbane places focus on deep local knowledge as the lever to generate real, lasting change.
For Johnson-Piett and his team, the revitalization process begins with identifying community anchor institutions, small businesses and meeting places where people convene, trust is key, and informal transactions take place — like bodegas.
“The bodega owner is way more than just giving you food,” Johnson-Piett points out, “When you walk in the door everyday, you’re establishing a credit relationship with that owner.”
If invested in, and supported, these anchor institutions can become hubs for local development, enabling micro-scale changes to occur within a community, and larger-scale transformation to happen over time.
Additionally, a network of these businesses can provide a significant data set of informal and formal market information, layered with demographic, ethnographic, and cultural data. This kind of deep community profile is not available to financial institutions at present, but can be a game changer.
“If we could understand the dynamics of a neighborhood and the various data points that come from it ,” says Johnson-Piett, “ we could show what the future of investment, analytics, and place-making could all look like and scale.”
These data sets start at the micro scale, with deeply personal relationships, but add up to systemic knowledge, through which opportunities for neighborhood growth can attract investment.
In this conversation, Johnson-Piett talks about Urbane Development's approach in further depth, his deep Philly roots, and how COVID-19 has increased insecurity for many Philadelphians, but possibly opened new opportunities for local innovation.
50 min