Building Community

A sharper focus for this newsletter

When I started writing this newsletter a couple months ago, the most common advice I heard was to just start writing and I’d figure things out as I went. That’s not the way I usually do things: I like to be organized, well-prepared, and follow a plan. But it’s true that you can’t plan everything—one of my favourite quotes goes something like, “planning is essential but plans are worthless”. While that may be a slight exaggeration, there’s something to it.

My original plan for this newsletter was to write about cities and technology. Two of my favourite topics, and I was excited to see where things went. But what is it about cities and technology that I really want to write about? The answer, it turns out, is community. You can see the theme of community running through much of my writing so far, but it wasn’t something I was explicitly aiming for. Now it’s clear that this is where I can really dive deep and bring value to you, to my own exploration, and to the improvement of cities.

Community is about the connection between people. Not just existing in the same physical space, but knowing each other, talking, laughing, having shared experiences, and building trust so neighbours can rely on each other in times of need. Feeling that you belong in your neighbourhood, not only because you own your home or pay rent, but because you are wanted, needed, and valued. This sense of community is what makes the magic happen in cities.

And yet, so many people in cities feel isolated, lonely, and disconnected. Even those who have friends and activities to keep them busy often feel that their neighbourhood is nothing more than a convenient place for their home rather than a place they belong with people they know and look forward to seeing.

There are many reasons for this: urban design, car-centric transportation, social media, as just a few examples. Technology can be a major barrier to building community, but it can also help if used in the right way. There is no one solution or one clear plan to building community—it requires systems thinking, experimentation, deep thinking, and collaboration.

So that will be my focus here at Atom & Byte: building community. I’ll explore what is missing in cities that are optimized for efficiency rather than connection, the barriers that exist to people getting to know each other, and how technology can be a tool rather than a goal in itself. Connecting with others takes courage, as we must overcome social norms that are comfortable, yet isolating. I plan to run some experiments around this, to test out new ideas for building community one conversation at a time. Ultimately, we must learn from what works, and trying things out in the real world is necessary, even if it’s scary.

If you feel like something is missing in your city life, that you don’t really know your neighbours, that people seem to be merely existing together and paying more attention to their screens than each other, you’ve come to the right place. I’m excited to explore these concepts together, and come up with new ways to better balance the physical (Atom) and digital (Byte) worlds, and build that wonderful sense of community that will unlock the magic of the city for all of us.