What City Builders Can Learn From Liquid Death
How to make urbanism party-friendly.
My wife and I had the pleasure of seeing Alicia Keys perform in Nashville this past weekend, and had a wonderful time.
But I spent way too long looking for a concession stand that sold water.
Stand after stand had fridges packed to the brim with beer cans, without a Dasani bottle to be found.
Fast forward about 30 minutes, and I got to feel really stupid when a woman at a concession stand handed me two of those beer cans. Except they weren’t beer cans at all. They were Liquid Death cans of water.
Liquid Death took a really interesting approach to marketing their product: they made it cool to drink water at events dominated by alcohol. Because unless you look closely, it looks like you’re drinking a beer just like everybody else. It fooled me for nearly half an hour.
City builders can learn from Liquid Death’s strategy. It doesn’t lead with talking all about how important hydration is, though it helps you stay hydrated. It doesn’t focus on the negative effects of too much alcohol consumption, though those effects exist.
It helps normalize water consumption in places where water consumption can be a taboo or looked down upon. And this is an approach that’s desperately needed in urbanism discourse.
It might feel good to literally rage against the machine, but if the goal of urbanism is mass adoption, “hater of cars and parking” isn’t the right packaging to make it fly off the shelves.
So how do we skin urbanism like Liquid Death? We may it cool to have at the party:
People don’t say at parties how much they don’t want their kids to be able to afford a place in town. You fit in if you want your children to find a place they can afford in town.
People also don’t say they hate having cute little boutiques and bakeries and restaurants nearby. You fit in just fine when you want to be able to walk to those things.
What city doesn’t say how much it wants a downtown? Building with urbanist principles will naturally make that more of a possibility.
The goal of urbanist coalition-building must be consent, not consensus. As Fearless Culture CEO Gustavo Razzetti says, “Consent is faster than consensus because it does not require alignment of preferences but rather an alignment of what’s acceptable.”
And the way to achieve consent around urbanist ideas is to meet people where they’re at. Help them fit their desires into their context.
When we can do that, that’s when we win.
One Thing to Get Excited About:
Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsome officially signed AB 2097, which bars local governments from implementing parking minimums within a half-mile of public transit.
Such comprehensive action in America’s most populated state will easily go down as one of the biggest “urbanism wins” of the year in the United States.
One Action to Get You Started :
Particularly for those of you that are active on social media or active advocates in your own local contexts, spend time this week thinking specifically about how you can start crafting your messaging in ways that might appeal to otherwise-hostile (or at least apathetic) individuals.
How can you “Liquid Death” your own message?
One Resource to Check Out:
With Hurricane Ian officially kicking off the 2022 hurricane season, I’ve been thinking a lot about flood mitigation and sponge city technology this week.
The UNFCCC’s Kim Harrisberg gave a really good overview of sponge cities early this year, which you can check out here.