Reimagine Your Neighborhood - Jeffery Tompkins

Livable City

As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words. And when something in your neighborhood or your city has been a certain way for decades or even hundreds of years, it’s easy to forget that a physical place or the places where neighbors come together to know one another can, in fact, change for the better.

But this is exactly the power of reimagining what a place could be like using basic and more advanced imagery and renderings. Also, it turns out places shape us as people either positively or negatively.

Sometimes certain neighbors don’t want things to change simply because they can’t envision it being any better and they’ve lost hope. For many places, we’ve internalized and expect that new buildings and new public places are just going to be worse than what’s there now.

So we accept what is based in fear and not understanding each other rather than learning how to hold generous, co-creating conversations together.

But my guest today Jeffery Tompkins will talk about and show you, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many of us get very excited when we see a photorealistic image of something new that’s coming. Whether that’s the latest smartphone model, a shiny new building’s inspiring architecture, or even a new cozy place to sit along your favorite cafe filling up what used to be a parking space for one car, we connect with this kind of vision casting in an emotional way. And positive emotion is a powerful catalyst for change.

In this episode, Jeffery will also begin teaching you how to create these graphical visions so that you can try your hand at it. Getting started is really easy and Jeffery has written a Getting Started Tutorial. And these will be powerful tools in our community conversations to reimagine our neighborhoods into more human, more livable places.

Jeffery has agreed to do a series of these as well, increasingly getting more advanced in tooling but always trying to keep it accessible. So check back on the Livable City website for other tutorials.

Check out Jeffery’s Intro Reimagining Tutorial at the bottom of his episode page.

Jeffery is a student in architecture from Ball State University with a minor in urban design.

Follow Jeffery on Twitter and on Instagram