Great communities are founded on great ideas. At the same time, our most admired communities become a magnet, attracting the brightest minds. The relational effect is clear: Bright minds make a community great, and great communities attract bright minds.

In the future, communities will be designed around ways to stimulate new ideas using such things as creative environments, imagination sparkers, and inspirational architecture.

They will also be designed around new ways for people to meet people. Future communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing positive human collisions.

The city of the future will form around multiple dimensions of human connectedness, the interfaces created between people and their surrounding community. A well-connected community will be a vibrant community where ideas are exchanged, energies are exchanged, and people become extremely loyal to the networks that connect them to the rest of the world.

While it is now easy to communicate with people all over the world, we can only physically interact with people and places locally.

For this reason, I’d like to step you through seven new developments that will add to our overall connectedness. So in addition to things like shopping malls, schools, hospitals, parks, concert venues, theaters, recreation areas, museums, and libraries that define our cities today, we are on the edge of raising the bar for how we define the nature of community.

Holographic overlays will help simplify the gameplay for the audiences.

1. E-Sports Arenas

Recently, Philadelphia announced plans for a 65,000-square-foot Fusion Arena, an electronic gaming arena that will host home games for the Philadelphia Fusion. They are a professional nine-person team in the newly formed 20-team Overwatch League.

This announcement followed similar press releases for Santa Ana, CA; Arlington, TX; Las Vegas, NV; Seoul, Korea; Burbank, CA; and Honolulu, HI.

It’s estimated that the eSports audience will grow to nearly 600 million gamers in 2020 with revenues exceeding $1.3 billion

Look for hundreds of this type of eSports arena to pop up over the next decade beginning in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Once tournaments get more established, I would expect much larger stadium size venues to appear, with some seating football and soccer-size crowds of 80K-100K.

Mini airports will soon become a common feature in most cities.

2. Mini Airports

When flying drones started entering our consciousness a few years ago, a number of drone pioneers focused their attention on vehicles big enough to transport people.

Today, following the maiden voyage of the first Volocopter flight in Dubai, September of 2017, several companies have announced their intentions to compete in the soon-to-emerge drone taxi industry.

No one disagrees with the vast number of problems that will need to be solved before it becomes a staple of our transportation mix; yet, the overwhelming allure of this prospect has attracted a growing number of our best and brightest seeking to make a name for themselves in an industry where the sky is literally the limit.

In just a few years air taxis will be common in most major cities and along with them will come a new kind of infrastructure – mini airports.

During the first stage of development, planners and entrepreneurs will carve out a number of helipads in addition to ground-based landing pads around cities. These will most likely be small sections of existing parking lots.

As traffic grows, and the number of landing and departures grows from tens to hundreds a day, single landing pads will grow into multiple pads with waiting areas.

Over time, crude landing areas will evolve into sophisticated terminals for managing passengers as well as the street-level and air traffic surrounding each of these mini airports.

The speed of this evolution will largely depend on pricing. With private planes still costing many times the cost of a first class ticket, that option has never made its way into mainstream consciousness. If flying drones can somehow lower the cost to 2-3 times an Uber drive across town, it will grow quickly.

The character of a community will be defined by the unique tournaments it hosts

3. Tournament Centers

Somewhere in between convention centers, rec centers, and sporting arenas is new type of facility designed around competitions.

Most cities host a number of tournaments each year ranging from athletic competitions like softball and basketball tournaments to more intellectual endeavors such as chess club tournaments, spelling bees, or debate forums.

The complete range of contests that take place within a city each year can be truly impressive, and the overall economic impact of these ventures has not been overlooked. From an economic standpoint, some cultural events can make or break a city budget.

But more than the underlying economics of tournaments are the fluid social environments that are evolving around us. With populations becoming more transient, people want to be able to “plug in” wherever they happen to be and this need will begin to coalesce around a “place” specifically designed for tournaments.

In much the same way large conventions and group meetings have been formalized with the construction of convention centers, and recreational activities coalescing around rec centers, a new breed of facilities designed around contests and competitions will emerge – tournament centers.

Tournament Centers will be developed using various configurations to draw attention to the city and its cultural identity. A city along a river may include facilities for managing fishing competitions, while a city in the mountains may have provisions for mountain climbing competitions.

Yet, most of the physical structures will be designed around easily configurable open spaces, and a resident team of tournament designers who will earn their stripes by organizing a complete year around assortment of competitions.

Tournaments will range from volleyball to badminton, from bridge to poker, from hot air balloons to marathons, and from scrabble to robotics. The variety of options will only be limited by a community’s imagination.

Since each contest will have its own group of loyalists, fan clubs, and organizational dynamics, each event will involve a communication structure that ties directly into the group’s core user community.

From an entertainment standpoint, it will be easy to find out about all of the upcoming tournaments taking place. For visitors, it will be an easy entry point to become familiar with a local culture.

How easy is it for you to sponsor a memorial for a loved one in your city?

4. Memorial Gardens

Great cities in history were known for their grand parks with their flowing masterpieces of floral design. But today’s parks are often little more than freshly cut grass and trimmed trees, with a playground thrown into one corner for the kids.

For most cities, parks have deteriorated into rubber stamped open space, boiled down to the bare essentials of grass, trees, sidewalks, playgrounds, and benches – nothing memorable, with little to inspire the mind.

With a growing resentment towards sameness, and a move towards personalization and hyper-individuality, perhaps a better approach is the idea of memorial gardens where the community decides on a particular theme and becomes integrally involved in creating its own distinctive features.

Adding to the possibilities is a way for people to leave memorials for their loved ones. Rather than spending money on a tombstone in a cemetery that few people ever see, the money could be better spent on a statue, fountain, park bench, bridge, fountain, sculpture, or fire pit with a memorial plaque.

Since a growing number of people are choosing cremation over caskets, they are still looking for a “place” to visit their loved ones. By adding a stylish memorial plaque, every new feature would be paid for by the sponsoring entity or individuals.

Memorial gardens will range from active to passive on the community involvement scale, but with each new development, the host city will set into motion a long-range plan for people to rally around.

With their numbers exploding, new types of coworking will emerge for freelance project teams

5. Freelancer Colonies

As a next-generation type of coworking facility, freelancer colonies are an evolving organizational structure designed around matching talent with pending work projects. With a growing number of “gig workers” looking for their next project, freelancer colonies become a “place” where new projects are continually percolating.

Each freelancer colony will be formed around one or more project managers, and a staff that is focused on landing new projects. As new projects take shape, managers will reach out to their trusted networks of free agents to tackle the critical components of each undertaking.

Colonies will develop their own standard operating procedures with consistent agreements, payment processes, legal structures, management software, and methods for resolving disputes. Over time they will be rated on their ability to complete tasks with specific ratings on efficiency, quality of work, and how well they treat the talent.

The driving forces behind freelancer colonies are more than the fact that it is a good idea. Rather, it is being driven by a combination of technology, emerging culture, and governmental systems that make it the logical next step in the evolution of work.

Most will be organized around a topical area best suited for the talent base of their core team. As an example, a team of photonics engineers will attract projects best suited for that kind of talent. Likewise, a working group of programmers specializing in computer gaming applications will serve as a magnet for new gaming projects.

In some instances, large corporations will launch their own freelancer colonies as a way to expand capability without adding to their headcount. Staffed with a few project managers, the company will use the colony as a proving ground for experimental assignments best performed outside of the cultural bounds of existing workflow.

Companies are always looking for ways to circumvent the escalating costs of adding staff, and project-based work done in freelancer colonies becomes a logical option.

With mobile retail, every day brings a new set of vendors and a new experience.

6. Driverless Mobile Mall Shops

The idea of mobile mall shops started when I was thinking about rural communities. In most small towns the customer base is too low to warrant a full-time presence and permanent storefront. But a one-day-a-week traveling shop in five or six communities might be a perfect arrangement.

For this reason, it’s not a stretch to envision a new form of shopping center that caters to mobile businesses. With a stationary common area at its core, the mobile mall will be a central gathering place where a variety of businesses can “doc,” “plug-in,” and set up shop.

RVs, trucks, vans, and other large vehicles can be converted into traveling dental offices, tax preparation centers, chiropractic clinics, and retail storefronts. As they pull into place, merchandise and service areas will expand into a common area creating an “open bazaar” feel for the shoppers.

Most of the traveling storefronts will be one or two person businesses, nomadically traveling from city to city on their daily business adventure. Others will work a regular circuit, showing up on the same day each week, building a loyal customer base.

When your shopping experience is defined around fine craftsmanship.

7. Maker Districts

With so many retail stores closing, consumers are left with fewer options for out-of-the-home forms of entertainment as well as a pent-up demand for meaningful experiences. This collision course of trends is creating the perfect storm for a new kind of retail experience – Maker Districts.

Walking through an active, vibrant shopping district where people are baking bread, spinning pottery, brewing beer, making jewelry, cutting and designing stained glass, decorating cakes, molding with pewter, and sculpting with clay, will give every visitor their own one-of-a-kind experience.

In addition to the sights and smells, having musicians performing mood-stirring music will help form a different ambiance, character, and vibe with every visit.

In this environment, creative people are both the entertainment and the proprietors of the shops.

A maker district can best be described as a cross between an artist colony, farmers market, woodworking shop, music festival, bakery, brewpub, and brainstorming session all happening in the same space. It’s all that and more.

Here’s why I see Maker Districts entering your lives in a big way.

With online storefronts flourishing, the need to run down to the local store and pick something up has been replaced with a few clicks of the mouse and a delivery guy knocking on your door a couple hours later.

But consumers are getting restless. As mind numbing as it might have been to run to the store and pick up a bag of flour, there was always the chance of running into someone unexpectedly.

Coffee shops have largely replaced retail stores as the next best place to hang out. Most are busy, noisy places, but fresh coffee is constantly being brewed and people love to feel like they’re part of the maker experience.

The maker experience comes in many different forms, most of which are on the opposite end of the spectrum from coffee.

There are several reasons why Maker Districts are on the verge of turning traditional retail on it’s head.

First, people love to watch things being made. Every source of creation is also the source of inspiration.

Second, small mom and pop businesses have a vested interest in building their community. No, they probably aren’t the most sophisticated, tech savvy business people, but artisan products don’t need to compete on price, and they only need to earn enough for a comfortable lifestyle. These are people that are doing what they love, not changing the world.

Finally, from a real estate standpoint, the time it takes to refill an empty big box store with a Maker District can be a fraction of the time it takes to bring in another large-scale retailer. Cities will love having sales tax revenues replaced quickly and neighbors will love being part of the new experience.

Final Thoughts

The role of the city is changing. While most cities are focused on being “smarter,” “greener,” better connected, and having the most iconic architecture, few are paying attention to “what’s missing.”

Each new dimension of community connectedness is adding to the overall human experience.

Even though much of today’s technology is giving us super-human abilities and virtually everyone can now think-faster, know-faster, and do-faster than ever before, every new technology requires skills, talents, and understandings that are hard to quantify.

A fully engaged community, with participatory openings, endless networking occasions, and entirely new paths for moving dreams to reality will open the doors to new opportunities that have yet to be imagined.

The people of the world have an “unfinishable mandate” to continually stretch, grow, propagate, and master not only the world around us, but also the entire universe. And it all begins with rethinking our cities.

Once again, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Retail is rapidly evolving and many of yesterday’s storefronts no longer exist. Gone are the Woolco’s, Radio Shacks, Gottschalks, Casual Corners, Ben Franklins, Mervyn’s, Montgomery Wards, and Miller Outposts of a bygone era.

While we still have some people predicting the death of traditional bricks and mortar storefronts, the reality is much different.

Physical stores are hardly going away. Retailers like Apple, Costco, Nordstrom, TJX, Dollar General, H&M, Ulta, Dollar Tree, Aldi, and Sephora are not only thriving, but plan to open thousands of new stores over the coming years.

Yes, ecommerce is making inroads, but it has taken roughly 25 years for ecommerce to reach 10% of retail sales in the U.S. At the same time, 16.4% of total retail sales in the U.K. came from the Internet

The retail industry continues to grow. Even in physical stores, overall sales continue to grow, albeit at a far slower rate than online shopping.

However, the changes happening in retail are far more nuanced than something we can derive from a single statistic. The percentage of e-commerce sales varies tremendously by product category, from around 2% for groceries to more than 20% for apparel to the overwhelming majority of sales in categories where products can be digitally delivered, like music, books, and games.

In the late 1990s, many were predicting the demise of physical stores altogether. Even today, many are still thinking in terms of a “retail apocalypse.”

What’s more likely is that sometime in the future we will hit “peak ecommerce.” That means we reach the maximum percentage of online sales, what some might describe as a hidden barrier, that can’t be crossed.

For me, peak ecommerce is a useful working theory because it begs the questions – how long until we reach it, and how high will it go?

Is there such a thing as peak ecommerce?

Let’s start by asking what it’d look like to have 100% of our retail purchases in the U.S. done online.

• Ten times as many delivery vehicles
• No malls, shopping centers, or retail stores of any kind
• No restaurants, coffee shops, bars, or nightclubs
• With grocery delivery, no personal selection of fruits, vegetables, flowers, or meat
• No beauty salons, nail shops, dog grooming, bike rental, banks, or fitness places
• No movie theaters, escape rooms, yoga classes, trampoline parks, health spas, dance studios, martial arts training, sensory deprivation tanks, or game salons
• No local sales tax for cities and local communities
• Very few places left to go and do things
• A complete reworking of all traffic patterns

Most of us would agree that this is not a likely scenario.

Yes, there may be scenarios where we still have stores, restaurants, and shops and every purchase is made through a personal device, but making a payment online is not the same as making the entire purchase online devoid of any retail experience.

If we consider the social nature of shopping and the number of places we frequent on a daily, even monthly basis, it becomes hard to imagine a world without markets.

For these reasons, and more that I’ll explain below, I would be hard pressed to find an argument for ecommerce to ever go above 30%, and it may indeed top out somewhere below 20%.

That said, retail is a brutally competitive marketplace that is not well described by a single data point.

How much will automated delivery affect your desire to purchase products online?

Are we facing a retail apocalypse?

There are still many who believe that most shopping will ultimately be done online, that commercial districts with brick-and-mortar stores are doomed, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a relic of the past.

On the other end of the spectrum are the physical store cheerleaders that acknowledge the retail climate is changing, think traditional retail will pull through because, retail itself is still growing and after all the hype, even now, ecommerce only represents a meager 10% of all retail.

Neither of these are safe assumptions in our rapidly changing world. Every aspect of the buying-selling process is getting rethought, experimented with, tweaked, reengineered, and reimagined.

Our next generation retail pioneers are already in the process of dissecting and reassembling concepts of ownership, first impressions, product placement, purchasing environments, payment schemes, product lifecycles, delivery methods, the human-product relationship, and even the value and nature of possession.

No one-size-fits-all formula

In the past, consumers had relatively few options for finding and purchasing an item. Storefronts, catalogs, mail-order, tradeshows, and traveling salesmen accounted for most of our options.

Today, Amazon alone has roughly 1.8 million sellers adding another 1.3 million new products every day. Around 50% of all sales on Amazon marketplaces come from third-party sellers. This means people spot a product on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn before making it to the purchase page on Amazon.

If you happen to be an inventor and develop a new product, does this mean you should focus on Amazon as your primary channel of distribution? Not necessarily.

Amazon still lacks the intimacy of talking to a sales person, having a product demo happen in front of you, feeling the fabric, tasting the food, smelling the fragrances, laying down on a mattress, having a person help you understand your choices, and personally testing the results.

By its very nature, retail will forever be a fragmented multi-option, multi-channel industry where the true innovators are constantly rewriting the rules of engagement.

Are shopping malls dying?

Even though regional malls, and their department store anchors, have been on the decline for more than two decades, the shopping mall industry is still quite viable.

The first threat to malls came in the form of big-box stores and discount mass merchandisers. The latest wave of disruption has come primarily from a surge of off-price and dollar stores. So while it’s easy to point the finger at online shopping, it’s only a piece of a much larger equation. At the same time, due to a surge in popularity, malls had gone through a rapid over-building phase and a correction of some kind was inevitable.

With shifting demographics and traffic patterns, many older malls lost the “relevance” battle to new malls. As a general rule, a newer mall with more desirable tenants will always win over an older mall that still appeals to yesterday’s trendsetters.

Finally, A-list malls are doing very well. This includes a group of 270 or so malls that represent about 20% of all locations, but they generate roughly 75% of total mall revenue. For the most part, these malls are unaffected by the closure of anchor tenants, and any specialty shop vacancies are quickly snatched up.

This is not to say that malls won’t die a painful death or be radically transformed. Rather, our need for finding an endpoint seldom matches with the reality of what’s happening in the trenches. More than likely, malls will still exist in one form or another even a thousand years from now, but consumers will interact with them in radically different ways.

How will ecommerce change in the future?

Twelve forms of future retail that haven’t arrived yet

So what comes next? How will retail morph and transition over the next decade or two? Here are a few options that may be added to the list:

1. Driverless mobile shopping

The number one challenge of traditional retail has always been driving customers to the store. As we move into a highly mobile marketplace, businesses can drive to where the customers already are.

2. Retail as a service

In this scenario, products are not purchased, but simply used for a time and returned. This already exist on some levels but may be expanded in unusual ways.

3. Slashcasters

Taking the “blue light special” to the next level, Slashcasters are a new breed of pitchmen geared to entertain audiences at retail showcases. Slashcaster events will be framed around our growing need for unique one-of-a–kind entertainment designed specifically to create an over-the-top shopping experience.

4. Hyper-individualized come-to-your-home customized products

With this kind of personalized shopping, your private team of professionals will show up at your door to step you through every detail of specialty products ranging from clothing, to shoes, to makeovers.

5. Experts shops

People love to talk to the experts and find answers for those nagging questions that create a cloud of uncertainty around most consumer products. The Apple Stores are a perfect example of an “experts shop” because each of their employees is an expert on the products they sell.

6. Maker districts

Where customers witness the making of products being sold. A maker district can best be described as a cross between an artist colony, farmers market, woodworking shop, music festival, bakery, brewpub, and brainstorming session all happening in the same space. It’s all that and more.

7. Model-driven click-to-buy

Imagine an engaging model working as a human billboard, wearing a 4K video t-shirt, where the t-shirt is looking at the audience as much as the audience is looking at him or her. The model’s primary objective is to garner impressions and sell products, as many as possible.

8. Mystery-driven experience shops/

Most people are already shopping for surprises, so in this type of discovery-your-own-adventure shops, participants are treated to a sprinkling of breadcrumb experiences that will help lead them to the ultimate and final pieces of the puzzle.

9. Certified one-of-kind shops

Every item for purchase is guaranteed to be original, one-of-a-kind merchandise.

10. Mobile mall

Set up as a large open-space building, every morning dozens, maybe hundreds, of mobile vendors show up and set up shop in new and different configurations. Mobile malls are similar in many ways to the Docking Shops.

11. Docking shops

Docking shops will be designed so mobile businesses can “dock” and expand into a larger commons area. First envisioned for rural communities where the customer base is too low to warrant a permanent location, a one-day-a-week storefront in five or six communities might be a perfect arrangement.

12. No-Inventory demo shops

One of the major expenses in traditional retail has been managing inventories and shelf space. Look for a new breed of retails shops that carry no inventory, only product demonstration stations with the ability to order on the spot (to receive a discount).

Final Thoughts

How long before we reach peak ecommerce? After studying consumer dynamics and examining our human need for social interactions, it looks to me like we will reach peak ecommerce by 2030 and peak somewhere around 20%.

At the same time, much our current retail environment will transition to experience-based products with a heavy emphasis on shared connections.

Naturally, when it comes to retail, consumers are in control. They decide what to buy, where to buy, when to buy, and how much they’re willing to pay.

In a connected world, where information is fluid and transparent, retailers become actively engaged in the global conversation. If not, their customers will begin the conversations without them.

Physical stores still provide the best way to create a high-value relationship with customers and build a branded experience.

Bricks and mortar stores are not going away any time soon, but the value they add to their communities and the variety of products they offer will remain in transition for the foreseeable future.