The Pop-Up City

Conventions and conferences create a constant flow of Burning Map-type events in downtowns. They are a critical part of the post-COVID "future of where" for cities.

I often talk about the future of downtowns and other business districts as “Urban Hotels”. By this I mean to say their future lies not with offices but with activities that require face-to-face contact such as concerts, sporting events, conventions, and regular old face-to-face meetings.

---

We’re glad you are enjoying The Future Of Where! Help keep us going by considering a freeor paid subscription!

---

This weekend I got to experience an “Urban Hotel”. And I realized it’s really more like what you might call a “Pop-Up City” – a temporary human settlement with dense interaction among of group of individuals who have gathered together to share an experience.

On Saturday I arrived in Denver for the annual National Planning Conference – a gathering of 5,000 urban planners who are unusually interested in cities and how they are evolving. For the first time, I took the train from the Denver Airport to Union Station in Downtown Denver, a pleasant but frankly somewhat slow ride.

16th Street Mall in Denver

It’s almost a mile from Union Station to the main part of downtown where the conference was being held, so I stepped out onto 16^th Street to wait for Denver’s well-known free “Mallride” bus. And immediately I realized I was in a Pop-Up City.

I could tell because I saw several groups of people with nametags around their necks, walking around with tour guides looking at their phones. These were, of course, my fellow nerdy urban planners on walking tours during the first day of the conference. Several of them hopped on the Mallride with me to go back to their hotels.

The Urban Burning Man

Ever since then I have been ensconced in the Pop-Up City. I have shuttled back and forth between my hotel (one of many) and the cavernous Colorado Convention Center (which we ae sharing with the annual “No-Dig Show,” the conference of the North American Society for Trenchless Technology). Throughout the day, this temporary community gathers at the Convention Center and then in the evening fans out through the neighborhood for an endless number of gatherings and receptions. People who live thousands of miles apart randomly run into each other several times a day on the street.

It’s a little like an urban Burning Man, but without the counterculture.

Burning Man: Maybe the ultimate Pop-Up City.

Tomorrow, we’ll all be gone, only to be replaced by another Pop-Up City – specifically, the annual conference of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Society, whose members will flood the convention center, the hotels, and the restaurants in the neighborhood. Then it’ll be the short line railroads, followed by the oncology nurses, and on and on. It’s all part of the American convention business, which according to the U.S. Travel Association generates around $125 billion a year.

Pop-Up Cities thrive in the United States in part because we have such an endless array of associations of all kinds – professional and personal affinity groups that gather on a regional, statewide, and national basis. Although such gatherings occur everywhere in the world, they’re more common in the U.S. because we are – and always have been – a nation of groups and associations.

Associations and Democracy

Indeed, almost 200 years ago, in his famous book Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqueville highlighted Americans’ predilection for association – and its connection to democracy itself.

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it,” he wrote. “When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.”

Which is why I found it fascinating that we planners shared the Pop-Up City with thousands of people who focus on boring technology as an alternative to excavation. (You’d think Elon Musk would have showed up but I guess he was busy elsewhere.)

You could say, of course, the Pop-Up Cities are exclusive – and even gated. After all, it costs a lot of money to live in one, even for a few days. But that doesn’t mean that only the elite participate. After, the fuzzy-headed planners were preceded in Denver’s pop-up city by a RV enthusiasts – a group that almost certainly didn’t go on walking tours of downtown.

Pop-Up Cities Can Seem Weird

And there’s no question that Pop-Up Cities can be weird. Orlando and Las Vegas are overgrown Pop-Up Cities, with a revolving door of regular tourists seeking in-person entertainment (whether produced by casinos or Disney) and people wandering around the largest convention centers in the country. You begin to wonder where the Pop-Up City ends and real life begins.

Pedestrians on the Las Vegas strip

I actually live in a Pop-Up City in downtown San Diego, squished between the San Diego Convention Center and the San Diego Cruise Ship Terminal. On some days, hematologists with convention badges (in town for three days) will be walking past my building in one direction while overweight tourists (in town for 12 hours) will be walking past my building in the opposite direction. (Indeed, in many ways a cruise ship is the ultimate Pop-Up City, especially when it docks and essentially becomes a local hotel for a day.)

It can be hard to sustain an endless parade of Pop-Up Cities, especially in midsized cities with midsized convention centers that cater to regional organizations. And convention centers seem to be engaged in an endless arms race to get bigger, with more (and more luxurious) convention hotels to house the Pop-Up Cities.

But there’s no question that with $125 billion at stake, Pop-Up Cities – and other manifestations of the Urban Hotel -- are part of the post-COVID "future of where," especially for downtowns.