I was mountain biking yesterday evening and while observing some magical views I started thinking about the street-art, street-wear…street culture in general. In Monkey Business we feel inspired and support all these movements, but how can we act and add some yellow spices to all the street culture? It was then when I came with the idea of Street + Entrepreneurship=Streetpreneurship.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about the role of the architects in our cities. They do not simply create buildings, but they design the working and living dynamics that will happen in the buildings (cities thinking on a larger scale), meaning how people will behave in there. If learning is a change in our behaviour, how can an architect help Monkey Business designing interactive learning environments?

In that sense I’ve been visiting couple of interesting offices lately, meeting great people who are running fantastic projects. But unfortunately their offices were really far from the city centres. If we want to change the world we may need to be closer to the world and citizens, maybe? So that interaction among citizens and us happens on a bigger scale.

After couple of trips around Scandinavia during the past few months I realized that probably the highest rate of entrepreneurship is among the immigrants, which is really inspiring from my perspective. People who come from radically different countries and cultures, but are still able to create their own businesses for their own survival and feed their families. Unfortunately in most of the cases the biggest added value they can offer is cheap price and having their stores open for unlimited amount of hours. But they are close to the people living in the neighbour. They might run a bike store and people come to say hi and hang around while their bikes get fixed. Their create an interaction culture.

I started googleing some of the ideas mentioned above and discovered that Jane Jacobs, an economist and urbanist, wrote extensively on the ways that interaction among the people who live and work on a particular street can reduce crime, encourage the exchange of ideas, and generally make the world a better place.

Until now only bars, restaurants, banks and clothing stores were the most typical businesses in the city centres. Businesses that had access to quite a wide range of citizens, but unfortunately haven’t succeeded in creating the change. In contrast, street artists or street dancers have managed to make the city centres more fun and yellow, always playing with the limits of the law and for limited time though.

Gandhi made the change spending time in the streets and being closer to the citizens. How close is our business and our office to the world? Summer is here, weather is perfect. Go out and do some StreetPreneurship!

Have a yellow weekend,

Liher

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