There are lots of guides to help you understand the past of a place—a fine and noble thing to do that will help you to understand the present. My approach to travel takes for granted that you can access enough a place’s history fairly easily, and can then move on to a more interesting question: how will its present shape the future?
Strategy:
Luckily, we already have a good starting skillset to predict a place’s future at least on a decade or so timeframe. When investigating a city, I find that the best mindset is to ask “would I want to live here?”, rather than aiming to understand the culture more broadly. I chose this starting point because we already try to predict the future of a place when we are deciding to live there or not. Given that most people seem reasonably happy with their choices and not continually surprised about the state of their chosen locale, this seemed a reasonable method. I suggest one minor tweak, rather than immediately asking about preferences, a better frame is “how would I live here”. Simply digging into the logistics of life now.
The questions I want answers to are:
- How is economic value created?
- What are the major industries?
- What are the untapped opportunities?
- Is there untapped human capital?
- What are the best neighborhoods?
- How do people spend their leisure time?
- How does the exchange rate affect my purchasing power for products I care about the most?
- How good are the bookstores?
- How regulated is the average person’s life?
- How hard is it to start a business?
- Can you get decent coffee and beer?
- Is late night street food diverse, cheap and delicious?
- How optimistic about the future is the average person?
Tactics:
Note: these tactics apply primarily to the developed world.
My normal approach for visiting new cities is to stay in an Airbnb in an up and coming, hip neighborhood or the cheapest centrally located neighborhood—often they are the same. Airbnb is chosen because it provides a kind of domestic tourism—how is the home laid out, what sorts of appliances are being used, etc. I’ll try to eat at home for at least a few meals because then you get to navigate the different lay out of the grocery store and figure out its inventory, rather than simply walking around browsing, and you’ll get to use a new set of utensils and appliances.
Outside the home, I am normally forced to see the main tourist sights, which is perhaps not all bad for checking out the informal and formal tourist economy, but I would probably skip them if alone. As I’m interested in the culture and economy now, the hip neighborhoods of today provide more diversions and insights than museums to the past.
There are various angles you can take to find rapidly developing areas, but the following lenses tend to work:
Food
Reading food blogs tend to get you a really early in. Craft breweries provide insight into how well capital is finding good culinary opportunities. Searching for boutique hotels tends to put you in more developed areas given the different risk profile of building a hotel, but is also not a bad tack. Once in a burgeoning area, see how innovative versus derivative the food and drink scene is.
Startups
To find the tech scene, visit a startup accelerator and talk to people. Ask about the fundraising situation and exit opportunities. A quick walk around the central business district will provide you with a limited understanding of how money is moving through the city’s economy and fueling innovative production and consumption.
Immigration
Find immigrant neighborhoods and explore the markets and restaurants. These folks’ recent arrival means they can’t have affected the past, and they will have above average business creation rates, thus creating a higher than average share of the city’s future.
Human Capital
Go walk around the leading university in the city. Typically the academic buildings are unlocked and you can see the infrastructure and what sorts of things people are studying and doing in their leisure time. Visit a café or cafeteria and try to eavesdrop—English is pretty frequently used. Find the main student drag.
Art
Visual arts tend to be pretty accessible to tourists, so a visit to a high end art gallery will be fruitful. Especially note the commercial side—ask how much a piece is and evaluate that against how much you would pay. Concerts are harder to find and often feel more exclusionary, but music is a more rapidly evolving art and can give you a look at whether globalization has led to homogenization or productive innovation. Concerts also just tend to be more fun than art galleries.