Financial districts are some of the most sanitized neighborhoods in any city. Filled with skyscrapers and men in matching suits, they are marked by an atmosphere of seriousness associated with important business during weekdays and the complete absence of life on the weekends. Visitors gawk at the beautiful constructions of modernity but rarely would one find oneself at home in these neighborhoods. After all, they are defined as living but toiling.
Yet, even for those toiling away in the corporate sanitation of big city business districts, the lack of life in them can at times be depressing. One goes from station to building to perhaps another building but rarely does one linger much outside built structures. There are simply not enough reasons to be outside. For the few parks that sit among the buildings, they provide little mental comfort to people who are always rushing from Point A to B.
That oppressive feeling of lifelessness is often exacerbated by the lack of street life. Eateries exist at the street level only when the prices of simple dishes can justify the stratospheric rent the establishments need to pay. The pricing, supposedly, also reflects the high salaries denizens of financial districts are paid to toil for long hours in stifling suits while enduring day after day transporting themselves to such lifeless neighborhoods.
Needless to say, not everyone working in financial districts are financially well off, and if they are, willing to pay inflated prices for average services and products just to prove their alleged elite status. So these people, a simple act of finding a quick, cheap meal after work can be as frustrating as handling an irritable project or client at work. Such frustrations, little by little, build up into a dislike for the financial districts and the work style they represent.
That, of course, is not what companies situated in financial districts prefer. For them, being in central, high-end locations in a major city signals brand, quality, size, prestige, and value to investors, clients, and employees. If financial districts become home to negative feelings like frustration and dislike, it makes no sense for them to continue paying exorbitant rent to maintain offices there. The companies need to keep the shine on financial districts and themselves by extension.
How? Making financial districts more mixed-use would be helpful. Who says a bank cannot be a neighbor with a fast food joint and an old apartment block? Maybe bankers would find visiting clients more time-consuming, but in return, they get cheap lunches and their employers get cheaper rent. By opening the neighborhood up to more diverse tenants, the banks may even be inspired to tackle new markets and types of clients.
And it also reflects well on the bankers themselves to be physically closer with whom they consider as mere plebians. Your average urban dweller may be much less well-educated and paid than the average financial district employee, but they belong to the city, just as much as anyone working for a bank's urban headquarters would be. That sense of equality would be physically visualized through the removal of an invisible boundary between the financial and other districts of a city. Workers from all industries working side by side in the same physical space will surely bring them closer together.
Thought this way, the greatest oddity of a financial district may not be its lifelessness, seriousness, or exclusivity, but the fact that they exist in the first place. Considering that people of all social classes and professional backgrounds require financial services, the fact that banks choose to silo themselves in one corner of a vast city and country makes little sense if all potential users of financial services are equally targeted and valued. It is perhaps time that financial service providers think a little outside the box and bring more variety into the box that is the financial district.
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