I've been in Moscow the last few days, designing a project that seeks to foster a spirit of social enterprise and help the city become a better, positive and even more appealing place.
A scary peak of the visit was a lecture to an audience of 400 courtesy of the Center of Contemporary Architecture. You can find it here.
It's up to Moscovites to decide whether their city is enterprising or appealing enough.
And up to the Government to decide on the role of social enterprise in its new commitment to human capital and innovation.
What I know is that I met an astonishing cast of people who'd turned old factories in to arts centers, created successful internet start-ups, busy welfare organizations, dance companies and creative schools.
All of these people have pursued their dreams and aspirations, acquired specific knowledge of a specific field, turned it in to either a job or way of life and created their own unique micro-climate.
In Silicon Valley, 9000 kilometers away, the head of Nokia's research center, according to reports in the Financial Times, is working on ways in which the mobile telephone can tackle the problem of forecasting the weather.
It's unparalleled in history that we now have this distributed computing platform - 3.3bn mobile citizens worldwide.
The challenge for scientist Henry Tirri is to find a way to capitalize on the possibility of humans, equipped with phones that carry a battery of sensors to relay changes in physical conditions over a wide area.
The challenge is in part expressed by the change in the weather you might experience on a 60-mile road trip from Marin County to the depths of Silicon Valley:
There are 186 micro-climates from Sausalito to San Jose.
And Nokia's first move is the Mobile Millennium project - an initiative that aims to recruit up to 10,000 motorists in the San Francisco Bay area to report on traffic conditions via GPS chips in phones.
Moscow. Silicon Valley. Mobile phones. The head-teacher of an innovative school. What's the connection?
It's simple: but the answer is only available if you engage with another two questions...annoyingly!
How to tap and pool the knowledge of the dispersed entrepreneurs of Moscow and use that experience and understanding to enable others in the City to follow their own interests and passions?
How to aggregate intent, map the micro-climates and change the weather?
One answer has to be to create third-party events and devices to pool knowledge and strengthen weak social, economic and cultural ties.
But another is to recognize that the entrepreneurs in Moscow, like the folks on their phones cruising the Bay Area, are all data-gatherers.
Both are harbors of knowledge.
And in every move they make they are gathering information and experiences that in aggregate could be of value.
Throughout the world, public authorities are inventing or using 'vehicles' for assembling and extracting value from land assets.
They take the form of public-private partnerships, 'special purpose delivery vehicles' or the opportunity every four years to host the Olympics.
What vehicles could we create to maximize and capture the value of social and creative assets?
In the field of city development, how can we create public-private partnerships or renewal corporations that are about assembling people, ideas and enterprise, as well as land and structured finance?
