The District Finder is a geographic matchmaker that helps people find neighbourhoods to fall in love with.

 

At the District Finder, we believe that a person's local environment plays an important, but often under-rated, role in all aspects of their life. We know that our sense of belonging (or of alienation) can vary markedly from one part of town to another; and that these feelings can oscillate through relatively small geographic movements - a shift of a couple hundred metres can often make a big difference to whether or not we feel "at home". We also know that different residential locations impact our physical health in multiple ways via differences in commuting times; differential access to parks and other green spaces; varying degrees of exposure to pollution; and proximity (or otherwise) to sporting facilities. And, of course, for many of us, our locational choices can have a direct bearing on the learning experiences of our children, especially in a city like London where sharp variations in school performance can be observed within surprisingly small geographic radii.

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Meanwhile, the rapid digitalisation of our urban economy has triggered a shift towards home working (a process accelerated still further by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic) which makes our choice of residential location all the more important. Our local neighbourhood is increasingly the locus of all the facets of our life: it's where we live and work; it's where we stay in and go out. Indeed, for many us, it's no longer a place we return to when the day is done but, rather, the place we inhabit from dawn to dusk.

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Given the critical importance of our locational choices, it is interesting to note that the tools we bring to bear on these decisions are remarkably unscientific compared to those we routinely deploy when it comes to other matchmaking choices. For example, a recent YouGov poll found that over a fifth of those aged 25-34 met their romantic partners online (13% through dating apps and 9% via websites such as OKCupid or Guardian Soulmates). By contrast, only one in twenty young people met their partner (at a bar or elsewhere) "by chance". In other words, we already know that the likelihood of serendipitously stumbling across "Mr Right" is considerably lower than the chances of finding "Mrs Right" through the application of OKCupid's matchmaking algorithm. We're also familiar with the widespread use of algorithmic matchmaking in the employment market where, by 2018, LinkedIn was already reporting that 67% of the firms it surveyed had reported that artificial intelligence was helping them to save time in their candidate selection.

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By contrast, for most of us, our choice of residential location is decidedly 20th century rather than 21st century. For example, all the major property search websites allow users to search by price and property type (including number of bedrooms etc.) but their search criteria does not extend to what really matters to many of us e.g. how vibrant is the local neighbourhood; how leafy are the surrounding streets; how long does it take to reach a decent-sized park in which to go for a morning jog; and how good are the local schools. Instead, these property search websites assume that their users already know the answers to these questions and have already narrowed down the locus of their search to a pre-selected part of the city.

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For some of us, that may well be true. For example, we might be long-standing denizens of London for whom there is no question that we definitely want to live in Hampstead...or Dulwich...or Fitzrovia...or Peckham. But what about the brave souls who are relocating to London for the first time from New York or San Francisco, Paris or Berlin, Edinburgh or Manchester? In a city with an urban footprint of over 1,500 square kilometres, their chances of accidentally stumbling across their geographic soulmate are even lower than their chances of finding their romantic soulmate in a crowded London pub. Moreover, even for born-and-bred Londoners, there are huge tracts of the city that remain terra incognita for them; and whose qualities - if discovered - might trigger an unexpected love affair.

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This, then, is the District Finder's mission: to offer a new way to discover (and uncover) the world's greatest cities so that each and every one of you can find your own, true, urban love affair.

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