# The City as Unreliable Narrator
Salesforce Tower was completed in 2018, became the tallest building in San Francisco, and immediately did something strange: it named a neighbourhood that had already existed for twenty years. The tower didn't create SoMa's identity as a technology district. It punctuated it — placed a full stop at the end of a sentence that had been written incrementally, messily, and without editorial oversight since the late 1990s, when the first wave of internet companies moved into warehouses south of Market Street because the rent was low and the loading docks were wide enough to run cable through.
That first wave emptied out after 2001. The buildings didn't. The next generation of tenants — design studios, co-working spaces, the second-wave tech campuses — moved into spaces that still carried the physical residue of their predecessors: the exposed brick, the freight elevators, the proportions of a room built for industrial use. Each wave didn't erase what came before. It built on top of it, the way sediment works. By the time Salesforce Tower went up, it was retrospectively anchoring an identity that the district had been depositing, layer by layer, through two decades of things actually happening there.
This is the part that urban planners find genuinely difficult to explain to clients: the identity wasn't declared. It accumulated. And the thing that named it finally — the tower — arrived last, not first.
## What Jane Jacobs Would Have Made of a Brand Strategy Deck
Jane Jacobs published *The Death and Life of Great American Cities* in 1961, and the argument she made was structural rather than aesthetic. Neighbourhood vitality, she observed, depends on a mix of old buildings and new ones, short blocks, and density of use. Not on vision documents. Not on master plans. On what streets actually do when people are left to use them.
The framework she built was entirely observational — she was describing what she could see, not what anyone intended. Which makes it structurally identical to the argument James Hurst makes in *Use Design To Design Change* about how purpose accumulates through behaviour rather than declaration. A brand, in James' framing, is not a wrapper applied to a product. It is the residue of every decision the organisation actually makes — the things that happen, not the things announced in the launch deck.
Jacobs was describing cities. James is describing companies. The mechanism is the same: identity is deposited, not declared, and the deposition happens at the level of the specific and the repeated, not the general and the aspirational.
What SoMa adds to that argument is a time dimension. The neighbourhood's identity didn't just accumulate — it accumulated *across discontinuities*. The 2001 crash was a genuine rupture. Whole companies vanished. And yet the physical layer persisted, and the next wave of organisations read that layer as signal, as permission, as context. The identity survived the interruption because it was embedded in the material rather than held in the memory of any single institution.
## The Tension Two Blocks Over
Immediately adjacent to SoMa's organic commercial accumulation, the Yerba Buena Gardens cultural district was developed through the 1990s as a deliberate civic design intervention. Museums. A children's centre. Public green space. All of it planned, funded, and installed as an intentional act of identity-making for the area.
The result is one of the more interesting design tensions visible in a single walk: emergent identity and designed identity sitting within the same few blocks, neither cancelling the other out, both visibly incomplete without the other's presence. The gardens give the district a civic anchor it couldn't have grown organically. The commercial accumulation gives the gardens a context that makes them feel inhabited rather than imposed.
This is the version of the question that rarely appears in brand strategy conversations, because it requires admitting that neither mode — pure emergence, pure design — is sufficient on its own. The skill is in knowing which one the situation is currently starved of.
> The city doesn't resolve the tension between planned and emergent identity. It holds both, and the holding is what makes it legible.
## What the Neighbourhood Reveals
There is a version of this observation that stays safely architectural — an interesting case study about urban development, filed away and forgotten. The more useful version asks what it means for any organisation trying to build something that outlasts the people who started it.
SoMa's pattern suggests that the most durable identities are the ones that survive discontinuity — not because they were protected by a strong brand guidelines document, but because they were embedded in enough specific, repeated, material decisions that the next wave of people could read them and build on them. The Salesforce Tower didn't invent the neighbourhood. It arrived late enough to inherit it.
For organisations navigating genuine change — a merger, a category shift, a leadership transition, a second act after a market rupture — the design problem is rarely about declaration. The launch announcement, the rebrand, the new positioning statement: these are the tower. They arrive last and name something that either already exists in the material of the organisation or doesn't exist at all, in which case the tower is just a tall building in an empty lot.
The underlying challenge is stratigraphic: what decisions, repeated at the level of the street rather than the skyline, are being deposited right now that the next wave of people will be able to read? For organisations introducing significant change, the real work happens in the material — in the choices that accumulate before anyone announces them. The tower names what's already there. If nothing is there, no announcement makes it so.
James' Perspective
Key idea
Durable identity survives discontinuity when it is embedded in material decisions rather than held in declarations.
Who this matters for
- Brand teams
- Creative leaders
- Product leaders
Related ideas
- Brand as Operating System
- Product Builds Brand
Books
- Use Design to Design Change