This is more a creation story than a case study. When we started Right Angle in 2005, we had some fundamental beliefs that still underpin our work nearly two decades later. 

The first belief is that cities need help to grow in the right way. There is a mythology in urbanism about great places growing organically, but that only really happens in established neighbourhoods that already have everything they need and without large gaps they can afford to iterate slowly. At the scale of the city, or in emerging places, there must be a lot of intentional effort to direct its growth towards a sort of place that people want it to be. 

The second belief is that people need help choosing. We are often time-poor, information-poor, cash-poor, energy-poor. We exist in both social media and real-life echo chambers of our own values, so we are not regularly exposed to the new even though it could be good for us. 

The Thousands was a city guide network that addressed both these beliefs. It covered every state capital in Australia and grew to London, Tokyo and Bangkok too. The recipe was always fast and simple. Every week, via a team of local street journalists and photographers, we would release a very short guide on what inner-city people could do across retail, culture and experience. The guides not only helped people make better decisions about how to spend their time and money, they also cultivated a positive social, cultural and commercial fabric for the city. 

It all looked very amateur, niche and indie (which it was) but about two years after launching, The Thousands had a bigger readership in Australia than The Good Weekend which was the largest circulating national magazine at the time – and this was all happening just as MySpace was launching, so there was no social media for finding out what everyone else was doing. We helped businesses succeed, venues fill, art shows sell out, brands and bands launch. We helped ourselves by using the guide as a research tool and to support our other start-ups like Rooftop Cinema. Most importantly we helped our audience understand not just what their city could do for them, but what they could do for their city by choosing wisely. 

The business model for city guides is a media model: more eyeballs, more likes, more advertising revenue. That didn’t work for The Thousands which was concerned with what was good, not just what was popular. We needed to stay small as a community – a proposition that is now returning through Web3 but was not an option in the heady days of Web 2.0.  

As our urban innovation consultancy grew we needed to sell The Thousands, but the disciplines of street journalism, the thrill of discovering the new and the value of supporting a city of small enterprise still runs deep at Right Angle. Occasionally we look back at Issue 001 which is stored for prosperity on the Victorian State Library web archive as a snapshot of Melbourne’s world-famous city culture. It makes us proud because you’ve got to start somewhere.