David Barrie

Sites as ecosystems

Over at U.K. construction magazine Building, urban renewal specialist Jackie Sadek comments on the impact of the recession on the industry and makes the point that

Developers who can respond, not just on ability to deliver but on a range of social objectives, stand to become "partners of choice"....We urgently need a new paradigm.

There's a clue to that paradigm in the familiar but esoterically called world of 'multi-sided platforms'. 

These aren't the sort of platforms that enable one to move from A to B as in a caper by Super Mario:

But the world of Facebook:

And according to a recent paper published by Harvard Business School, TopCoder, HBS and the 12-hectare sprawling "mini-city" of Rappongi Hills in Japan (above and below):

The example of Rappongi Hills is not convincing but the idea of multi-sided platforms (or MSPs) and their links with the process of designing and delivering urban renewal is tantalizing.

In their paper for HBS, Kevin J. Boudreau and Andrei Haigu define MSPs as

platforms which enable interactions between multiple groups of surrounding consumers and "complementors".

Platforms are defined as products, services or technologies which serve as foundations upon which other parties can build complementary products, services or technologies.

A multi-sided platform is both a platform and a market intermediary: a place in which distinct groups of consumers and "complementors" interact through MSPs.

So what has this got to do with urban renewal and real estate development?

A lot. And it's way more than simple ideas of networks and network theory.

To the bottom right of the above picture is a site known as Roath Basin in the docklands of Cardiff, Wales in the U.K.

The site is being brough forward for development as a new mixed-use neighbourhood by a development company called Igloo Regeneration and joint-venture partners the Welsh Assembly Government.

As part of the development strategy for the site, Igloo has commissioned me and associates to work with public, private, voluntary and community groups in adjacent neighborhoods to ensure that the site is developed in such a way as to connect with the social, economic and cultural past, present and future of the area and that the area and Igloo can leverage mutual opportunity from the £150m ($225m) or so new investment in the area.

We are working with local organizations and Igloo on designing a sequence of all sorts of tangible and intangible, real, digital and layered 'interventions' to help make this happen.

This image is of a new bridge in Castleford, Yorkshire that me and an army of others helped make happen between 2002 and 2007.

The bridge was designed by designers and built by engineers: but it was actually realized by a co-ordinated confederacy of local interests - both institutional and communal - linked through a single initiative.

The initiative became a vehicle for transformational change not just because of the coherent, co-ordinated efforts of all but also the fact that connected to the main 'capital' programme was a series of social, economic and cultural initiatives and opportunities for people to organize their own projects and activities and co-opt or link them in to the main programme of work.

This is an image of a concluding event in a programme of work that me, a design company, artist and team of public agencies helped organize last year in Middlesbrough, North East England.

In the project, people grew food in vacant public places across the town, took cookery classes in neighbourhood centres and then, come the final harvest, cooked a 'town meal', in an event attended by over 8000 people and curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith.

The important point about this project is that over 1000 people in over 80 organizations across the town elected to grow food at diverse, dispersed locations: in school yards, public parks, the backs of community centers and front doorsteps.

Here's a picture of Margaret from Gresham Neighbourhood Centre taking it easy in an empty growing container: 

The sponsoring bodies of all three initiatives were/are an amalgam of public and private investors, non-departmental public bodies, charities, NGOs, arts organizations and individuals willing to grant time and effort.

But the unifying element of all three initiatives is that they see/saw physical development sites as an opportunity to create or support new ecosystems of economic, social and cultural activity.

And a process was designed around those opportunities that enabled people and institutions to self-organize and innovate.

None of this is new. It's going on all over the place. Except that more often that not, business models are unable to admit or compute the added value that these processes can bring to the original land asset.

And people often get land-locked in the mechanics and confines of the physical world.

In a recent event at Harvard Business School, James Breyer, an early investor in Facebook and a director of Wal-Mart Stores, commented on the difficulties of understanding and codifying the vast amount of new daily information generated on the Web.

To date, there is no company that allows one to take quickly all of this information 'in the cloud' and integrate it with the vast arrays of information in the physical world.

And Susan Decker of Yahoo! went some distance to start to profile the sort of outfit who might offer a solution:

Companies that will do pretty well will create a dashboard of simplicity that is very open to the whole Internet, not just the company it may be associated with, and will elevate social connections in a way that drives dollars.

Jackie Sadek is right. We urgently need a new paradigm in urban renewal.

And as Jackie writes, it is about reducing risk by using public sector assets.

But it's also about widening and changing our view of what is and isn't an asset.

It's about creating real, live, hydra-headed, multi-sided, open platforms to do the work.

And it's about finding new ways of valuing social connections: perhaps using new currencies, such as energy, food or the joint productive power of the Web.

The obvious challenge is to find ways to win a critical mass of adoption and demonstrate how the value extracted can be maximized. (And this is where the skill *really* comes in.)

But the sponsors of all of the above projects intuitively understand the opportunities of working a new paradigm.

The less obvious challenge is not to try to clone initiative but to push public and private sector organizations and individuals in your area or domain to get with that paradigm.

They need to become sustainably-minded social entrepreneurs.

Rappongi Hills by Marc Lee Pack. Mario capture by NES--still-the-best. Cloud by Reko.

The Spirit of a Moment

What a week in politics. 

One thing stands out for me....a great quotation from JFK I read on a train on Wednesday. 

I know it's sexist. I know the enchantment may pass. But god, it captures the spirit of a moment:

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.

 

You've been shopping - we won't tell...

Hidden away in the packaging options of designer fashion retailer Net-a-Porter.com is something shocking.

If I was a right-wing columnist, I'd have a field day. A person who harbored the need to drive a flat-bed truck in to a designer store, my excuse. An anti-packaging eco-warrior, confused. 

For first, we had the worry of men hanging around fairgrounds offering kids sweeties.

Then, we had clinics and pharmacies handing out methadone to heroin users.

Now, we have Net-a-Porter offering 'Discreet Packaging'.

As an email shot said earlier this week:

Hide all your fabulous NET-A-PORTER purchases from inquisitive eyes with our new Discreet Packaging. Your secret is safe with us! Your items will arrive in an unbranded recycled brown paper bag and we'll be the only ones who know...

In other words,

You've been shopping - we won't tell ....

Fortunately, I'm a slut for fashion. And no Iron Man. But if you don't believe me, go here and click on Packaging Options.

But please be aware - and this is an act of exceptional public service - that the anonymous package just delivered to our door might not be a part for your ventilation system, a bulk purchase of lo-price instant coffee from Staples or a job-lot of ricin - but something by Balmain that nestles on Rodarte heels. 

Remember, Shhh...your secret is safe with us...

Image by Fulanoinc.

 

Delivering Digital Inclusion

'Aggregating intent' is fast becoming a cliche of the age.

Everyone just now is busy finding devices to collate content, be it Hank Paulson and toxic debt, Google gathering services in the clouds or users of Linked  In amassing 'friends' to convert in to streams.

The U.K. Government has published a plan for delivering digital inclusion - to enable the estimated 17 million people in the country who are not using computers and the Internet to benefit from what it offers.

The plan is a massive, commendable, and totally exciting effort. It aggregates policies, best practice examples, academic research and international comparators. And it headlines serious integration and co-ordination of initiative at the highest levels of government. 

Now it is only a consultation document but there appears to be one key omission from all of this pooling together of knowledge and intent: there's no creative strategy.

The consultation is good on establishing the terrain, frameworks and infrastructure of initiative - also at pointing out inspirational examples of good practice.

But then it falls in to a danger of pipe-laying and plumbing - thinking about structures, not about fluids - and so falls under the spell of project-itis.

It suggests 'pathways to digital inclusion' - but dare not declare a preferred route. 

We know that use of technology and media is highly subjective and often non-linear.

We know that the challenge of public service is to support individualized needs for advocacy and support and bridge the disconnect between the individual and organizations designed to serve them.

But without an up-front creative strategy, these objectives become harder to deliver and consultation becomes an epic, energetic scoping exercise rather than a supportive, guiding hand on where to start and how to make it all work.

This is not to diss the authors.

This is a problem endemic to a 'stakeholder economy' and the cult of feasibility: a space in which partners and different interest groups are brought together for common cause, only for no-one to be brave or bold to jump off the cliff and deliver a narrative.

With the nationalization of some banks in the U.K. and a new understanding starting to emerge that the market doesn't necessarily act in either its share or stakeholders' interest, is it time for Government to stop fine-tuning the art of building frameworks but take hold of the story and declare its colors as a creative force?

Creative need not mean a return to command-and-control.

It can mean being imaginative, responsive to the market and declaring an understanding that processes of self-organizing often need leadership and a helping hand. 

Images courtesy of Adult Swim and youngfook.

A new alphabet of sensation

It's a familiar human condition to find yourself in a space of communication but unable to string a sentence together.

But it's strange to find yourself in a space of communication that invites, say verbal communication, only to find, say, writing a message on a card and flashing it up a more effective and viable form of expression.

On the Net - and especially Flickr - there's a sub-genre of expression/exhibitionism/conceptual photography that involves creating and uploading images of things - but often yourself or your mate - covered in scrawled messages. 

This marker madness stretches from people saying hello, to declaring love or giving instructions on how to cook them.

As ever, Yoko One must have fluxed this years ago but in the context of the net and all it's supposed to be doing as a platform for seamless communication and exchange, it's puzzling - but interesting. 

Why the need to 'self-billboard' and send scribbled messages in a bottle if you're part of an epic, happy, super-friendly media party?

Plain old exhibitionism?

Experiment?

Or  evidence of the boundaries of the Net and ways people are trying to escape its isolationism.

In other words, a new language of Robinson Crusoe-isms?

Couch image by danske.  Come clean me by titania*A.

Someday it will happen...

The speed with which it's happening is worrying.

But the politics may be pleasing...

Exposure of the contradictions and fealties of the triumphalist capitalism we've lived through over the last ten years.

Newspapers in the UK are starting to fill with stories that demonstrate how the new money order is in crisis and political relationships and value systems are going up the Kyber.

First, the London Financial Times reports that the Russian government has made $50bn of state aid available to help finance the external debt of the country's oligarchs.

But then ES Magazine salivates over the opening of a new branch of Gagosian in Moscow.

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is caught soliciting money from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

But at the same time his party is pushing itself forward as compassionate conservatives devoted to social responsibility and fraternity -  and going to work on a bike, not a yacht.

As Charlie Leadbeater writes in a brilliant article in this week's Spectator

The crisis may make us turn away from cosmopolitan connections.

It may also turn us towards

a simpler, back-to-basics capitalism.

But in its wake will also come all sorts of stuff like exposure of sham values of honesty and humility, of lazy media punting exuberant capitalism and posh people posing as friends of the pauper.

The challenge has got to be to get ahead of all of this.

As Charlie says

We should be searching for a new kind of capitalism.

He's right.

But the question is, what's the currency?

Here's a list

• Cash
• Energy
• Food
• Online social networks

Take your pick.

Image by Kent Rogowski.

Listen to the Panda

Architecture writer Arjen Oosterman has collected a brilliant series of essays in the current edition of Volume magazine.

'Engineering Society' is a wholesale investigation in to the vogue for popular/citizen/'service user' involvement in the making of cities.

What interests me in particular is an essay by Peer 2 Peer theorist Michel Bauwens.

Bauwens surveys the basic business models emerging around peer-production - what he defines as the ability to create value in common - and attributes the success of Linux and Wikipedia to our need for third parties - platforms for bridging or strengthening ties between people.

Now the neeks out there will know that all sorts of mechanisms and vehicles have been created in recent years to try to bind people together to the cause of social progress, ways other than command-and-control government, war or other forms of peer-group pressure.

And there's much discussion going on in the U.K. at the moment to experiment with how the Net might play a role in acting as a network agent of change in poor communities - and next year, I'm planning to give it a go in my own social media project.

But one question nags...what does a third party look like? What are its constituent parts? What does it do?

Here's one answer, scribbled on a scrap of paper by my friend Ben, after three hours of professional therapy and East 8 Hold Up cocktails at Milk and Honey:

The mix might help define the role of 'cultural broker', 'transformational designer' and/or what we have in our heads when we use the phrase 'enabling government':

2 parts - Thought Leadership
4 parts - Stakeholder Management
6 parts - Social Entrepreneurship
8 parts - Project Delivery, not Consultancy

What do you think?

Picture by Zhao Bandi, Laid Off, 1999.

A painter speaks...

Here's another antidote to the daily news of irredeemable credit default swaps and synthetic collateral debt obligations that don't, er, add up.

It's a call to arms to the visceral by German artist Gerhard Richter:

I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.

So there.

Picture courtesy of Jorge Franganillo.

An accidental Christo situation

This is an abandoned Victorian workman's hut - wrapped for preservation - on a vacant development site that I am currently working on in Wales.

It's a brilliant piece of accidental art that's taken on totemic qualities over the past week.

Either by design or accident, I'm trying to let a fabulous existential thing kick in before reading grim financial news and am reading J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition on the London underground on the way to work.

And it's to be recommended:

Beach Fatigue

After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Though next week I think that I'm going to turn to steamy Sidney Sheldon.

Filthy rich, sovereign wealth chic

 

One of the major cultural effects of economic catastrophe - a moment when it seems, as J.G. Ballard once wrote clock time is no longer valid - is what it does to wealth, its perception and celebration.

In their support for the part-nationalization of British banks, it's heartening to hear the leaders of the British Conservative Party calling for curbs on executive pay and bonuses - even if just a few weeks ago they were against a ban on short-term selling.

But what is - and will be - further revealed as the nightmare progresses is the total incongruity of all existing value systems of aspiration.

No less than three of ten 'news' pages in this week's Sunday Times newspaper in the U.K. told stories of the super-rich:

    * Lakshmi Mittal's paper loss of £16bn in the credit crunch
    * Charles Saatchi backing protest art in the Middle East
    * Roman Abramovich's new super-yacht

The previous week, the magazine carried four pages on the spending habits of Princes and Sheikhs - letting us know the amazing detail that in billionaire circles concierge services are known as my outsourced wife.

Look around you and filthy rich sovereign-wealth chic is everywhere.

It drives attention to Damien Hirst and Kate Moss.

It fills all of CNN's commercial breaks.

It's maidservants have played a big role in popularizing raunch culture.

And it provides acres of tidbits in the margin that we are supposed to buy and aspire to - like London-based organizing service Practical Princess who provide, according to a recent edition of W Magazine:

folding templates for sweaters, thin rubberized hangers that save space and prevent slippage; plastic boxes for off-season storage; clear cases for stowing costume baubles; and suede drawer liners for protecting fine jewelry

The stuff is needed, according to the company's founder because

Clothes are like food: if you make them look appealing, you're more inclined to reach for them.

Clients: Camilla Al Fayed, Melissa Odabash, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and the poster-girl for all this, Tamara Mellon.

But what happens to all of this as we enter an age of the super-rich selling up and disappearing from vision and the chic-est thing about sovereign wealth is the brown manila folder containing the $1bn cheque from the manager of the firemen's pension fund in South Korea?

Why bother to ask the question?

Because culture has been obsessed with excess capital and how to spend it over the last ten years.

Because early-adopting Notting Hillbillies have (ironically) driven consumer markets for ethical life values, such as sustainability.

And a key pivot of celebrity - as well as cures for loneliness - has been the Balenciaga handbag.

We love it. I love it. But it's not going to float boats any more.

Time to become a South Korean fireman?

Or just gloat at New Conservatism and the right-wing press tie itself in knots, celebrating the filthy rich while equally donning the mantle of austerity?