David Barrie

Florence Broadhurst

Aren't these beautiful?

They're wallpaper designs by the Australian designer Florence Broadhurst.

According to an article in a recent edition of  Time magazine

Broadhurst was as outrageous as her designs. She sallied forth in Titian hair, orange false eyelashes, multicolored dresses and Plexiglas rings. Flamboyant charmer, avid dissembler and wily social climber.

Broadhurst launched her wallpaper business when she was in her sixties, after careers performing on the stage, running a trucking business and a dress salon. She was murdered in 1977 in Sydney.

Most excellent touchy-feely

To imagine that you can have mediocre standards because you're doing something that's got a touchy-feely thing to it, I think is complete shit.

Tim Smit, chief executive, the Eden Project, in a recent profile.

"I like people. I hope it shows."

In an interview with Lynn Barber, architect Will Alsop says that he believes that we all crave civic identity and that that's what's missing in much of Britain:

The politicians and planners make terrible assumptions about a lack of imagination in the general public, but they're much more imaginative and what they're really saying by and large is that they want the place that they live in to have an identity and be different from anywhere else.

He's right. In the urban renewal project in Castleford, Yorkshire that I have been involved with since 2002, local people have time and again sought to express a difference, reflected in either their participation in the project or  selection of an eccentric, disparate team of  architectural and landscape designers.

Urban renewal and economic development is obsessed with differentiation. But it doesn't demand oodles of marketing spend and brand angst to develop a position that future customers will see as unique.

Talk to the resident. Talk to the consumer. Talk to the taxpayer. Then fashion a process that can express and expand their unique sense of place.

Designing gardens and houses

You cannot design a garden until you know where the house will be.

So says the London Financial Times  in its critique of the Government's lack of movement on committing to deliver Crossrail,  a major new proposed development of London's transport system.

This may be true when it comes to major infrastructure development but the F.T.'s comment assumes a sequential mindset that has  slowed progress of improvement of the public realm throughout the world.

In city development, the idea is to wait until decisions are made about structures and buildings, then worry about the ground that surrounds it. And in life, wait until all the ducks are lined up before making a move.

There is little doubt that investment requires firm ground and context within which to pitch.

There is also little doubt that society has suffered greatly from roads which lead nowhere, chaotic planning and beautiful but useless acts of isolated expression.

But the mindset expressed by the F.T. ultimately disables entrepreneurship, marginalises the incremental and lays the ground for analysis paralysis.

Why not start with the garden? Why not apply the ethos of incremental development  that we apply to our daily lives to the business of making change? Why not tear a leaf out of Reyner Banham and others' ideas of Non-Plan for a moment and think the unthinkable: a world without planning?

Social-networking and software development have shown the power and value of open, evolutionary narratives.

Scientific analysis of marathon sports, such as long-distance swimming has also shown that  "you make your own water."

A rather anxious-looking me!

DSC_0524, originally uploaded by CKS007.

A rather anxious looking me at the recent Doors Juice 9 Design Conference in Delhi, India.