David Barrie

Fields of gold

This is an image of the celebrated Not a Cornfield art and land project in Los Angeles:

 

And this is an image of the existing landscape of a housing estate in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England that was involved in an urban farming initiative I ran last year:

Yesterday, the price of wheat skyrocketed as Kazakhstan, one of the world's largest exporters of grain, said it would impose export tariffs to curb sales of wheat. The reason: to contain domestic inflation of nearly 20%.

Dear city mayors, planners and architects,

How about reviewing those renewal strategies based on physical, social and cultural build and write a Five Year Crop Plan?

Be inspired by the spatial planning of Not a Cornfield:

Or the first vision of architects Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn for the town of Middlesbrough as a productive urban landscape, in a project enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time, One North East and The Design Council, England:

Viljoen and Bohn's plan connected tissues of land that might be cultivated, from existing parkland, open green spaces and allotment sites across town to places that local people chose to grow food  as part of the initiative and would like to see urban agriculture happening in the future (red dots above/green dots below):

Not a Cornfield is described as a sculpture. Viljoen's plan for Middlesbrough: an edible town.

It remains to be seen whether spikes in commodity prices, peak oil, the dearth of productive arable land and the changing metabolism of compact cities will make all of this financially viable.

But you've got to admit that the vision of an urban design for cities as an unfenced Glastonbury Festival or embargoed Havana is compelling - even if Fidel Castro has stepped down and you don't like hippies.

Urban farming images courtesy of Dott07 Urban Farming. The project was enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time Ltd., One North East and The Design Council. All rights reserved. Urban Farming Project Site map, copyright of Middlesbrough Council.

A seat guru speaks

 

The Wall Street Journal reports that

The current business cycle will go down in the history books as one which confirmed that leadership in the global economy is now shifting from the old industrial countries to the emerging market countries.

One eccentric indicator of the strength, value and nature of that emerging market is in medical tourism.

A recent research paper by a professor at the Harvard Business School plotted the rise of medical tourism for everything from cardiac care to plastic surgery to hip and knee replacements.

What used to be rare is now commonplace: traveling abroad to receive medical treatment, and to a developing country at that.

And a recent report in the Financial Times, London pointed up key destinations as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey.

Some researchers are looking at whether US employers would be willing to pay for a covered employee's medical procedure of equivalent quality abroad so as to lower overall healthcare costs.

This change (or hobble) in the demographics of air travel is interesting.

Medical tourism also marks the purchase of services from emerging markets way beyond technical support for banking transactions, escape from IT hell or heavy-breathing.

But first things first.

Please take special care when retrieving your luggage from that overhead locker.

And when you can't get that seat by the emergency exit, kindly refrain from smoking in the toilets and discover your inner Mother Teresa.

Image courtesy of Geraldi.

Revolting local events

This is Belgain artist James Ensor's famous Christ’s Entry into Brussels:

This is an image of the March of the Dissenters, a series of opposition protests that took place in Russia in 2006 and 2007:

And this is an image of a community event held in Yorkshire in 2004 to raise public interest in the renewal of a dead-beat public space:

All three are images of carnival.

In a recent edition of Mute, journalists Dmitry Vorobyev and Thomas Campbell made a scathing attack on the development of Saint Petersburg in Russia, a city

besieged by elite-backed architectural mega-projects and micro-interventions.

The authors described the activities of Living City, a group who protested against proposals by authorities to turn Palace Square, the heart of the Russian Empire, in to a gigantic skating rink.

Living City decided to make public its 'support' for this initiative on behalf of all sporting enthusiasts. Armed with ski poles, swim fins, an inflatable mattress, and a basketball, activists appeared on the square, where they began frantically engaging in their favourite sports.

They thus drew attention to the fact that the authorities hadn't yet thought to 'renovate' Palace Square and also make it a venue for skiers, swimmers, and basketball fanatics.

The skating rink went ahead. :(

But two weeks ago, a Court ruled that its construction was illegal and ordered it to be closed and dismantled. :)

According to the writers in Mute, this is one small victory for groups and movements in Russia in which

thousands and tens of thousands of ‘non-aligned’ individual activists and ordinary concerned citizens can express their distress at the direction their beloved city has taken.

But it's also ammo against those who think that community events and civic participation are naff; and carnival is just something ecstatic and Latin American - or a cheesey, awkward essay in pointless juggling.

For be it people pretending to ski on a city square or ordinary citizens laying down in a long line in park, carnival is about performance, as well as celebration and community. 

Carnival can also be a form of protest.

Evolving Britain

Sometimes the ability of capitalism to absorb debate, trends and just get on with it is a joy to behold.

This is the headline of an advertisement by U.K. property development company Land Securities in last week's edition of real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required].

The company is marketing one of its shopping malls that has space devoted especially to local and regional independent retailers. The ad goes on to say:

Evolving Britain needs cities with local character and identity. So in our recent redevelopment of the Princesshay centre in Exeter we reserved a street just for independent retailers.

In the last few years, Britain's high streets have become the battle-ground for debate on Clone Towns, with focus thrown on the prevalence and might of national and international grocery stores.

Hostilities have just broken out again with the publication by the Competition Commission of proposals to improve competition between grocery retailers in local markets and address relationships between retailers and their suppliers.

Journalists have taken up pro- and anti-supermarket positions. 

On one side is India Knight of The Times:

Supermarkets are like tower block housing: what once looked like the future now feels mired in the past and what once felt thrilling and new now seems tired and passé.

On the other is Sathnam Saghara writing in the same paper:

Does it matter to shoppers in Watford that their main shopping thoroughfare resembles the high street in Inverness? Isn't your average branch of Boots a nicer place to be than your average independent Happy Shopper?...And is it really true that independent retailers have character? One independent Indian convenience store/Portuguese café/fried chicken outlet seems much like any other to me.

Meanwhile the property market brilliantly adjusts its pitch.

Next month, there's a Slow Food Festival at LandSec's mall in Exeter, hosted by a deli called Chandos featuring wine by the glass and baguettes made up with their own shop produce.

In effect, Evolving Britain continues on its merry way, angsting about food and its distribution, rather than supply.

For grain prices are currently at record highs around the world.

Pakistan recently launched ration cards to provide subsidised food for nearly 7m households.

And last week an undersecretary at the (alarmingly called) Ministry for Social Solidarity in Egypt - the world's largest importer of wheat -  revealed that

The bread subsidy alone went up by around $820m last year to reach $2.45bn.

There's a simple message in all of this: Evolving Britain...worry not about where you buy your bread - but do worry about what it costs.

Will it make a beautiful ruin?

They're back! Nuclear power stations that is - not the Spice Girls or dropped hemlines.

Time magazine reports on the comeback of nuclear energy and plans worldwide to build a new generation of 'zero-carbon' reactors.

The U.K. Government is making the running, with a recent announcement by the Business Secretary that he hopes to have a new reactor completed by 2020.

Time once again to ask a question that teams of designers, artists and others wrangled with in 1994 in the U.K. in a project I ran called Power to Change.

Four teams of architects, landscape designers, engineers and others, including environmentalists, writers and artists were invited to brainstorm the future of the site of a decommissioning nuclear power station in Snowdonia, Wales.

The Trawsfynydd Magnox power station was opened in 1963, generated power for twenty-eight years, closed in 1993 and it was estimated that it would take 135 years to dismantle.

The question posed by the project was

What should Trawsfynydd become and how might the future of its site bring new prosperity to the community?

After a year of design brainstorming, community projects, access to the station and exploration of its surrounding landscape, a series of ideas was born, critiqued by local people and a panel of experts that included design guru Cedric Price and artist Rachel Whiteread.

Team 1 proposed celebrating, not burying the site and turning it in to a model decommissioning factory.

Led by architect Will Alsop and artist Bruce McLean, the team included writer Mel Gooding, theater director David Gothard, engineer Matthew Wells and regeneration developer Roger Zogolovitch and argued:

If the Tate Gallery can open branches in relevant artistic communities like St Ives, Cornwall, the Science Museum should have a presence in a place which will witness one of the most significant developments in twentieth century technology.

Team 2 was led by Ove Arup & Partners and proposed burying the station's turbine halls in hills of slate, vegetating it, then up-lighting the surrounding hills with narrow beams of projected light.

Team 3 was led by architect and artist James Wines of Site Environmental Design.

James proposed turning the site in to a resource and polemic on the global lack of information on waste management. 

He proposed ripping down the turbine halls, greening the surfaces of the station, instigating research in to water contamination, cleaning up the site using phyto-remdiation and creating an International Energy Communications Center to hold relevant data on the decommissioning of all the world's nuclear stations.

Team 4 was made up of architects Ushida Eisaku, Kathryn Findlay, engineer Tim Macfarlane and music composer Gavin Bryars.

Their response - the fruit of video-conference visioning between the U.K. and Japan - was 

rather than leave two large, stainless steel skips in the landscape, let's get dermatological!

The team proposed turning the site in to a media center, exploiting the skills of electrical engineers, Snowdonia as a popular film location and the value of the site as a place of technology and solitude.

And using the metaphor of right brain intuition and left brain logic

We'll cover the reactor halls in a podded, white PVC skin and enclose certain activities. By covering the outmoded technology of the station with the new technology of our centre, we'll stimulate the brain's constant replacement of dead cells and strike up a new connection with the surrounding landscape - its "body".

Fourteen years ago, climate change and the cult of zero-carbon weren't understood as the context for either the construction or de-construction of such sites.

Architectural design may also have been slightly stuck in a groove of making and remaking facades. 

But now that energy and economic cycles have created a new logic for nuclear power, a challenge remains for designers, landscape urbanists, politicians and engineers alike.

And it continues to be best expressed by Basil Spence, the original architect of the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in a question he asked back in 1963:

What's the point of community involvement, 'co-design' etc. etc.?

...as scribbled on a stickie at a recent event I ran in Chongqing, South-West China.

But it's something more.

An architecture of social relations, brilliantly expressed in a story told by Barack Obama in a speech inAtlanta on the eve of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday [Video here/transcript here]:

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

I am Jérôme Kerviel's girlfriend

It's been agony following the London Financial Times' handling of the story of Jérôme Kerviel: the man who cost French bank Societe Generale €4.9bn.

Over the last few weeks, the paper has blushed at the temptation to go large on the financial world's one and only genuine human interest story.

But over the last few days, the newspaper has set aside its faux sang-froid.

In an analysis piece, the FT milks its contacts and knowledge to gave a first inside view on how a €1.4bn profit for Kerviel at the end of 2007 became a loss of €6.3bn.

But the best elements of the story are the small but dramatic chinks in the armor of the boring narrative that is the stock-in-trade of investment banking journalism.

Jean-Pierre Mustier, the head of SocGen's investment banking division spent hours interrogating Mr Kerviel in the aftermath of his Icarus-like plunge...

When questioned by about 15 people from SocGen's back office risk control division, according to Mr Mustier, the young trader "took some persuasion" before he would admit having breached his authorized limits...

"I kept him in front of me for a long time," says Mr Mustier.

Now this sounds scary.

15 interrogrators! Sounds more like a death squad.

Then when Mr Mustier told Daniel Bouton, SocGen's chairman, that there was a problem with hidden trades in the equity division

The SocGen chairman was so sickened by the actions of the trader who had tarnished his lofty reputation that he refused to meet him and later called him a "terrorist".

How much would you have paid SocGen to have been a fly on the wall of Mr Bouton's office that day?

For more personal engagement with the story, I'd recommend connecting with Kerviel at Linkedin.com?

If you're looking for alternative starf**king, get a T-shirt from MissKerviel.com with the slogan Jérôme Kerviel's girlfriend.

However you're positioned on Kerviel, I'd recommend one simple Woody Allen-ish lesson: if you have to go on the fiddle, just stick with the office squash ladder.

Over the counter avant-garde

According to Estates Gazette, the real estate magazine, artist Damien Hirst is to open his first art shop in Marylebone, London.

Known as Other Criteria, the store is to sell artwork, T-shirts, postcards, plates and books featuring the artist's work.

The London Evening Standard reports that

Among the Hirst items on sale will be an 18-carat gold charm bracelet featuring different types of pills as the charms. It costs £250,000, while a set of 12 plates decorated by the artist costs £10,000.

A key reason for the venture, according to one of the directors of the new retail company is that

Art has to be experienced and the shop is where people can experience it in a democratic atmosphere rather than a West End gallery.

In an age in which Kate Moss designs clothing for Topshop and pitched battles mark the opening of sales at Primark, it feels right for the avant-garde to see the shop floor as the contemporary Palace Square.

Even better, Hirst's diversification suggests a total revision of the history of art - as a canon of artists as unfulfilled shopkeepers, not angst-ridden expressionists.

Duchamp doing bathroom fittings.

Fragonard retailing cosmetics.

And Caravaggio doing Pinot Grigio - with a personal shopper service downstairs devoted to Colt Leather.

Amy, Lily and the return of rave

Thanks be to D.J. Mark Ronson.

Guest on a recent edition of NPR's All Songs Considered, Ronson threw a blinding bit of musical anthropology in to the mix.

What's inspired his horny production of Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen?

Answer: the totally brilliant Stone Roses' Fool's Gold.

Madchester is usually a hermetically-sealed sea of rave. A snow-globe of floppy fringes and fishing hats.

Is it coming out of the cold? Or have I just been living in the fridge?

The gold roads sure a long road
Winds on through the hills for fifteen days...

(And Rowena Ronson, if you read this, please get in touch!)

A sexy graph

Buried in a survey of sovereign-wealth funds in the Economist is this sexy graph.

It shows the extent to which those obsessed with sustainable development, one planet living, energy security and peak oil have to set their sights firmly on the financial markets.

The graph shows how much the value of equities outdid oil between 1985 and 2007.

And it tells a simple story:

Better for an exporter to sell as much oil as it can today and invest the proceeds, than to leave the stuff in the ground in the hope of spreading production over the decades.

In other words, produce now while the going is good.

In my work in urban development, I'm starting to work on ways and means in which financial products linked to property might induce a more sustainable, efficient and healthy local market.

But the graph from Morgan Stanley suggests that innovation of consumer products is almost beside the point.

Financial performance of major listed companies and the relationship between sustainability and shareholder value is what matters.

And elsewhere in the Economist, there's bad news.

In a survey of corporate social responsibility, the magazine reports that two of the best-known indices - the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good - under perform the market.

And that AccountAbility, a British think-tank

admits to the inconvenient truth that its 2007 ranking of the Fortune Global 100 companies by their progress on building sustainability into their business shows no connection with their financial performance.

There is a message in this.

Unless and until we find ways to boost the price and value of virtue, sustainability may remain a composite, common sense, piecemeal phenomenon, rather than a critical object of competitive advantage.