David Barrie

Civic revolutionaries

This is the clean and simple, inspirational image of cities that we like - and it's fantastic.

But in the London Observer, design writer and curator Dejan Sudjic offers a great reminder of some of the complicated and dirty casting that delivers this reality:

Cities are made by an extraordinary mix of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators.

They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary.

The hole-in-one here is that cities are made by people - and (more than) occasionally mad ones at that.

Not just the real estate dealers in their sheepskin coats, or the shady, cynical operators in City Hall but also the total fanatics.

This is an image of some of the bloody-minded obsessives that I have been working with over the last few years on an urban renewal project in the U.K.

There are about ten people missing from the shot but this picture includes community leaders, an architect, a property developer, a former school cook and a janitor who won an Order of the British Empire - in part for her commitment to the cause.

Every town or city in the world has such a group.

Dejan calls them urban obsessives.

Doug Henton of Collaborative Economics has a positive, more romantic catch-all description of the cadre. 

He calls them civic revolutionaries.

A new age of purgatory

According to Alex at Worldchanging

Optimism, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary.

I'm certain of this but just now nothing beats private equity investor David Rubenstein, CEO of the €1.1bn Carlyle Group, and his recent comment on the financial markets.

According to the London Financial Times,

Mr Rubenstein said that if 2007 was private equity's golden era, then 2008 marked the start of a new "purgatory age".

Thank your lucky stars that in Catholicism, Purgatory is a temporary punishment.

But remember that according to Dante, there's a problem...it's just one step up from Hell...and for a moment just check out who else is on the beach:

:-o

Despair image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Forbidden love

Scarborough is an outstanding play that was just staged at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

It tells the story of a teacher on a dirty weekend with a school student in a hotel bedroom in the English seaside town. The play is in to two parts. Each part centers on one couple. Both couples follow exactly the same script - but with genders reversed.

The play painfully - and hilariously - highlights society's schizophrenic attitude towards children, their sexuality and relationship with adults.

On the one hand, the scenario fulfills Lolita - a fantasy of an adult having an affair with a precocious young girl or boy, what one character sees

in me mam's magazines all the time. That Sadie Frost, she's always knocking off young lads and she's ancient.

Then cutting across the entire play is society's all-round obsession with perv and paedophilia:

AIDEN picks up the Sun, there is a paedophile story on the front page.

BETH: What's up with you?
AIDEN: I can't believe you bought this shit.

BETH starts to read his magazine.

AIDEN: Disgusting.
BETH: You don't have to read it.
AIDEN: I'm talking about the little kid who was molested.
BETH: Oh yeah - Pervert.
AIDEN: I mean, who could...
BETH: Fuckin' beast, they should lock him up and throw away the key.

In the last few months, Britain has become obsessed with child-snatching.

First there was  Madeleine McCann, then Shannon Matthews.

These stories are personal tragedies.

But why do they dominate our lives?

For sure, they express innocence lost.

But do they also expose a trauma or messed-up-ness mined by Scarborough - some kind of forbidden love, hidden love or profound guilt?

Go forth and aggregate

One of the key business technology trends of 2008, according to The McKinsey Quarterly [registration required], is making businesses from capturing information.

As we know from shopping sites and business-to-business product directories on the net, there's money to be made from accumulated pools of data.

But something we're failing to do in parallel is understand and exploit the value of accumulation and - more importantly - aggregation to social and economic progress.

A huge amount of information and relationships accumulate in national local government.

Extensive networks of diverse social, economic and physical assets aggregate around the commercial redevelopment and regeneration of towns and cities.

A vast diaspora of hopes and interests sit in devolved off and online groups of people, be it 5-a-side soccer leagues, Facebook groups, community gardeners or moderators of Wikipedia.

There's a vast amount of dispersed energy, enthusiasm, activity and innovation out there. And it's brilliant.

But a key challenge has to be how public managers - not just designers of online entertainment platforms - public initiatives - not just pressure groups - and central and local government - not just eccentric entrepreneurs or innovators - can aggregate this activity.

Why bother?

Because new value might be captured for the benefit of all.

So, here's a message for Lent:

Go forth and aggregate.

And start trading and packaging social, not just physical assets.

 

Dolly mixture

So a girl will be out in a dress and it will seem quite simple. And another girl will say, 'That's nice, but what's that?' pointing to a wooden carving on her shoulder. And then the girl will say, 'It's a wooden owl, actually, it's hand-carved'. And her friend will say. 'Lovely.'

Stylist Cathy Edwards sums up the look of her friend Emma Cook and her clothes designs in an article in the London Independent.

Absolutely nothing to do with the publicity picture of Alison Goldfrapp and an over-sized owl for her latest album  - but kind of connects - and is a great account of friendship any way...

Thanks to Style Bubble for the link to Emma Cook...

Slaves to the cult of de-clutter

This is an eagle-eyed view of a new square in the town of Castleford, England:

And this is what it was like five years ago:

An earlier age of crud:

Has given way to something brighter, more elegant and de-cluttered:

But my favorite image of the project is this one:

 

Why?

Because it makes me think about clutter - or more to the point, tidiness.

I was involved in the early stages of design development of the new main square in Castleford.

The selection and management of the design was devolved to a steering group made up of representatives of the local community - and by and large, people got what they wanted. 

The town is proud of the design. I am proud of the design. And there is little doubt that it has contributed to the $400m plus new investment that is now flowing in to the town.

But what gets me thinking is that for many years, the model for successful urban life has been the noise, disorderliness and messy mix of people and traffic of SoHo, New York.

Alongside, creativity has escaped linearity and order: be it ironic, awkward Britart, whimsy, casual Goldfrapp, the popularity of feature-length social documentary film-making, the chaos of social networking and exotic packaging of securitised debt.

And yet we're choosing to scrape the surface of our towns and cities and turn it in to clean, clear and crisp pavement.

In its wake has come outdoor food courts, not street markets and a sweep of control orders that segregate access to the streets.

An irony is that all of this has been done in the name of winning back public space.

Another is the derision that once greeted minimalist, conceptual art in '70s and '80s.

Why is the new public realm so out of sync with the grind, mess, whim and float of popular culture - and of our lives?

And how and why did the cult of de-clutter take hold?

Here's a quick list of some of the things that might have got us here:

• The cult of Copenhagen, Danish urban design guru Jan Gehl and the pedestrianisation of the city
• The stream of sparse, ambient Sigur Ros running through the veins of the design profession
• The massive, hidden influence of chic interiors by John Pawson
• The apolitical lure of an empty stage
• The rise of de-clutter and home cleaning TV shows
• Our un-ending anticipation - and expectation - that something big's about to happen

The problem is that quite often in these places, nothing big does happen.

It's as if city developers skipped the chapter in Jan Gehl, William Whyte or Jane Jacobs that said that "designed" public spaces will be empty of people most of the time if a user population doesn't live near by.

Is it time for the script to move on?

Time for urban designers and their clients to take all of that brilliant new energy and enthusiasm for public space, look at the popularity of artists like Peter Doig and realise something simple?

That what we like and what often works is not just tidy stuff but experiences and images that are colorful, casual and awkward?

Art's best kept fashion secret

What fuelled the action painting of American artist Jackson Pollock?

Was it angst? Nope.

Testosterone? Nope.

A sublimal drive towards fractal expressionism? Nope.

Tucked away in the print edition of this month's edition of V Magazine is the answer:

Pollock wore Converse All Star sneakers!

Time to re-write that macho history of Abstract Expressionism?

Who owns your house?

The crunch in the credit markets and bailout of investment houses' bad debts has revealed the globalization, complexity and connectedness of financial markets.

It has highlighted a fistful of opaque financial instruments designed to spread or hedge risk.

And it has cast as savior, sovereign-wealth funds operating out of countries like Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and China.

Today's Financial Times reveals that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is about to reveal plans to 'kitemark' mortgages according to risk: part of a plan to ease the market for wholesale mortgage lending.

But can I ask a simple, naive question: who owns the mortgage on your house?

Until the current financial crisis, I thought that I knew: a building society, a bank or other lender.

Now I am confused.

Is the bank's equity owned by the financial institution you signed up with and kept somewhere safe, secure,  local and known? Say a box with a brass-plate on it?

Or has it disappeared in to the global morass, held by the Bank of Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority or another institution answerable to those you have not democratically elected?

Is it being used as collateral to help finance other borrowers - at super-risky Northern Rock-style rates?

Or is it being used to support the buying of shares in Gazprom or to enable the risk incurred by contractors working on early ground work for a new terminal at Heathrow Airport?

Just now there is an emerging move to provide people with green mortgages.

Also for many years there have been well-established - if poor-performing - ethical investment funds.

In the future, will there be demand for more traceable mortgages and debts - products that make it clear who owns what and to whom?

Will the current crisis press for a review of the extent to which we are prepared to allow our livelihoods to be invested in the globalized economy?

The global-local debate is usually framed to take in issues of labor, natural resources, politics and culture.   

Perhaps now is the time to widen that agenda to include the roof over our head.

Wire is so passé

I can't resist sharing a second image from this week's Sunday Times' Style section, giving us all an inside track on the ultimate new fashion accessory: the cardboard box.

Move over Oskar Schlemmer.

Wire is so passé.

A warm glow of sustainability

When I came across this scene on a street in Shanghai not too long ago, I was filled with a warm glow of sustainability.

Of the ingenuity of humanity, the miracle of the bicycle and the circular metabolism of solid waste in cities - described by writer Herbert Girardet as a calmer, serener vision of cities.

Little did I know that the guy in the picture could have been a photographer's assistant, collecting props for a fashion shoot published today in the Style section of the London Sunday Times:

The coat is by Burberry Prorsum, made of gold foil snakeskin and retails at £6,500 ($12,900) - and is pretty gorgeous.

The pile of cardboard is by I Don't Know Who, with a current retail value of £100 ($198) per tonne.

When you next meet a Martian, I defy you to try and explain the style connection between the two.