David Barrie

Building digital bridges

The U.K. Government has recently published Digital Britain, a plan that seeks to establish the framework for the roll-out and use of broadband technology in the country in the future.

Part of the plan is to establish ways and means by which the 'digitally excluded' can have access to the vast resources offered by the internet, rather than become the untouchables of the knowledge economy.

There's a huge amount going on in the field of Digital Participation just now - and some of the biggest shouts have to be reserved for the grassroots activism of Will Perrin, Talk About Local and the Digital Engagement network in the U.K., the ideas being generated by the Network Weaving group in Ohio, Australian academic Marcus Foth's work on how 'interactive systems' can be designed to support social networks in urban neighborhoods and, as ever, the guiding lights of Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater.

But as young people's digital engagement consultant Tim Davies writes in his post on the website of the Royal Society of Arts' Connected Communities program:

sometimes it seems like there can be a gulf between the economics focussed vision of Digital Britain, and the social justice discourse coming from grass roots and hyper-local social media and digital inclusion projects.

Meaning: there's a huge amount going on just now on the framework and supply side of digital inclusion but there's a gap in the middle.

Implication: if we don't sort out ways, means and opportunities to connect the dots of public involvement online, alongside boosting participation and access to technology, society and culture won't capture maximum benefit.

This is an image of a bridge that I helped deliver in Castleford, West Yorkshire. It's a major piece of new infrastructure for a small town that has won awards. Yes, it was designed by an architect. And yes, it was paid for by the state. But underpinning its commissioning and design evolution was a process that aggregated community effort and organization across the entire town and which spawned the formation of a new community group who acted as client and key driver of the bridge project. 

This is a composite image of an event held in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England in 2007 that was attended by 8000 people and was the culmination of a process through which over 60 different community organizations grew food in over 240 different spaces and places across the town.

A framework for participation and a narrative was established, then local people elected to get involved, then more and more people got involved, participating on their own terms and, in the end, their aggregated effort has had important impact upon the future of their community.

These projects demonstrate two things that I think are relevant to innovation around digital inclusion.

Both have been successful in generating a community return and triggering new external financial investment - the bridge has been central to Castleford leveraging over £200m ($320m) of new investment, Middlesbrough a new £4m ($6.5m) program linked to supporting a healthier town, with urban agriculture at its center. 

But more importantly, both have established mid-level platforms or enabled processes that have collected up existing local initiative, networked them, helped consumers establish a vision for their community and created a narrative that has allowed other groups and people to self-organize.

Now none of this is brain-surgery: those experienced in community organization and urban renewal have been doing similar things for years, boosted by the need to mobilize volunteering, the privatization of public services and the need for smaller towns and cities to construct business cases for investment around a mixed bag of diverse and fragmented land assets.

I have also posted on this theme quite a lot - forgive me! - linked to networking data-gathering, approaching development sites as 'ecosystems' or the value of middle-up innovation in local government.

So what's the relevance to Digital Britain?

• There needs to be acute focus pulled on building the community collective online, if what's been called 'digital maoism' is not to create another billion community activists, this time online, who are as disenfranchised as those in the real world
• It would be helpful for policymakers to link to those involved in community organizing in urban regeneration and renewal, since they have expert experience at creating and enabling what's known as 'bridging capital'
• Whether our romantic streak likes it or not, economic and urban policy nowadays is devolving to the regional and metropolitan level. This system demands localism but suggests that hyper-localism might benefit politically and economically from being joined up somewhere higher in the local political order
• Community organization in urban renewal and the delivery of urban policy benefits from a thematic, non-stove-piped approach to the design and delivery of public services. In digital participation, the provision, receipt and generation of news as a public service seems to be emerging as a key to delivering this. 

All of this leads to two questions:

• What's the infrastructure that can act as both frame and driver to digital participation in the future?
• What's the hook that will encourage people to use the Internet for positive actions or what Clay Shirky has called "online barn raisings"?

In urban renewal, the hook is the opportunity to contribute to improving your prospects and the world outside your front door.

If we believe that social technology can have social benefit, it might be useful to be led by this and think harder about promoting the immediate benefits of online existence.

On one level, humanity is already doing this, using Twitter to get the message out from the streets of Teheran and Moldova and then news networks and academics picking up on the use of digital media as an instrument of expression and freedom. 

But perhaps on a more mundane level, policy makers and digital practioners might think more on the line of networking existing online social media activity. 

If this effort were connected with the larger process of economic improvement of towns, cities and commuities, it's uninpsired name would be the phrase  'digital renewal'.

Images courtesy of knittingskwerlgirl, McDowell Benedetti & Partners and the Design Council.

Things are getting worse...food as a prism for sustainability

There are lots of posts here on the theme of food.

There are recipes for cooking dog in Vietnam. Thoughts on why culture has turned celebrity chefs in to society's new investigative reporters. There's been the trauma of the loss of Barbar the Elephant. And food with provenance becoming as luxurious as a felt rug from Kyrgyzstan.

So what's the big deal?

Well, for a long time, I've thought of food as not just a thing that we, er, have to eat to survive but also a bit like art, or at least Nicolas Bourriaud's idea of art as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements.

Quoi?

Well think about food for more than a nano-second and you're instantly thrown in to what it's made of, where it comes from, who has it, who doesn't, its expense, cheapness, how sexy is (friend of Jay Kay) Jamie Oliver, how sincere is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and why does the following expression always seem so true:

Now I think that I might have the answer. And its nestling in the biog of Canadian geographer Dr Betsy J.Donald, author of the book Food Fears:

Food is a prism through which to explore many dimensions of sustainability -- from local economic development to better ecological practice to social stability and opportunity.

*is slightly in love*(?)

Images of grumpy man and meringue courtesy of Tubbyphunk. Chocoloate image unknown. 

A vision for urban renewal: write your own

All urban renewal needs a personal vision.

Cleaning my hard-drive yesterday, I found a slightly-cringey-"needs-a-chill-pill" creatif statement I wrote five years ago and shared with the designers and artists I was working with on an urban renewal programme.

Don't like the condition of the place in which you live?

I've blanked out the name of the place that I was working in. Now fill in the blanks to suit you, blow my stuff away and compose your own...

 
“I feel the hints, the clues, the whisper of a new time coming.” (Norman Mailer, 1956)

I first visited ________ in December 2002. On a rainy, overcast day, I was confronted by a landscape of vacant, windswept plots totally lacking in incident. Not here - relics of industrial archaeology. Not here – a morphology of landform that represented the erosion of history. Not here – the shadows on the wall, real or imagined, that represent ‘thereness’. Not here – surface, artifice or invention that represents habitation or expression.  What was here was the commitment of one woman – the Chair of The ________ Heritage Group – to see better for her town.

In a city like Monrovia, Liberia, identity is expressed in the built environment in two functioning traffic-lights, walls of banks pock-marked with bullet-holes and the declamatory billboard of a phoney gospel medicine-man.

In the empty landscape of the Sahara, identity is expressed through sediments shaped by wind and water in to towering urns, sleeping lions and pyramidal mountains of rock. Like Scalectrix track, a strip of man-made road drives destinies across its fate.

In the night-time streets of Nagoya, Japan, identity is expressed in knotted telegraph wires against a moonlit sky, the Hopper-like midnight liquor corner shop and the paedophile fantasy of a young salary man playing Rayman on his mobile.

Human beings know life through moments. I know mine through ten Liberian paramilitaries pointing AK-47s at my head, my wife hemorrhaging on a stainless steel table after the birth of our first son and the first time I sang aloud the first track from Adam and the Ants’ Dirk Wears White Sox.

All of these moments have a certain architecture – the tailgate of a truck, the floor of a carriage, the pony-skinned upholstery of a chair, Ghiberti’s doors – palimpsests cut in to the material of a life lived.

We expect places to declare equivalent moment. Sometimes, it can be profoundly human one – a place where divisive boundaries are crossed, experiences shared and differences mediated. At other times, it’s pompous, rhetorical and brilliantly superficial – something like the over-formal presentation of haute couture, “The Chanel bag with the inlaid silver chain” or “The Halter-Neck bikini with the fur-trimmed stitch”.

Sometimes, it’s monumental. At other times, fleeting. Sometimes, found. At other times sought or constructed: be it the doorstep painted by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch, a giant ad draped on the side of a faceless New York façade or artist Robert Smithson inserting mirrors in to the surface of the desert.

Not ________.

________ is like Tirana, Albania: a landscape of non-selective demolition that has witnessed seismic earthworks, above and below ground, without the legacy of an idea. It is a place full of ends of sentences and no commas. The aliens landed, The Earth Stood Still and what remains are edges of scorch marks known as buildings.

But what’s great about ________ is its foreground: thousands of people with attitude moving through it every day.

What’s great about the town is its underground: a road map of redundant mining galleries, voids of sand, Roman artefacts and an old trashed Mini lying at the bottom of the River Aire.

If the city is a microcosm of the world and the built environment is an essential feature of its personality, what is this world of ________?

All that I can say is:  Can you think of a place in the town that you’d like to have your picture taken?
 
Images: Pat Pat, Jooliah, Craig E. Laycock, National Gallery London.

Supermarkets as rusting hulks

What kind of shopping experience do you prefer?

This:

Or this?

The first is a newly renovated Wal-Mart SuperCenter in Tabb, VA. The second is the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York.

Big Box Reuse is a book by artist Julia Christensen that charts the adaptation of big box retail units vacated by Wal-Marts and Kmarts for an even bigger box "supercenter" down the road.

In different parts of the United States, empty units have been turned in to things like a courthouse, a library, a school, even a church.

In the book, Christensen quotes a mayor of Bardstown, Kentucky with a good summary of what's been called the industrialisation of shopping:

The new supercenter in town is geared for tunnel vision, tunnel shopping. You go in, get what you need. You are only distracted by the other hundred things in your line of site that you feel like you need to buy.

When are these supertankers going to be turned in to spaces and places appropriate to an age of personalised entertainment or what Richard Layard has called "a time for less selfish capitalism"?

When might superstores take on some of the personality of the awkward, bumpy humanity that is the interior of Park Slope? 

Do we need to wait until a knobbly, dirty carrot becomes acceptable to buy?

Or with the rise of internet shopping, are these SuperCenters just spruced-up hulks - soon-to-rust relics of another age?

Images courtesy of Ryanrules and Heather Ring.

Vulnerable Celebrities: Love em, Hate em, Knife em

Susan Boyle, the star of the U.K. edition of Britain's Got Talent is recovering from the ordeal of her appearance on the show.

The BBC has a flock of pop-psychologists interpreting her fate and TV executives have sought to pre-empt regulation by calling for more rigorous "psych testing" of participants in reality programmes.

This is all very interesting but misses the point, either by design, accident or willful ignorance.

The point is that the media features people like Susan Boyle because they are vulnerable. They're cast because they are extreme and unstable, because in their vulnerability and madness rests talent - and a compelling one at that.

Problem is that once the likes of Susan Boyle, Britney Spears, Kerry Kantona or Paul Gascoigne start to crack, their fate fast becomes, in the words of journalist Jenny McCartney  

a prolonged pageant of self-destruction that draws the crowds, like a potential suicide teetering on a balcony.

One way in which the media promotes and embellishes the narrative is by editorializing - giving an opinion that masquerades as objectivity.

But there's another, more posh, deceptive way via eyewitness-style, wannabe 'literary journalism', something that television - and especially British television - loves: voyeuristic journalism cast as high class art, rather than - in the words of Tom Wolfe

a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph of the novel.

In a recent edition of the London Sunday Times, "international interviewer" Daphne Barak reported on her experience of filming Amy Winehouse for an up-and-coming documentary. The article was republished in Grazia.

The four days Barak spent with Winehouse is cut-down in to a story of Dress Swap, illicit drinking and intimate scenes of Amy playing with children.

Winehouse plays with several young girls and, according to Barak,

it's obvious that Amy feels much more at home with these girls than she does with the grown-ups...She is childlike in her need for affection, constantly coming up to hug us.

Being told off by her father, Amy is said to look like a child who has just been sent to the naughty corner.

After Barak lends Winehouse a dress to go on stage, Amy switches into a little girl who needs approval. She is melting, hugging me over and over again and saying "You're so sweet. You're so nice..."

And the day after a performance, the femme fatale of last night is once again a little girl. She hugs me again and again. I notice at one point that she is sucking her thumb.

Now I am not guiltless in this space.

Over a decade ago, I made a mannered film with English TV presenter and writer Paula Yates that investigated the circumstances of the death of her lover, Michael Hutchence.

But the genius, ground-breaking work of the likes of Joan Didion or Norman Mailer in the 60s, 70s and 80s does seem today to have given way to a deluge of authored aperçus on human nature by journalists and filmmakers.

The prevailing influence of therapy in culture and of vulnerability as a defining feature of 'personhood' seems to allow more and more observers to become analysts.

And a will to typecast a human now turns fast in to the hot pursuit of jeopardy.

So it's a nice idea to introduce more rigorous "psych testing" of TV contestants.

And it's comforting to acknowledge that fame induces undue stress. 

But psychodrama is entertainment.

And poor souls like Susan Boyle are its medium.