David Barrie

Amateur Innovation goes (beyond) Size 0

 

This is Rumi Neely, author of blog fashiontoast who describes her style as

One part grunge, one part Parisian influence, then rolled around in the San Diego sand and dipped into a giant jewelry box. 

And this is Jane Aldridge, author of fashion blog Sea of Shoes

who in Lookbook.nu says that

Lately I've been listening to Suicide, Japan, Boredoms, Ex Models, and Cocteau Twins. The last book I read was 'Kafka on the Shore' by Haruki Murakami and the next book I'm going to read is 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell.

A couple of weeks ago, I was with fashion designer Mark Ely of Ely Kishimoto and we talked a lot about Jane Aldridge. And here's a reason why.

First, Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week wrote the other day that:

I’m working with Parson’s grad Kelsey Meuse to build out a Gen Y Research Collaborative and she pointed me to Lookbook.nu. It’s a simple digg-type platform where Gen Yers around the world are posting their fashion creations and getting rated by their peers. It’s simple, beautiful and wonderfully innovative in a quietly disruptive way. 

Throw in that Rumi Neely of fashiontoast has signed for Next Model Management and is a designer for RVCA Clothing.

Add that American Vogue magazine featured Jane Aldridge's 'Most Wanted' back in July.

And then that streetstyle pap blogger Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist has photographed two seasons worth of DKNY campaigns, according to Fashionologie.

 

Now there's nothing new about (photo) journalists becoming celebrities - er, Norman Mailer.

But there is something materially different in these three bloggers - and there are many others - becoming models, designers and ad-men in one of the most brand-pure conscious parts of consumer culture.

Back in 2004, writers Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller introduced to culture their idea of the Pro-Am Revolution:

...amateurs who work to professional standards. These are not the gentlemanly amateurs of old - George Orwell's blimpocracy, the men in blazers who sustained amateur cricket and clubs. The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked, by new technology.

Now Charlie and Paul were writing principally about the emerging army of people using open source technology and innovation, flattened heirachies, knowledge and passion to make social, economic and cultural change. 

In fashion, there's loads of this passion about - Nussbaum cited lookbook.nu but my fave remains Chictopia - see a previous post.

But fashiontoast, Jane Aldrige and The Sartorialist and what's happening to them shows something more.

Amateurs are not just busy in online playgrounds, mish-mashing taste and sharing it in walled gardens.

Their values and skill are now starting to influence - and be commodified - in not just offline culture but the most brand-dilution-obsessed part of it all. 

Maybe it wasn't open-source-wash when Stefano Pilati of Yves Saint Laurent told the London Financial Times on the publication of the company's fifth 'manifesto' just a few weeks ago:

If they take my manifesto, go to a vintage store somewhere and are inspired to make their own outfit, I think that's great. Then we've helped them dream a new idea of themselves. Isn't that the point?

Maybe fashion, a key part of the creative economy, is going Pro-Am and genuinely changing its spots.

If so, it'll be interesting to see how the aesthetic changes - or not.

Images courtesy of fashiontoast (@fashiontoast), sea of shoes (@sea_of_shoes), Joe Ferrucci and Petronio Associates. 

(See good links here at Gawker on post that disses front-row bloggers as an old story, or "tired dead horse linguistic chicken bone?")  

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative

 

This could have been the closing caption for a private "summit" on urban renewal held in London this week.

Sponsored by Eversheds and King Sturge, the event was a wake/brainstorm for an industry that has ground to a halt - but for the design and delivery of the 2012 Olympics and its East London after-burn. (my regeneration Bhagwan Jackie Sadek has also posted on it here.)

The last twenty years has delivered some remarkable urban regeneration schemes in the U.K. - like Tate Modern, the transformation of Shoreditch, regeneration of Canary Wharf in London Docklands, the arrival of Westfield shopping mall in West London and new waterfronts in the cities of Newcastle-Gateshead and Liverpool, not to mention the Scandi-style minimalist repaving of most U.K. city centres.

But the debt-fulled boom is over: bank lending is tighter, house-building has slowed, the mathematical equations of 'value uplift' have been wrecked by falling land values and the number of people in poverty in the U.K. has increased, when the very purpose of regeneration is to help poor people become more prosperous - or at least that's what it says in the manual. 

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative. What might it be?

Well maybe...

...since in a speech this week called The Big Society, Conservative Party leader David Cameron laid out his thoughts on a new role for the state: directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal.  

Labour minister Tessa Jowell then unveiled public service partnerships, public management that champions co-operative working - call it The New Mutualism, the name of a key policy paper of over a decade ago: 

We think mutuals have a much broader potential across the public sector, especially now where they can become an expression of the new national soul post-credit crunch.

What do these two statements suggest for the future of urban renewal?

1. Economic change will be less reliant upon property developers, unless they are prepared to innovate by shifting to sustainable development or become increasingly transparent and flexible
2. Local development will be more answerable to 'the people' -  and we'll see less of a "massive- shopping-centre-with-a-town-attached" approach to urbanism  
3. 'Value' will be assessed on a broader basket of local currencies, over and above rental income
4. More time, attention and pride is about to be invested in local councillors and planning officers,
5. Small projects that trigger social renewal - rather than physical projects so big that they make the earth tilt - will come back in to vogue (cf City Challenge), and
6. New, non-aligned organizations or aggregated civic organizations at the most local level are about to become flavour of the month, since they offer a bridge between citizens and state, can engender trust, express identity and promote the welfare of the larger community above parochial Nimbyism

The poster boys and girls of this new mutualist world will be the army of activists and entrepreneurs who lead their communities, believe in collaboration and the welfare of their larger community.

These need not be either anti-capitalists or anti-development - just people who understand that enterprise in all of its many forms - social, as well as mercantile - is a key route to progress.

In the United States, these figures are lionized - just listen to President Obama at a press conference in June celebrating the work in particular of innovative non-profits:

At the centre of this new narrative are two of the oldest characters in the book. First - the taxpayer. Second - the consumer.

But the new element is the collective. The new formation: the non-profit. The new cast member - the social entrepreneur.

Either this is the dawn of a glorious new age of the social economy, political cynicism or the last bout of communal generosity as a post-industrial nation takes to the lifeboat.

What I do know is that I am yet to speak to a pension fund manager who is in the least bit interested in sharing an algorithm on life-cycle costs or dreaming up a vanilla-wrapped product that capitalizes upon social, as well as land, power, skills, knowledge and data assets.

I assume that's because the financial returns don't fit in to client demand, the terms of managers' annual bonuses and no bright spark has yet to work out a marketable link between carbon credits and the financing of urban renewal.

What I also know is that some - if not all - of this was the elephant in the room at the event this week: part of the paradigm shift that everyone cites, but an equity revolution that no-one really quite dares engage.  

Images courtesy of fliegender.

Cultivating a new Butyrkskaya, Moscow

With the collapse in international bank lending comes a real opportunity in the world of urban development for investment in small projects and those projects growing over time to become catalysts to change.

In an earlier post, I called it (rather unsexily) 'Venture Urbanism' - and the good news is that there's an increasing amount of it about.

Earlier this year, the London Borough of Hackney, Design for London and the London Development Agency published Making Space in Dalston, a directory of improvements to public space in the district of Hackney that they hope to advance in the coming years. 

And last year, I was involved in the start of a physical and cultural masterplan called High Street 2012 that aims to  use the London Olympic Games as a catalyst for improvements to the very long (and very unwindy) road that runs from (what will be) the gates of the Olympic site to the centre of Tower Hamlets, taking in Whitechapel High Street, Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road and Bow Road.

These are brilliant frameworks for change that are already evidencing first moves, like the recent Dalston Mill wheatfield, a re-creation of American artist Agnes Denes' famous Wheatfield in Manhattan in 1982:

But what if for a moment we disposed of mega design-visioning and went for something hyper-local and more micro?

Last week, I participated in an event in Moscow called Promzone 2.0: a think-tank, organized by cultural organization the British Council, as part of their pan-European Creative Cities programme, centered on generating ideas for the adaptive - and communally regenerative - reuse of a former glass factory called Flacon. (Interest: I have helped the Council design their project programme in Moscow).

For a day, I worked with a team of residents from Butyrsky district, alongside students, journalists and generally committed citizens who came up with a suite of things that they would like to see happen in the area around Flacon that would improve lives today but might also, over time, seed popular, new uses for the former factory site. 

The group came up with an inspirational programme - inspirational because of its range, refusing to drill down to the usual bento-box of public art and postage-stamp green space revivalism.

What's more, rather than choose some kind of internationalist, in-flight, Lady Gaga brand identity, the group decided to theme their program to Friendship - to personalize and counter public association of the area with the brutalist Butyrka Prison, the central transit prison in pre-Revolutionary Russia. 

This is what the group came up with (with the final presentation, in Russian, available here):

Some highlights:

• In the proposed cultural program was the refurbishment of a dead public building in to a small cinema showing old movies for older people living in the district.
• In the social program, two great ideas: a communal wash-house and a ribbon ice-track that would wind its way through the neighborhood.
• In the economic program, a service exchange initiative.
• In the environment program, a makeover of dull buildings in shades of pastel pink and blue and an apple feast sourced from local fruit trees.

Now the wristy cynics amongst you might say - "yeah right, David, but this ain't exactly the sort of thing that's going to pave the way for Google to relocate to the district. What's more it's frivolous - and this isn't the right response to such a bleak economic landscape."

In part, you'd be right. 

But think of this as a prospective sequence of small, highly local projects that, if choreographed in an effective, integrated way, might start to turn around some of the negative sense and sensibilities of the district.

With a small degree of public participation, chances are that by word of mouth, they would start to replace fear or disinterest in the pro-social with curiosity.

The projects would be staggeringly cheap to implement. They would attract a disproportionate amount of interest and the value yield for local people, government and investors in the area would be high.

Put another way, think urban gardening not regeneration - and reap the reward. 

First image un-sourced. Dalston Mill courtesy of cakehole. Images of Flacon event: David Barrie and British Council Russia.