David Barrie

City development and innovation

All places, even countries - as brilliantly satirized in this image - are distinctive clusters of people, communities, organizations, institutions, beliefs, tastes, personal and public mania.

Go out on to the street, slip on a pair of psychological x-ray spex, forget the physical ways in which we organize ourselves and start to see the city as a zoo that encloses a multitude of social, economic and personal struggles.

Convention has it that the best, most effective form of strategy-making and public engagement in the development of real estate is to consult widely, draw differing strands together and then forge a consensual route forward. 

This approach may have been proven to work but the prospect of a hung Parliament in the U.K. and the coalition-building that will follow may throw in to question the effectiveness of continuing to take a consensual 'everyone-gets-something-and-no-one-gets-nothing' attitude. 

Does the current approach to engaging people in development just now capture all of the energy, commitment and excitement that people invest in their lives?

Maybe there are other ways to gather, collect and maximize the sum value of the social, commercial and personal struggles that make up urban living.

I'm just starting a process around the development of a large site in a major city in the U.K. that's directed towards putting together a forward plan of actions that help the real estate developer and local government create a world-class creative and socially innovative place.

What I am planning to do is yes, gather opinion, yes, build consensus and yes, create a forward plan but also to scope the design of what U.K. policy guru Geoff Mulgan (inelegantly) called in a recent book a horizontal support.

In the generation and delivery of public policy, a horizontal support is not so much a framework for action or set of 'bottom-up' initiatives but a vehicle that acts as an engine of participation - think of it as a 'platform' that over time gets populated by people, organizations and activity and enables change. 

Inspired by investment vehicles like public-private partnerships and websites that act as network agents of content like Wikipedia, I've set up such 'platforms' in the past - for example, aggregating partnerships of public, private and Third Sector organizations that have enabled urban regeneration and loose emergent clusters of people framed by the common cause of growing their own food.

In a few weeks' time, a group of us are to experiment in another way and open The People's Supermarket. This is a start-up social enterprise that as our new Facebook page says, aims to turn a vacant retail store in central London in to a place that allows a community to come together and take charge of the food they buy and eat. Think of it as another kind of bearer and trigger of social value and change.

I need to 'visualize my lines' for the new piece of work linked to city development but am thinking up a kind of floating entity - a bit like a 'magic carpet' (!?!) - that enables social and cultural innovation to cluster and grow but forms its own consensus and keeps the creative and commercial struggle of people and their enterprise alive.

Some options: 

• a loose local organization that acts as a market-maker for ideas and aspirations
• an investment vehicle with power to assemble and is backed by creative, social and commercial assets
• a local stock exchange that provides trading facilities for commercial, creative, community and other groups and has the power to issue equity investment in new social, creative or community enterprise

If you have inspirational examples of initiatives that work this vein, I'd love to hear them.

I'll share what I come up with, so long as my vagueness takes a solid form!

Images: 1. Source unknown. 2. ANDWHATELSEISTHERE. 3. R9. 4. YoYo Games.     

Rodarte love

In January, Kate and Laura Mulleavy of fashion design company Rodarte scored a profile in the New Yorker by Amanda Fortini, a feat that took designer Karl Lagerfeld more decades of work to achieve than the sisters from Pasadena have lived, says the Wall Street Journal.

 

Rodarte is great because, as Fortini writes, it is where the beautiful meets the baroque:

Rodarte is great because the garments include a multitude of textiles and finicky ones, like tulle, organza, leather and lace), adornments (crystals, feathers, rosettes) and techniques (draping, pleating, dyeing).

Rodarte is great because the designers had no formal fashion training, learned basic sewing techniques from their mother and their creative vision is cinematic, inspired by horror movies and the work of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.

A recent feature on the Mulleavy sisters in RVCA ANP Quarterly sourced inspirations as diverse as the Space Shuttle, Frankenstein, Star Wars, burning Klu Klux Clan crucifixes, Stonehenge and seminal works of European art like Rachel Whiteread's House and Joseph Beuys' I Like America and America Likes Me.

In case your avant-garde funny-bone hasn't been tickled enough by now, the New Yorker reports a scene in the Rodarte studio of the designers setting fire to a piece of polyster fabric and collections in which all the clothing had been burned, stained, shredded, sandpapered or in some way "ruined".

And the article snoops a bulletin board in the designers' studio carrying images of paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, California condors, testing of the atomic bomb in the Nevada Desert and Degas' ballerina sculpture - a wistfulness in the foreground of much of the imaging of their work...

...and explicit in their latest collection:

Until March 14, Rodarte have an installation at the The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York - and if you are in the area, visit it.

But there's a moral in my tale (and it comes with a hat-tip to a comment made to me by Robert Hewison, a cultural historian and keen follower of the English art critic and social thinker John Ruskin). 

There's a reawakening of romantic anti-capitalism in culture and politics just now. In the U.K., you can see it in protest by the establishment against a third runway at Heathrow Airport, government endorsement of co-operativism, a policy rush on 'mass localism' and civic organizations like the National Trust turning sections of its property over to food-growing.

Rodarte is romantic, born from the obsession of two sisters brought up among the redwood trees of a small town near Santa Cruz, California, to quote Fortini. They burn stuff, love the spikey and fierce and are committed to beauty - albeit one that retails up to $25,000 a piece.

The two trends are worlds apart. But together they say something.

Romance and anti-materialism is an aesthetic. It has tradition. It is optimistic, often creatively destructive - a brilliant antidote to an age of disappointment or light at the end of a post-apocalyptic tunnel. 

But it can be expensive. No small part of the romance rests in the eccentric and the kinky. And if you work too hard to co-opt those values in to something consensual, you may kill the very spirit that you admire.  

Images: 1.Jillian0229 2. Interview Magazine 3.SavoirFlair 4.Fashionologie 5. NYC Art Style 6. Not known 7. Style.com via TeenAngster 8. Stardust and Sequins 9. Inside-out 

More Rodarte links here. And thanks to Dawn Danby.