David Barrie

A Magic Box of New Media and Urban Policy

In a recent podcast of the Economist magazine on online social networks, US technology correspondent Martin Giles said that in Silicon Valley the acronym URL stands for "Ubiquity First Revenue Later".

For those in the commercial and non-profit sector seeking to generate and capture value from sustainable products and services, the ubiquity offered by the internet is a magic box waiting to be opened.

The net is a potential treasure-trove of social sustainability, offering easy-to-reach educational facilities, employment, inclusion of traditionally marginalized or under-represented groups and a public place that generates new identity and opportunity for social interaction.

What's exciting for urban regeneration, urban renewal and real estate is that the internet brings a massive new dimension to the meaning of 'place' and the way in which websites work and how we interact with them starts to make cities feel like platforms for the delivery of services and government like a form of applications service provider, like Yahoo.

What's even more exciting - but also challenging - is that the personalization of products and services intrinsic to use of the internet might make physical 'place-making' more important than ever but also it starts to make some conventional answers to a timeless question feel a bit limp.    

There are countless developments in new media just now that are starting to engage with this issue and you need look no further than the current edition of Next American City - a brilliant Philadelphia-based magazine that's also profiled in an article in this month's Monocle.

Reporting on a conference last October called "Open Cities: New Media's Role in Shaping Urban Policy", Next American City serves up a great directory of people, tools and widgets that seek to take new media technologies and apply them to enhance urban sustainability and quality of life.

Some highlights:

• DIY City - a website that seeks to apply open software to solve urban problems
• Hub2 - which uses tech tools to engage the public in urban planning
• the Open Planning Project - an organization advocating for open government and "civic empowerment" software
• PublicStuff - an online platform that allows residents to access service requests and local government information
• The Collaboration Project - a forum of leaders committed to leveraging the interactive web and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government's complex problems
• Smarter Cities - a project of the Natural Resources Defense Council that, among many things, encourages citizen journalists to talk about their perception of the city
• EveryBlock - a "microlocal" website for several American cities, by neighborhood
• SeeClickFix - a service that allows local people to log non-emergency complaints and so alert one another to shared concerns

There is a full account of the conference proceedings on the Next American City website - and many of these tools or initiatives have their cousins or clones here in the U.K.

To quote the Canadian cyberspace maven Pierre Lévy in his book Collective Intelligence:

New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge.

In urban regeneration projects in Cardiff, Moscow, Glasgow and elsewhere, my project design and delivery company is bleeding these systems in to the process of delivering urban development or seeking to create conditions in which they can thrive. 

Hope the links are of use.

Images: 1. Source lost. 2. absolutelyoblivious. 3. Project for Public Spaces.

Punk Regeneration

This is artist Laura Oldfield Ford's sardonic dig at the gentrification - or yuppification - of urban life, using a combination of pseudy Socialist Realism and Special Offer stamps. It's hilarious. 

Oldfield Ford is an East London Warrior Princess who expresses Class War by depicting - according to the Tate Britain website (sic) - dystopian scenes, class conflict and urban ruins using ballpoint pen, fluorescent spray paint and acrylic.

 

As the Tate website says, Ford makes work that both imagines a future London whilst simultaneously sifting through the detritus of history.

 

Ford's work is in part motivated by what she sees as an absence of herself and other people's selves in the development and regeneration plans of cities - “I’ve looked into the future and I can’t find myself ANYWHERE.”

And she reserves special blame for the real estate sector - in the following work, St Modwen Properties, a company involved in bringing forward some key development sites in the UK:

Now all of this dystopian stuff is sexy in its counter-cultural-biro-ness. It chimes well with a view of the U.K. as Broken Britain, sits pretty in an age of post-apocalyptic nihilism - for another view, see Russian artist Vladimir Manyuhin's visions of a decayed world - and is a miserabilist drone that syncs well with the retro bits of people's iTunes playlists - in my case, the greatest, angriest hits of Crass and Part Chimp.

But hold on! WAKE UP!

In an age of huge public sector deficits, private sector investors are not the villains but the cavalry. 

We need to Make Poverty History, not update and adapt Europe After the Rain by Max Ernst - one of the greatest works of twentieth century art.

What's more, there have been tremendous advances in recent years - for instance in new media technology and online urban advocacy - that enable people to start to call a city or place their own, rather than simply become the thirteenth tribe of urban renewal, The Deleted. 

These advances fly past Ford's view of urban life: a comic/zine aesthetic that's ticklish, needs to be noticed since it's the tip of an exciting neo-punk thing but in the end is only for folks with fetishes for images of war-damaged Chechnya or those nice yellow Bic biro ballpoint pens that used to snap and leak in your pocket. 

More on Oldfield Ford's work:  

• Podcast of the artist talking about her view of the city and the apocalyptic painting of John Martin - a Tate Conversation Piece - can be downloaded from iTunes (December 2009)
• More images of the artist's work available at sjrobertson at flickr.com (March 2009)
• Article on Oldfield Ford's work in Frieze magazine (February 2009)
  
• The artist has a website and publishes a zine called Savage Messiah. (But both websites down at time of writing.)

Images randomly pulled from the net. Apologies to the artist for theft.

"It's not enough to want to do good..."

Throughout the world, social enterprise is on the rise.

Dubbed the new “fourth sector”, this hybrid form of for-profit/non-profit business is forecast to have a global value of $500bn-a-year within 5-10 years.

However, in all economies, the establishment of social enterprise as a distinct, flourishing sector faces many challenges

At the end of March 2010, social and creative entrepreneurs from across Europe, the United States and Thailand came together at a castle in Warsaw, Poland for two days of talks, workshops and a fantastic angst/love-in to share their work and experience. 

I led the event on behalf of the British Council, the U.K.'s international organization for cultural relations, following in the footsteps of innovation and public policy gurus Charles Leadbeater and Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation, who ran earlier events and have been instrumental to the steady rise of social entrepreneurship and social innovation in the U.K. 

Innovation for Urban Challenges [click on the link for a full event report] featured some of the U.K.'s outstanding entrepreneurs, including Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns and Jonathan Robinson, co-founder of The Hub.

In lightning speed, live events production company Germination made three short films in just two days, designed to share knowledge and inspire people across the globe in as 'real time' as post-production allows.

At the top of this post is a film on the keys to success to creating and running your own enterprise. The second film is a summary of the event. And here's a final episode on the challenge of managing a successful enterprise:

A huge thanks to the seventy entrepreneurs who attended from around the world, guest speakers - including Micheal Pyner and Saeda Ahmed (U.K.) and Blake Jennelle (U.S.A.) - and on the production side, Ewa Ayton of British Council Poland and Lorraine Warner of Germination.

Tim Smit of the Eden Project is a directory of great quotes but the gold star has to go to Mr. Micheal Pyner, Chief Executive of Shoreditch Trust and the man (pretty much) responsible for the urban renewal of Shoreditch and Hoxton in East London in recent times:

It's just great for people to say "I want to change the world" but you're not going to do that with a crap business, are you?

:)