David Barrie

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.

Venture urbanism

Last week, our bridge in Castleford, Yorkshire was awarded the Palme D'Or - so to speak - of the U.K. urban renewal industry, at the annual Regeneration & Renewal awards.

The professional jury led by David Ubaka of Design for London commended the bridge for the quality of its design and the unusual and direct involvement of local people in its development. 

Six years ago, working in close alliance with local government, I led a group who asked people living and working in Castleford to nominate the ten improvements that they would like to see made to the town - and a new way of getting from the town centre to an area known as 'Duck Island' came out No.1.

Local people were instrumental to the choice of architect, design and many other aspects of the £4.5m ($7m) structure.   

With local government acting as convenor, project/technical manager and banker, local people were the client for the work - rather than just end-user consultee.

So yes, the award goes to the project team - Client: City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council, Designer: McDowell + Benedetti, Structural Engineer: Alan Baxter & Associates, Civil Engineer: Arup Water, Lighting Consultant: Sutton Vane Associates, Timber Consultant: Engineered Wood Products/Michael Berringer and Contractor: Costain Ltd.

And on the funding and support side, immense thanks needs to go to the local authority, English Partnerships (now Homes and Communities Agency), Yorkshire Forward, the Environment Agency, British Waterways, the Heritage Lottery Fund, SITA Trust and the project and cost managers of the broader initiative, MACE Group and Gleeds.  

But in the end, this is just set construction, cinematography and commendation all round for production services.

Because the Best Director slots need to be reserved for the three organizations who were instrumental to making the bridge happen: the Lock Lane Residents Association, Castleford Riverside Community Group and Castleford Town Centre Partnership.

Now before you reach for your hankie to wipe away a tear, can I just leave you with a thought.

Recession has stalled the momentum, value and yield of regeneration, renewal and construction in the U.K. and rest of the world.

With big investment gone from the sector, big projects are history.

Master planning will remain in some shape or form, not least because it evidences the fact that something major is going on or being thought through - but the writing has to be on the wall for that too. 

The flourishing of the Internet Economy suggests an age of direct communications, network relationships and more 'done with' than 'done to'.

The level of business insolvencies in the SME sector and the new relationship between the private and public sectors as a result of Government stimulus suggests a new dialectic of resilience and dependency.

So have we reached a moment of great opportunity?

A moment to develop and deliver small projects that build out in to larger phenomena?

We could follow the lead of Enterprise 2.0 and progress these projects in ways that involve ordinary people deciding who, what and when.

But this is about action, not feasibility, and choreography of initiative, not simply small-scale invention.

What should we call it?

Maybe start with "Venture Urbanism" (and find something sexier a bit later)? 

An Architecture of Hope

Over the last few months, I've fallen in love(ish) with fashion website Chictopia and been lurking at networked fashion blogs like Devote.se.

These sites are brilliant.

Because whatever their commercial imperative and however cynical their wiring, these places are personal, bright and fun - and they network people and their passions smartly.  

I've picked up on the value of all of this in an article in this month's edition of design magazine Volume.

With a nod in the direction of the epic, the edition is subtitled Architecture of Hope.

In the magazine, I'm not confessing to a fetish for liquid leggings or multi-colored Heelys shoes - you'll be pleased to know - but sharing some first ideas on ways to capture and link the energy, commitment, enthusiasm and speed we invest in online social media to cities, their development and expression.  

Why bother? Because if you take a look around, you'll see cities full of extraordinary human diversity and energy turned in to identikit latte landscapes that are planned monotone or badged inert.

I've designed and am now starting to run two online social media initiatives in Russia (Moscow) and Wales (Cardiff) that try to link and apply the energy and brightness of one to the other. 

In Volume, I've set out the project in Wales, a nine-stage Road to Damascus in which

a multicultural community is not bounded by walls and windows.

It's a project that tries to engineer a process that allows for

improved flows and exchanges of experiences between people and existing groups and seeks to establish a platform for growth by supporting distributed activity and innovation. 

Here are some sketch steps in the project plan:

• research current use of online networks by local people on the net and mobile telephones
• identify sources of local knowledge on different aspects of the area's way of life, such as its environment, sports or shopping
• provide these people with training in writing and editing blogs and wikis
• create a homepage for the area that takes feeds from diverse digital content sources, such as personal blogs, photo blogs and micro-blogs
• encourage knowledge sources to upload and share what they know online
• share this web space with others and allow them to add to or edit its resources
• over time, re-position the site as a space to prioritize local issues and collaboratively action plan
• offer local government the services of this platform and its community to create strategies for the future public management of the area

Arjen Oosterman writes in his introduction to Volume 19 that:

The inclination to see the current crisis as merely passing and the tendency to say "take cover, then we can get on with it" is great. Yet every day makes is less likely that this will be sufficient.

Arjen suggests that one answer is to advance contemporary practices of communication development.

He's right.

Advancing communication development in cities is a precondition to enabling a new architecture of hope.

Images courtesy of crazybeautiful and VanityMale at Chictopia, "the people's fashion destination".

Recession, yoga and haikus made from fresh fruit

The Sunday Times in London reports that celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is to organise picnics in the U.K. to which everyone is encouraged to bring home produce.

According to journalist Jessica Brinton, it fits in to a new sobriety:

Fashion girls are retraining as yoga teachers - the same women who were cat-fighting at the Christian Louboutin sale are now morphing into self-styled spiritual entrepreneurs advertising yoga holidays in the Ardeche. Or doing charity bike rides. Or going on protest marches.

Now time will tell whether the closure of fashion boutiques like Paul & Joe and their peasant/boho chic will drive mourners to up sticks, fly to Kiev or Riga and support events that mark the possible collapse of central Europe.

But Fearnley-Whittingstall has cottoned-on to a nice idea.

Last Summer, architects Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn created an event that was part of the London Festival of Architecture called The Continuous Picnic.

It's currently on show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in an exhibition called Actions: What You Can Do With the City.

To encourage Londoners and visitors to think about urban food production and alternative uses of open space, Bohn and Viljoen and a team of architects, community gardeners and others - including me - organised a day-long event celebrating local food and the city.

For twelve hours only, an area behind the British Museum and an adjacent square became a public picnic area.

People were invited to bring produce that they'd grown within a certain radius of the city to an Inverted Market - a food installation that showed where the food had come from.

Alongside community composting, picnickers were invited to compose fruit and vegetable haikus conceived by architects charlick+nicholson.

The idea behind the event was to promote Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes - or sustainable use of urban spaces for production (urban agriculture, markets, gardening or recycling), connection (walking, cycling), and social activity (playing, working, meeting).

Architecture publishing magnate Peter Murray, Chairman of New London Architecture, was on hand to promote a special edition Continuous Picnic blanket:

And chef Oliver Rowe of Konstam judged the best produce of the day.

Now the Sunday Times says that Money is out of fashion, and we are looking elsewhere to find happiness.

For sure, the Continuous Picnic was a happy event. And it celebrated values other than cash (though I'll always take it, if you are offering).

But rather than a sanctuary for supermodels or happy-clappy empowerment, the event was about something brilliantly obvious and summed up by a bumper sticker found by Debra at Culiblog:

More information available from mail@bohnandviljoen.co.uk

Photographs courtesy of Jonathan Gales, Clare Brass - seed foundation, Richard Kaye, Natasha Nicholson and Irma Irsara.

The Continuous Picnic was supported by Arts Council England, London Development Agency, London Borough of Camden, Global Generation, London Food Link, CEEN, the University of Brighton and the Calthorpe Project.

Poster boy for Urbanism

Hilarious still from Hi Mom directed by Brian de Palma, 1970.

The tagline over at IMDB.com reads:

God bless our humble upper-middle-class high-rise co-op and keep it free from smut peddlers, militants, urban guerrillas and Greenwich Village liberals.

Move over Antonioni's L'Eclisse!

Thanks to Waxin' & Milkin: A Visual Mixtape.

Urban Farming: not a load of old bananas

Last November, the city of Detroit introduced a Neighborhood Stabilization Plan, a $47m plan to accelerate renewal of the housing market in areas most severely impacted by foreclosure and abandonment. 

A key element of the plan is alternative use of land - and as Bloomberg reports, Detroit is already one step ahead as: 

close to six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 500 ``mini- farms,'' demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive.

One 'farm' is Birdtown Community Garden, where private land and vacant city lots were turned in to a place for growing food: 

Over here in the U.K., foreclosure is growing but not on the same scale as in the United States and the national social security system is a key safety net.

But recession is putting pressure on housing market renewal, private sector finance of renewal and the boss of the national urban renewal organization has now acknowledged that we need to find new ways of financing urban renewal.

In other words, if we don't innovate fast, the country is to be scarred with more and more of this:

 
Empty land.

And more and more of this:

Empty shops.

Three weeks ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that he would bring forward £10billion of spending planned for public works such as school and hospital repairs, environmental projects and IT schemes to provide employment.

In November, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced a 45% tax rate on earnings over £150,000 from 2011.

What are those "environmental projects"?

What's to be the return on public investment for those in the new higher tax bracket?

Increased use of land for food production - a local boost to local foodie culture - seems a practical, political no-brainer.

I mean how irresistable is this image of a food growing site in an Italian city?

As opposed to this....

....a manicured stretch of barren English housing estate.

But there's an additional thought.

For the last year, I have been running a programme of advice to house-builders and providers of social housing on how to meet U.K. Government targets on climate change.

At an event last week, Brian Mark of Fulcrum Consulting made it clear that a key route to delivering viable carbon-efficient housing is to super-size development and introduce community energy systems.

And Peter Walker of EcoCentroGen decribed releasing capital to support the additional cost of low carbon and renewable infrastructure by applying a rent to the present and future provision of energy to development sites.

What if a significant proportion of the land on which a development is to sit were given over to food production and you could project a yield of fruit and veg that promised residents a considerable saving on their weekly food budget?

What if against that saving - as well as utilisation of the site's waste - you charged rent for use of the land - but not two groats and a shilling - but say £600.00/year/plot?

What if you bundled this with other services that could be 'rentalised', such as broadband provision?

Now this is no recipe for turning England in to Chianti - and any way why should we? - but this does start to become a route to seeing urban agriculture as less of a shampoo-free, urban eco-hugger zone, and more about bundled services that extract new value from land.

Do this on a city-wide scale - especially in places where there is a surplus of land laying derelict and with next to nil value - and doesn't it start to turn urban farming in to something way more than touchy feeley bananas?

Moscow, Nokia and harnessing the power of citizen participation

I've been in Moscow the last few days, designing a project that seeks to foster a spirit of social enterprise and help the city become a better, positive and even more appealing place.

A scary peak of the visit was a lecture to an audience of 400 courtesy of the Center of Contemporary Architecture. You can find it here.

It's up to Moscovites to decide whether their city is enterprising or appealing enough.

And up to the Government to decide on the role of social enterprise in its new commitment to human capital and innovation.

What I know is that I met an astonishing cast of people who'd turned old factories in to arts centers, created successful internet start-ups, busy welfare organizations, dance companies and creative schools.

All of these people have pursued their dreams and aspirations, acquired specific knowledge of a specific field, turned it in to either a job or way of life and created their own unique micro-climate.

In Silicon Valley, 9000 kilometers away, the head of Nokia's research center, according to reports in the Financial Times, is working on ways in which the mobile telephone can tackle the problem of forecasting the weather.

It's unparalleled in history that we now have this distributed computing platform - 3.3bn mobile citizens worldwide.

The challenge for scientist Henry Tirri is to find a way to capitalize on the possibility of humans, equipped with phones that carry a battery of sensors to relay changes in physical conditions over a wide area.

The challenge is in part expressed by the change in the weather you might experience on a 60-mile road trip from Marin County to the depths of Silicon Valley:

There are 186 micro-climates from Sausalito to San Jose.

And Nokia's first move is the Mobile Millennium project - an initiative that aims to recruit up to 10,000 motorists in the San Francisco Bay area to report on traffic conditions via GPS chips in phones.

Moscow. Silicon Valley. Mobile phones. The head-teacher of an innovative school. What's the connection?

It's simple: but the answer is only available if you engage with another two questions...annoyingly!

How to tap and pool the knowledge of the dispersed entrepreneurs of Moscow and use that experience and understanding to enable others in the City to follow their own interests and passions?

How to aggregate intent, map the micro-climates and change the weather?

One answer has to be to create third-party events and devices to pool knowledge and strengthen weak social, economic and cultural ties.

But another is to recognize that the entrepreneurs in Moscow, like the folks on their phones cruising the Bay Area, are all data-gatherers. 

Both are harbors of knowledge.

And in every move they make they are gathering information and experiences that in aggregate could be of value.

Throughout the world, public authorities are inventing or using 'vehicles' for assembling and extracting value from land assets.

They take the form of public-private partnerships, 'special purpose delivery vehicles' or the opportunity every four years to host the Olympics. 

What vehicles could we create to maximize and capture the value of social and creative assets?

In the field of city development, how can we create public-private partnerships or renewal corporations that are about assembling people, ideas and enterprise, as well as land and structured finance?

Paul Raymond: 60 out of 87 acres

I've always wanted to post a photograph of a naked bloke in the bath.

So here it is.

It's a picture of Paul Raymond: the English 'King of Porn', 'King of Soho' and 'King of Brut' - if the bottle on the left hand side of the bath is what I think it is. 

Raymond died earlier this year, reclusive and super-rich. 

So why does he grace this space?

It's nothing to do with him owning telephones or baths that look 'just so' in an age that chokes on boho cushions and the frou-frou interiors of decorators like Sera Hersham-Loftus.

But more of an unlikely link between being a porn baron, bathing in bubbles and the transformation of downtowns. 

In a recent article in the Sunday Times magazine - and a really good one at last, not just four pages of graphics showing the course of climate change - Raymond's property company was said to own

an estimated 60 of Soho’s 87 acres

For those who can't do imperial, that's over thirty average-sized soccer pitches and almost 70% of the  entertainment centre of London.

Astonishing!

It throws in to stark relief anti-gentrifiers' obsession with the politics of displacing the poor,  rather than the actualité of who owns what.

And suggests that gay life as a magnet to city development can happen on the back of corporations and linked to mega landlords, not just small-time, frontier-spirit entrepreneurs.

But enough of that.

I've just noticed the sponge and marbled soap behind Raymond in the picture.

Yuk.

Time to move on.

Communities in Control: new opportunities for citizen participation

Slowly but surely, the relationship between the state, taxpayer and local change in the U.K. is being re-aligned - looking towards a new dawn for the Enabling State.

The Conservative Party has bought in to localism hook-line-and-sinker - with next to no detail  - and newspapers over the last few days have given lots of space over to Prime-Minister-wannabe David Miliband's ideas on 'double-devolution'.

But a key moment was reached last month with the Government's publication of Communities in Control, a statement of policy

to generate vibrant local democracy in every part of the country, and to give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of active citizens.

What's interesting is that hidden behind velvety stuff on community empowerment, an iron fist is emerging that could send to oblivion nicey-nicey, PR-ridden 'engagement' of people on local affairs.

From April 2009, all of the country will be subject to a Comprehensive Area Assessment that will relate people's experiences of living in an area to how local agencies work together and how local public services can be improved. In time, this will become a measure for evaluating public management. 

But what's exciting - and please stay awake - is that alongside this regulation, you can start to see pots of money becoming available to people to directly administer.

For alongside the Government paper, a wide range of reform of the planning system is taking place.

Since 1990, local authorities in the U.K. have been allowed to enter in to legally-binding agreement or planning obligation with a land developer over a related issue: and this has often delivered stuff we need, like roads, schools or parks.

In October, a new piece of legislation - the Planning Bill - will come before the House of Commons.

The Bill carries provision for a new regime called the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). The Levy is bascially a new tax on developers on top of existing obligations but one more directly linked to profits.

What's important is that the recent Government paper infers that this is an opportunity for

local communities to get involved in decisions on where to spend money.

If this happens, say goodbye to old-style, PR-led 'community engagement' in which the community is consulted on development plans - but basically told what's going to happen.

And hello to new style 'community involvement' in which the powers that be actively ingratiate themselves with folk bearing cashflow.

 

Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan

Here are images of almost all of the design projects that form The Castleford Project: an urban renewal initiative in the forming coal-mining town in West Yorkshire.

A TV series on the design and delivery of these projects and the pleasure and pain of renewing a town will be broadcast by Channel 4 in the U.K. for four weeks from Monday, August 11 at 2100hrs. It is called Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan and produced by Talkback Thames. 

According to an article in today's Times newspaper

the physical results are impressive. Talkback attracted serious talent. On the steering committees are leading lights such as Roger Zogolovitch, one of Britain’s most influential, design-led developers, and Peter Rogers, brother of Richard and the founding CEO of developers Stanhope. Architects included rising stars such as DSDHA and Hudson Architects, plus international luminaries including Martha Schwartz.

Here are two views of the new pedestrian bridge, designed by McDowell & Benedetti.

The new town square, designed by Hudson Architects:

A new pedestrian subway and public space to the south side of the town centre, designed by DSDHA with lighting artist Martin Richman.

The initiative features the renewal of three open spaces in housing neighborhoods across the town as public spaces and play areas.

Here is the new Playforest at Cutsyke, designed by Estell Warren Landscape Architecture and Allen Tod Architecture:

The new playground at The Green Ferry Fryston/Airedale, designed by Parklife:

A new public space at New Fryston on the site of former mining cottages by American landscape designer Martha Schwartz:

In addition to these physical transformations, the Project enabled the creation of a forward plan for the town's riverfront by architect Sarah Wigglesworth.

And a new master plan for a housing district known as Wilson Street, adjacent to the town centre by architects Allen Tod.

The design team was supported by Roger Zogolovitch, AZ Urban Studio and design writer Lee Mallett.

The public space strategy of the initiative was advised by Gehl Partners, Copenhagen.

Project Management: MACE. Cost Management: Gleeds.