David Barrie

A place is an experience, and not a brand

At a recent conference on The Art of Placemaking at NLA, London, the air was thick with talk of “branding” and “curating” real estate and "programming" opportunities in the built environment for people to socialise. (Standard device: hip canteen. Decor: super-sized graphics. Fuel: super-sized soya latte.)

The event was timely, since the making of successful places is a key objective of recent reforms to the planning system in the UK and key feature in an high-profile review in to the future of the High Street, or Main Street.

The National Planning Policy Framework emphasises establishing a strong sense of place to create thriving local economies.

And the Portas Review promotes the imagining of new social places that give a sense of belonging and trust to a community.

Now no-one, not even a caveman, could contest the value of public gathering spaces to human experience, but there are issues that stand in the way of delivering the inclusive, life-changing experience and collective meaning that the idea of place implies:

• most landowners prefer to screen out undesirables from the property that they own or manage
• convention is that public spaces are designed by professionals who then offer it to the public for adoption, and
• corporate profit tends to favour behaviours that are predictable and disciplined

Problem is it is the very unplanned-ness of a space and its unintended uses that often generates delightful, memorable and meaningful pleasure.

What's more, the principle of exclusion is at odds with popular culture in an age of internet economy, which maximises opportunities for people to share, like and make their own spaces, relationships and experiences.

How to create places in towns and cities that overcome these issues and develop a real estate that engenders the culture of the virtual?

Several strategies just now seek to address the question.

In the urban designer’s toolbox, there's the animation of public spaces by creating community facilities, green spaces, places to grow food, market days, nights and work hubs.

Progressive urban planners suggest more diverse use of the built environment, including the decommissioning of Main Street as a retail centre and its re-commissioning as a social one - a return to the idea of an Agora which inspired the ancient Greeks and urban professionals in the U.S.A. in the 1970s in their revitalisation of downtown districts.

While experts in retail markets look to the recasting of the real and virtual through experience shopping or click and collect, a place in which “Shops will become glorified showrooms”, according to Jeremy Newsum of the Grosvenor Estate in a recent article in Property Week (£).

One strategy that we are committed to in our work - and is featured in the new book The Temporary City, a collection of thought-provoking new creativity in placemaking from around the world - is to apply to the built environment some of the techniques that make online spaces 'sticky' for millions of consumers, and approach the creation of place as interaction design.

Another is to borrow from the playbook of documentary media producers, who create a framework for a story, populate it with content and then edit and re-edit intended and unintended content to arrive at an experience for the public to enjoy - and then, if they want to, codify as a brand or franchise.

Both approaches feel appropriate to an age of ubiquitous content, of increasing consumption of increasingly customized personal services via smartphones, and technology that changes constantly our relationship with everyday products and services in ever complex, interactive ways.

What's telling is that if you apply a more interactive, content-led approach to the built environment, you quickly arrive at some pretty traditional, lo-fi ways to turn a hum-drum space in to a place.

Here are three random inspirations and ideas.

Take a look at Chicago's Waste to Profit Network, a virtual facility which helps businesses identify by-products and waste from one business that can be used as inputs by another. It establishes a public space as a network hub for production and consumption that takes place in diverse geographies.

What if we created an equivalent experience by networking activities, cultures and tastes across the dispersed geography of a city?

What if we took the public spaces of a major world city and turned them in to the venue for a *giant* Silent Disco, with different spaces in different neighbourhoods acting as different 'rooms' or 'servers' for different sounds?

Kind of a whole-city version of the Mobile Clubbing craze that popped up several years ago - here in London's Tate Modern back in 2007.

Then take a look at fashion designer Marc Jacob’s Facebook page.

Last year, Jacobs, a passionate owner of two Bull Terriers, invited subscribers to his page to upload pictures of their dogs, some of whom accessorised their pups with his products.

Not a big deal, but makes me think: what if we created public places which invited people to bring something to the space and leave it there?

Not exactly a new idea, I know: think notes left on devotional statues in places of worship or in the cracks of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Then take a look at U.K. broadcaster Channel Four's award-winning TV series Hugh’s Fish Fight.

This was an old skool story of investigative, campaigning journalism that exploited diverse media platforms to cultivate - and more importantly be able to project itself - as a successful movement for change.

The popularity of this, and other media causes, begs an obvious, naive question: how about creating places with the express purpose of enabling human expression, Urban Commoning and Occupation, spaces that support collective socialising, rather than deter it?

To create place, we need to provide opportunities for people to exchange goods, services and emotion.

Some of this is to do with built infrastructure and deregulation. Some of it is to do with central programming of things that we can enjoy communally.

But if we are to look to public space to generate bigger social returns of belonging and trust, we need to maximize opportunities by which people can call public space, even privatised public space, their own.

This is in part about nurturing and nudging informal uses of public space - about making them 'sticky', not controlling them, about finding ways in which users can generate and manage their own pleasure.

All of this could be a free-for-all, a mess.

It could start to look like the faeces-out-of-the-window existence of eighteenth century England - and note the pastiche design of the current vintage window displays of London department store Harvey Nichols.

There's an equivalence in the disorderly personality of the multi-coloured townscape of a place like Guanajuato, Mexico or Willemstad in Curacao.

And architecturally, there's inspiration in John Kormerling's Happy Street in the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai.

This is an idea of place that's not defined by hygenic, brand-directed, open plazas but the richness, complexity and excitement of the present - the experience of NOW.

This is a dimension to the Art of Placemaking - and you know what, it's (kind of) artless.

Images courtesy of:  1. Immo Klink, Disturbing Factors (2007) via Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art  2. Candy Chang 3. American Airlines via Trendwatching  4. Yvan Rodic (Paris, December 2010)  5. Jan Chipchase  6. Dean Ayres  7. ce matin, un lapin  8. unknown  9. Style Crusader

Survival technologies

There has never been a more important moment for action and not words in social business and social innovation.

Reductions in Government spending, rising unemployment and social inequality make the design and delivery of effective new services that benefit the public a priority.

In developing those services, it is worth tattooing to wrists the cautionary advice of Richard Rumelt,  professor of strategy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and published in his recent book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: the broadcast of intent does not make it happen.

And for guidance on roles and responsibilities, mine a Golden Nugget in the observation by US broadcaster David McKillop - repeated in a speech by TV executive Jane Root last year and relevant to other industries, not just the media - that networks find the winds like sailors, while producers build the ships.

Here are several projects that we have helped build over the last few months - and were characterised provocatively by designer Jakub Szczesny of Centrala at the Europe Culture Congress, Wrockław, as survival technologies.

We see each of these ventures as a Tiny Epic, a small local social 'widget' that enables people to associate with one another, share and exchange experiences, skills and commitments and so create new value. 

 The People's Supermarket

The co-operative supermarket in London that we co-founded in 2010 will soon celebrate its eighteen-month anniversary.

Since opening in May 2010, the business has created twenty new jobs, stimulated over 10,000 volunteer hours and and its innovation is now starting to mainstream, with a link to the NISA-Today product supply network.

In just a few weeks time, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts will publish a How to start your own Supermarket manual that we've written - with all of the pleasure, pain and secret ingredients that we have learned and used to deliver the new social venture.

Shiregreen Neighbourhood Challenge

This programme that we designed with Sanctuary Housing to develop community initiative and involvement on a large housing estate in the Shiregreen district of Sheffield, Yorkshire is now being delivered.

A massive number of events have taken place in the area since Spring 2011, events designed to support neighbourliness and encourage people to declare what they are good at, like, and might want to do for or share with others.

A new neighbourhood website - Shiregreen.net - is now up and running, edited by local people and designed to promote the talent of residents.

We are developing an estate catering service and food production hub with talented Mum & Dad cooks, staff working in school kitchens, food growers, micro-entrepreneurs and restauranteurs in Sheffield.

And we're working with local residents on Make Do & Mend, a possible new social enterprise in which people who live in the area and have practical skills can fix stuff for others.

The SKY 1 HD Great Tree House Challenge

This is architectural designer Charlie Luxton and engineer Alex Shirley-Smith, Treehouse Architect at The Greendream Company.

Next month, Sky Television in the UK will broadcast The Great Tree House Challenge, a series of three programmes featuring their involvement in an initiative in which three local communities have created an ultimate Tree House for the enjoyment and benefit of local people.

We supported the development of the initiative which forms part of the broadcaster's Sky Rainforest Rescue campaign and for us has been a great opportunity to help develop informal and unusual social spaces in neighborhoods.

You can see the treehouse at Lochcarron in the Highlands of Scotland here.

Portobello Giving Project

As journalist Tyler Brulé pointed out earlier this month in an article in the Financial Times, super-gentrification is an emerging issue in the development of urban neighbourhoods around the world.

In parts of London like Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Road, neighbourhood shops and services that have helped define the personality of the area for many years are slowly being replaced by global brand boutiques and luxury residential development.

The market can't be 'bucked' but we feel passionately that by leveraging local creative and financial assets, areas like Portobello Road can and will retain their differentiated personality and so competitive advantage.

With this in mind, we have been starting to work with local residents, business, public and private sector organisations in the area, such as the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, on the development of the Portobello Giving Project, a possible new 'citizen finance' service in which wealthy, talented people who live in the area act as business angels and advisors to existing or new entrepreneurs in the area.

To call these ventures survival technologies is both compliment and insult.

Yes, they're cute. Yes, pennies in a world of €440bn European Financial Stability Facilities; dust in an age of China Inc.'s acquisition of European industry.

However, these sorts of small-scale ventures are effective ways to promulgate confidence and value - and strangely, in certain lights, their practicality and localism reveals them to be, rather than comic book saviours, some kind of re-versioning or new age of Asian-syle community capitalism.

Images courtesy of 1. Annette Pehrsson 2. Haarala Hamilton Photography 3. Sanctuary Housing 4. Balnacra Arts 5. Author, with illustration by Yahnyinlondon (Amanda Wright).

 

A Coalition of the Bold

"Consultation", "participation", "co-design" and "community" is the growing mantra of responsible city development - and politically en vogue.

In recent years, the development sector in the UK has started to embrace this as 'community engagement': a process of talking to local people about the nature of a possible development.

Sometimes the process is practised as if it were "empowerment" but in practice, it is product marketing or the sampling of public opinion to support product development and the winning of regulatory approvals.

This business to business transaction, masquerading as consumer choice nicely chimes in with one of the earliest moments in the development cycle when investors can capitalise upon their asset.

But if the purpose of engaging people in development is to generate longer-term markets and capital receipts, a return to taxpayers, as well as institutional investors, and if the first port of call for a rioter is to torch property - as happened in the UK last month - the development sector evidently has a social contract to fulfill beyond talking to people, both as a protective measure and strategy to win a 'licence to operate'.

Understandably developers want to minimise their costs. By and large, 'the people' are not their clients, or prospective tenants. And in essence, they are entrepreneurs who need as few barriers as possible between them and the generation of profit.

Problem is that while the riots were about theft and opportunism, there is evidently a group of people out in the cold, untouched by conventional 'public consultation', 'grassroots enabling' or the benevolent custody of local government - the tools in place that are supposedly designed to make our cities more equitable.

How to bring these people in to the process?

Countless statutory initiatives in the UK just now seek to hardwire 'ordinary people' in to the process of urban development.

But just as one gets excited over a new spirit of shared value, tempers calm with short-termist engagement of the public in the name of 'place-making' and the reluctance of the real estate industry to commit to community investment in a hardcore way - for instance, accepting broader social allocation of finance raised by a new local tax like the Community Infrastructure Levy.

"Community" remains a subset of design and communications, rather than a front-line currency of economic growth.

How do other advanced economies deal with urban failure?

A progressive strategy in the United States has been to establish community coalitions - and it would be game-changing for a real estate developer or local authority here in the UK to seek to foster this approach in their involvement of the community in development. 

If this were a guiding policy, what would be the headline actions? 

• Foster an alliance of urban activist organisations that campaign for human rights & equity in the life of the town or city
• Support this alliance and create an organisation/Foundation that would be funded by a consortia of stakeholders who have an investment in the safety and security of urban life - and that would include the property sector
• Draw this coalition in to the formation of local plans by local government
• And on big schemes, promote direct negotiation between this coalition and real estate developers and the agreement of a series of local benefits, in return for a non-contested application for building approval

Think of this as a Coalition of the Bold, where the real estate developer/owner is a civic entrepreneur and part of the solution, rather than an organisation whose assets need to be defended by police when society implodes.

Where's the evidence that this approach works?

There isn't any - except that stable cosmopolitanism, open mindedness and a genuine sense of participation in public life consistently feature as key ingredients in 'smart', successful, innovative economies.

Images are sourced from the Net but no credits available

 

 

 

 

Tahrir, cities and a new enterprise of public place

The Limits of Cyber-Revolutions was an outstanding article in a recent edition of New York Magazine on how Public spaces, not virtual town squares, are still the places where uprisings are decided.

While writer Eric Goldwyn acknowledged that a robust Twitter following and widely followed Facebook group may have changed the way that insurrections like the Arab Spring are built,

It takes physical space to connect revolutionary passions with daily life and, more important, the broader population.

When citizens unite in a square, a park, or along a scenic beachfront to demand reform, it creates an impossible-to-ignore spectacle that draws the attention of anyone nearby, not to mention those watching at home.

Of course, spectacle is critical to the role of public spaces in making social change and social value - be it Tahrir Square, street protests in Athens or (dare I say it in the same breath) the Royal Wedding. :*

But Eric's point is that physical public spaces in cities remain the place where people often choose to make life-changing decisions.

We make history on the streets, while the content of our lives and political, social and creative concerns are created elsewhere.

So what? Here's what.

Over the last decade, massive slugs of public and private investment have been made in creating key attractors in cities, like new museums, plazas, parks and gigantic Super Size Me works by artists like Anish Kapoor.

In the light of events in Tahrir Square, the impact of austerity measures in Europe and the possibility of a big slowdown in China, these investments are starting to look less like the 'catalysts to change' that they were marketed as.

And they look more like what they were always were: objects in pursuit of competitive economic advantage, the confidence of a global arts/Hyatt Plaza investment elite and expressions of order that offer solid comfort (in the face of the disorder of change).

But now that we're reminded of the power of the streets and values other than house price inflation, is it time to start to mainstream a different offer and use for public space in our cities?

How about seeing public space as less of a function of the tourist or global cultural economy and more as opportunity spaces of our own, places that tap up personal and local political, social, creative and intellectual feelings, rather than the kind of me-too, read-it-once content of an in-flight magazine?

Curate public places as amusement arcades, 'museums without walls', outdoor class rooms or a place for forests of tree houses from which to see the surrounding cityscape.

Create places where people can give stuff away - at its most esoteric, books left on a wall or clothing left on a seat for others to pick up.

Conceive of an infrastructure for our cities that mimics all the diversity, multiplicity and energy of the online landscapes we inhabit and encourage public spaces to be used by multiple groups, for different types of relationships and experiences?

Of course urban economies need to continue to chase and serve global corporate tenants and capital who (it's assumed) tend to prefer manicured, clean and high culture views from their windows.

But cities in advanced and emerging markets also need to devise ways and means by which they define themselves - and not let competitors define them.

If cities want to foster new intellectual, property, knowledge, product and service innovation, they need to reach for a new playbook and review and sweat their own assets.

They need to cultivate public places that allow us to reach for adjectives like "useful", not just "beautiful", "personal", not just "professional", and nouns like "playground" and "enterprise", rather than expressions like "it looks nice but please get out of the way, I'm late for my meeting". :)

If savvy public or private investors aren't able to create spaces that offer more than neutral, minimalist 'platforms' for conventional entertainment, it's up to creative and social entrepreneurs to support new vitality in adjacent neighborhoods or districts - a vitality that's so attractive, sensitive, human and socially conscious that it spreads like a contagion through the city.

Some of this is already going on in cities like London, New York, Moscow and Barcelona, spilling from the back-packs of a global creative elite.

But how are we going to turn this urban entrepreneurship in to a strand of popular culture - especially in towns, cities and countries where people don't believe that they have an investment in the public realm?

There may be a clue buried in the closing sentence of an article by Raul Juste Lores of Folha de São Paulo in a recent edition of Monocle:

Innovation is mandatory if you don't want to be just a commodities exporter.

Images courtesy of 1. Rosemary Sabet 2. WBUR 3, 5 & 6. Yvan Rodic 4. jmenard48 7. Jan Chipchase 8. Deep in Vogue

Percent for Innovation

For all of the trauma of recession, when it comes to urban innovation, be it people forming a new collective enterprise or socially producing goods and services, we're living in exciting times.

In the UK, we've shifted from the boutique outreach of street-level projects like the National Gallery's Grand Tour of 2007 to the Cineroleum, the adaptive re-use of a derelict petrol station in London as a temporary cinema by a collective of artists and designers.

In the delivery of public services, we've gone from industrial age 'command and control' Government to a moment when the Whitehall Innovation Hub, a unit of the National School of Government, the blue-chip space for the training of civil servants in the UK, can say in a report that

Innovation in the public sector flows through a viral model...The enormous challenges society currently faces...demand systemic innovation, new narratives, new ways of working and, more importantly, more appreciative atttitudes to people and their potential.

In earlier miserabilist post-punk times, this view of human creativity would have been derided as happy-clappy niceness and the warm, well-meaning, collaborative politics of the wig-wam.

No more.

Look to the United States - and New York City in particular - and you can't help but notice an orgy of modish socialist-real collectivism.

Take just two examples.

First, the weekly Fixer's Collective at the Proteus Gowanus Gallery, a former box factory on Union Street, Brooklyn.

Billed as a social experiment in improvisational fixing and mending, the Collective is a group of local handy-people who are waiting to fix stuff for you, like textile artist Maya Valladares.

At the same venue, there's the Brooklyn Brainery, a programme of four-week collaborative courses in which participants all read up on a topic, then share their findings with the group, much like book clubs.

 

Recent classes include The Life of Che Guevara, How to Survive Winter, How to Make Irrational Decisions - and I am sorry to say that the forthcoming course on World Dumplings is full.

At a time of street riots and demonstrations across Europe, this kind of progressive, DIY, local self-help starts to feel like a relation of pacifist activism, a form of carnivalism I blogged on here and what English philosopher Simon Critchley has called tactical frivolity.

But it expresses other things too.

It supports the idea of the city as a creative place that maximises its citizens' potential and also feels like early adoption of a make-do mutualism that cities and communities will need to prioritise over the next two decades, as the number of economically active people - i.e. those paying taxes - decreases.

But how to make this kind of thing more common?

How to help collective enterprise become an integral feature of urban life, rather than a trendy exception to the rule?

One tactic worth looking at is to turn the culture industry in to the libertarian industry and take inspiration from an element in the recent transformation of our cities, a phenomenom that has triggered and mirrored shifting values of culture and self.

Today, whether you like it or not, art is an important feature of the public realm of towns and cities and it has played its part in turning soulless business districts or burnt out downtown districts in to more civic, animate places.

The ancient Egyptians were good at it. Ditto Napoleon III. But there's little doubt that the prevalance of public art across the world today is in no small way thanks to a programme that started in New York City over twenty-five years ago - and if there's a will to mainstream make-do mutualism, I think that it's worth looking to for model behaviour.

In 1982, as New York emerged from financial crisis, the City Council led by Mayor Ed Koch passed legislation called Percent for Art that insisted, in effect, that one percent of the budget of a new or reconstucted public building be devoted to art.

Since that time, almost in silence, the Percent for Art programme of The City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs has produced over 200 works of art for the City, for public spaces, parks, schools, hospitals, fire stations, juvenile detention centres, even sewage treatment plants.

This is an astonishing sculpture in the Queens Family Courthouse that was completed by Ursula von Rydingsvard in 2003.

Suspended five floors above the atrium of the building, the sculpture is called katul katul, derived from a Polish children's game that mimics the rhythmic kneading of dough.

Also in the borough of Queens, here's a large-scale sculpture on the roof of the 107th Police Precinct that was completed by Alice Aycock in 1992.

The work is a weird combination of military-industrial and Harry Potter, made up of various pieces of painted grey steel and a large disk, inspired by a medieval astrolabe.

Around the disk are fragments of doors, steps, wheels, and a vessel-like form from which light emanates at night - or did back then.

For over twenty-five years, the Percent for Art programme has made art accessible and visible to the public in New York. It has spawned copycat schemes throughout the USA and Europe and played an important role in rendering the city as a more civic place.

But does Percent for Art also offer up a model for stimulating other kinds of creativity in cities, beyond flickering lights and ribbons of polyster?

If one percent of the budget of new or reconstructed buildings in our cities were given over to promoting or seed-funding new social ventures, it could light the touchpaper for a new culture of civic enterpreneurship.

Call it Percent for Innovation.

Value for money?

Yes, if you attach value to the power of sharing and vibrant, local, independent, sociable enterprise.

No, if it's happy-clappy nonsense to think of the city and its development as a platform for social achievement.

Images courtesy of 1. Tristram Sparks. 2 & 3. The Cineroleum. 4. the hanner. 5. Proteus Gowanus Gallery. 6. The New York Daily News. 7. Brooklyn Brainery. 8. Jeremy Keith. 9. Yvan Rodic. 10. Wally Gobetz. 11. Ursula von Rydingsvard. 12. Newyorkology. 13 & 14. Alice Aycock.

And thanks to Ben Denton, Director of Investment at First Base Limited, an urban development and investment company, for making me think about this the other week, rather than zzzzz on the 06:37 train from London to the city of Sheffield. :)

Growing the people

 

A big challenge to development in the UK just now is how to empower entrepreneurship.

How to do this when economics and culture is fixed on either large congolomerates or niche players, enterprises often rooted in monopoly, acquisiton, cost-cutting and exclusivity?

Urban renewal has a role to play in answering that question - and not least because it is central to the structuring and re-structuring of local economies and offering people opportunities.

Problem is that in recent years, urban renewal has gone either Extra Large, concentrating on developing super-sized slugs of real estate with large anchor tenants, such as supermarkets, or canape scale, opting for the grassroots development of small opportunities, such as the improvement of a dead park, empty building or creation of kitchen gardens. With little in-between.

Where is the motherboard in urban renewal that acts as an intermediary between the raw materials and end product?

Can sites and their development unfold in a way that builds markets, communities and new networks of independent social, creative and community enterprise?

How might we plan and develop our cities so that they are pro-social, respond smartly to feedback and second, third and fourth order effects and are more than a framework, with services and people super-imposed?

Earlier this year, a group of real estate developers, designers, urbanists, business people and representatives from government came together in Glasgow, Scotland to workshop the progress of a large development site on the northern fringe of the city called Speirs Locks.

Commissioned by Architecture + Design Scotland and the Scottish Centre of Regeneration, the workshop brain-stormed a 'social action plan' for Speirs Locks and involved both its landowner - the Glasgw Canal Regeneration Partnership - and existing tenants, including Scottish Opera, National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

We produced a short documentary film of the event - part of a larger programme of work that included workshops and intensive interviews with the local community, local social enterprises, creative enterprises and organizations with a stake or share in the development of the site.

The audience for the film: local government workers and development managers in the public and private sectors looking to set in motion a more creative and sustainable approach to the making of towns and cities.

 

Key participants in the film (other than me with, er, a Simon Cowell twang):

John Thackara - design writer

Roy van Dalm - cities consultant

Diamaird Lawlor - Architecture + Design Scotland

Donna Brooks - Glasgow City Council

Steve Dunlop - Director Scotland, British Waterways

Gary Watt - Development Manager, ISIS Waterside Regeneration

Dougal Perman - Radio Magnetic (Alternative Music Internet Radio)

Tom Beardshaw - Native HQ (social and digital media consultant)

The event was joined by creative and social entrepreneurs from Europe, supported by the British Council Creative Cities programme.

Its progress was also 'scribed' by service designer Lauren Currie of wearesnook.com:

Architecture + Design Scotland have posted a copy of the film and a report on the initiative here.

You'll find an essay by me that summarizes some of the key creative conclusions and recommendations off the back of the project here.

Please show the film some link love.

It's devoid of futuristic rap-rave to make it easy to share. :-{}

Images courtesy of 1. Yvan Rodic. 2. Michelle Lord via Ballardian. 3. Tom Beardshaw. 4. Glasgow Canal Regeneration Partnership. 5 - 8. Architecture + Design Scotland/wearesnook.com.

'Open source' place-making

How to deliver a Big Society - a place that acts as a catalyst to and inspires grassroots local activism - in the most bureaucratic, statist and controlled public space of them all: the built environment?

Here's one answer: 'open source' place-making.

This is an approach to urban development that centres on the making of an implementable 'social action plan' first - not a master plan - is inspired by the autonomy that many people want from their lives and seeks to create places through an unfolding process of interaction design first, architecture second.

You can download an essay by me on the idea, its roots and implications, with case-studies here.

Strapline: 'a collective approach to the development of cities in an age of Big Society, digital media and social enterprise'.

In its most naked form, 'open source' place-making is about taking a development site, establishing a very basic planning framework for it, triggering population of the site and then through its unfolding occupation form a forward plan for its development.

In effect, run an alternative to the standard planning and development process, enable occupation of spaces and places that's a physical equivalent of what's known as digital swarming and free real estate developers from having to be generalissimos of a war-game to theatrical managers.

A second dimension to open source place-making is to innovate the management of a neighbourhood, prioritise opportunities for tenants to benefit from short leases, self-build and self-management of the way in which they relate to buildings; also support different terms of trade and promote internal markets in goods and services on a barter basis - perhaps even follow a model by which tenants provide services-in-kind to external grant funders of a site, in lieu of rent.

A third ingredient in 'open source' place-making is to prioritise commercial occupancies of sites that service residents and other tenants on a collaborative, shared-risk basis.

No problem reserving a place for a branch of Zara or Jamie Oliver's Leatest Eating Experience but why not actively support the formation of co-operatives, mutuals and social enterprises on site, entities that tenants can direct, benefit from and that help build community? 

There's no need to fight shy of enabling this to happen at the centre of the consumer economy - see the new co-operative corner shop a group of us have recently founded in London, The People's Supermarket. 

What's more, there's no need to be narrow-minded on the terms and conditions of business responses to social problems. All of us have problems that need attention - but not all of them are dire.

For those who suffer from a lack of thrills: do a deal with Ferrari or local Scraphead Challenge types, turn an empty warehouse in to a showroom/playground and you could incubate a cluster of engineers.

For those who want autonomy: cluster their talents and provide an opportunity for them to excel. Say if they are good cooks, offer them vacant space on site and encourage them to form a new micro-food enterprise.

In other words, be a talent scout, recruit and capitalise upon its momentum.

On one level, 'open source' place-making is asking the development sector to open its mind up to a different way of thinking about design and site assembly: what tech people call interaction design.

Start to see physical space as a form of sovereign real estate - much like a web page - who's personality unfolds through the involvement of users - and see activity on site as a sequence of what geeks call transient interrupts that develop, die or mutate in to profitable enterprises over time.

Create a development framework that is less command-and-control zoning and more a theme that enables an early idiomatic understanding of the space that over time, through public engagement and interaction, acquires a personality and resolute business case.

On another level, 'open source' place-making is a plea: to slim down bureaucracy, open up development to taking an equity stake in the customer and reflect the fact that in an internet economy, people are loyal to data and experience and 'modal switch' between platforms; what's more, maximise opportunities to win a return on investment in certain markets or market-makers: such as social enterprise, independent retail, consumers who live in online, as well as offline spaces, and those who want autonomy.

Where's the capital receipt?

The pragmatic answer is that there's nothing stopping landowners from holding on to the most lucrative bits of real estate that will generate the highest short-term return.

The better answer is that to outsource development sites as enablers of change is to create and capture new (and higher) values.

Why bother with this advanced potion making? :)

Earlier this year, the Social Investment Task Force reported that investment by Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Funds in the UK was running at an estimated £764bn.

At a similar time, the BBC reported that one in every four and a half minutes spent by people online is on social networks and blog sites.

Meanwhile, urban development has wound right down, with producers and consumers of land either deleveraging or starved of bank credit.

You don't need to be Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve to realise that in this climate, it might be profitable - as well as more effective - for the real estate and renewal sectors to follow people and their money more resolutely in to online and social markets, and start to behave like those markets.

You don't need to be a nu-folk hipster to realise that stimulus investment in green infrastructure in the USA and UK is starting to confirm our age as a decade of sustainability as offensive strategy, to quote Gardiner Morse in the Harvard Business Review.

And you don't need to be Che Guevara to recognise that if grassroots citizen action is going to have an impact upon the design and delivery of public services - and become a key player in a new value chain - there's no better place to start than in a key market place for those services, the public realm.

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The paper on 'open source' place-making is part of a larger programme of work - "Growing the People", a social action plan for the development of Speirs Locks, Glasgow, Forth & Clyde Canal - commissioned by Architecture + Design Scotland, the Scottish Centre for Regeneration and part of the Scottish Government's Sustainable Communities Initiative.

An army of outstanding creative thinkers working in real estate, economic development, design, the creative industries and architecture have fed in to this work - including Diarmaid Lawlor of Architecture + Design Scotland, Chris Brown of igloo Regeneration, Stuart Gulliver (former Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise Glasgow), Steve Dunlop (Head of Regeneration, British Waterways), Gary Watt (ISIS Waterside Regeneration), design writer John Thackara, city development consultant Roy van Dalm (former associate of Richard Florida) and social innovator Rohan Gunatillake.

Please subscribe to this blog if you want to know more. I'll be posting a video and links to other stuff here in the coming days.

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Images courtesy of: 1. Not known (lost). 2. Mauricio Guillen. 3. Yvan Rodic. 4. James Joyce. 5. Haarala Hamilton Photography. 6 & 7. wearesnook.com (Lauren Currie). 8. Jan Chipchase, Frog Design. 9. Via my veil of stars.  

The 'F' Word

This month's edition of Monocle magazine turns its designery, Look & Learn style gaze on the family firm - or the enduring appeal of dynastic rule.

An opening article by Sasha Issenberg makes the simple but important point that From Associated British Foods, owner of global tea brand Twinings, to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp to Germany's Miele and Italy's Fiat, family businesses are part of the fabric of everyday life.

And Sasha goes on: according to the London-based Institute for Family Business, they account for more than 30 per cent of the UK's GDP, with one in three jobs at a family business. A 2010 IFB survey found that the UK's top 10 family businesses had total annual sales of £36bn (€41.5bn).

With the withdrawl of certain welfare benefits in last week's UK Public Spending Review and the UK Government's plan to devolve power closer to neighbourhoods - the programme known as Big Society - statistics like this are a reminder of the power of the family, as a basic, vital unit of economic life, consumer culture and social stability and solidarity.

On November 24, several thousand people in Middlesbrough, North-East England will find out whether they have won a Palme D'Or (ish) of foodie culture: one of the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2010.

The nomination is for a healthy food initiative in the town that a group of us helped start in 2006 and has since gone from strength to strength, led by local environmental charity Middlesbrough Environment City.

As the nomination for the BBC award says:

Local charity MEC has helped over 100 local groups and families in urban areas grow their own fruit and vegetables. Food is grown in school playing fields, allotments and local parks as well as back and front gardens. Each group donates a small portion of their produce to be cooked up into a Town Meal feeding thousands of local people in a festival atmosphere.

Just in case you missed it:

Local charity MEC has helped over 100 local groups and families in urban areas grow their own fruit and vegetables.

Now 'the family' may sit awkwardly with cultural/social innovation types - er, like me ;) - slaves to the cult of the individual, tipsy on the association between crowds and transformation and quick to fix on social change as the work of a hoard of strangers, massed in an heroic scene that could've been filmed by director Sergei Eisenstein.

But to state the obvious - lots of people have families. Families are often the beating heart of places and neighbourhoods. And while Carrington or Soprano-like families are capable of creating hell, there are also those who can give love "in a family dose", as disco dollies Sister Sledge once sang: 

Political policy just now in the UK is captive to 'C' words - community, communities of interest, civic, collectives, co-operatives and co-production.

Then there are the 'L' words, like local, localism and low-cost.

But is it worth also thinking about the 'F' word?

...not just seek to organize communities of people and build movements for change around motivated individuals, civic entrepreneurs or the tallest poppies in the field.

But also focus on key families in neighbourhoods, towns and cities - be they dynasties, folks with jugs behind the bar or the biggest fleet of cars jacked up on bricks on the drive: people at the centre of what goes on, spreads by word of mouth, give a place personality and often create wealth?

Images courtesy of: 1. Johannes Kleske. 2. Matt Hinrichs. 3 &4. Tubbyphunk. 5. Not known. 6. Not known (but probably Jane Aldridge).

A new nation of caretakers, as well as shopkeepers?

I gave a speech at a dinner of business leaders last week on innovation, urban renewal and Big Society, the new policy plan of the U.K. government (and have uploaded the slideshow here).

It was clear from the event that the creative, business and governmental communities are terrified of the coming U.K. Government Spending Review.

The terror: that the ‘furred arteries’ of many urban economies, a condition caused by dependence upon the public sector, low levels of entrepreneurship and lack-lustre marketing will now prove fatal.

The only response that seems viable just now is to be practical, opportunistic and emphasise certain values.

The economic survival of cities – not just magical 3%+ growth – may well require a major heart by-pass operation.

However, it stands to reason that there's value in performing intricate ‘surgery’ at a civic, local scale, small pieces of tactical activity that make a difference. Call it 'urban make-do'.

In places most vulnerable to public-sector cuts, it might be worth thinking of 'urban make-do' as economic strategy - yesterday's Sunday Times (£) carried a list of those places, including Hastings, Plymouth, Gloucester, Swansea, Liverpool, Blackpool, Newcastle, Sunderland, Barnsley and Ipswich.

One version of extreme make-do is captured in Jan Chipchase's images of life in Afghanistan, especially of street services like mobile-phone battery charging:

I snapped another version last year in a set of pictures taken in a park in Navarinou, Athens of a former parking lot that was squatted and transformed into a neighborhood park by a grassroots citizens' initiative.

But there are less extreme "get your musket"-and-"fix your bayonet"-type strategies out there.

They have a proven track record, require little more than a shift in frame of mind and they feature already in many urban initiatives in the U.K. just now - including one that we've just started to advise, billed to deliver an important nationwide legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Here are some principles:

• Pay attention to passionate activists and enthusiasts in cities - that's the band of outsiders formerly thought of as "the awkward squad". That's people like Peter Obletz, vintage rail car enthusiast who started up a movement in New York to preserve a railroad that has since become The High Line, an elevated park that has cost $43m (£27m) to date, generates 25,000 tourist visitors/day and has triggered twelve development projects adjacent to its tracks.

• Value philanthropy, since it's astonishing just how much time, equipment or money people are prepared to give away, either for personal gain or their own commercial objectives. This only became properly apparent to me with The People’s Supermarket, a new non-profit that I've co-founded in London, 79% of whose start-up costs have been 'paid for' by gifts of time, equipment or interest-free loans.

• Promote the caretaking of under-used assets, such as buildings and other public spaces. It's a way to minimise the landlord’s management costs but also yield revenue for venture investment. Caretaking is going on in countless initiatives across the U.K. just now, such as Meanwhile Space and Brixton Village Indoor Market and historically, this kind of activity has triggered economic revitalization - be it the market town of Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire or Freetown Christiania, a hippy commune that has become a huge attraction to visitors to Copenhagen, Denmark.

Doing business just now in towns or cities might feel like picking coal, even in those places with high proportions of employees in knowledge-intensive businesses or high quality built environment.

But it stands to reason that places that already suffer from high levels of deprivation or are at most risk from cuts in public-sector jobs will have to issue a new call to arms - and one best captured in a recent headline in the Financial Times: Doers and Grafters, your time is nigh.

'Doing' and 'grafting' is about survival and enterprise. But it could also inaugurate a new age of caretaking, not just shop-keeping.

Images courtesy of: 1. Not known. 2. Childhood Flames 3. Jan Chipchase 4. David Barrie 5. Kieran Lynam.

Arts, culture and development: creating "more for less"

For over a decade, the creative industries, especially the visual and performing arts, have been seen as important drivers of competitive advantage in the U.K., especially for 'post-industrial' cities, communities and real estate.

But in an age of fiscal tightening, social enterprise, green enterprise and infrastructure are fast becoming "the new black", with their promise of new employment, new markets and a new alignment of development, sustainability and social justice.

The challenge for the arts/creative sectors is stark. To make matters worse, culture may thrive everywhere but bankers' bonuses don't - and these are a key source of philanthropy and investment.

Earlier this month I led a one-day 'masterclass' on culture and urban renewal, supported by Arts Council England, Sheffield City Council and New Start that asked the question: In a time of 'more for less', can cultural enterprise offer value for money and different models?'

My answer is "yes" - but with two first thoughts.

First, cultural people need to assume the mantle of a warrior class, go to the gun cabinet and engage immediately with particular symptoms of downturn: empty properties, low rental demand and struggling businesses.

So, point one, take up your weapons, get down and get dirty.

 

Point two, promote public association and use this to make markets for new enterprise - and for inspiration, take a look at the current DIY Urbanism exhibit at the Urban Center in San Francisco.

In a fit of pre-'masterclass' nerves, I wrote down two lists of things that I find inspiring in the fuzzy thing we call 'culture': one list of 'creative places', the second of 'creative culture'.

And instead of arias, artworks or award-winning, architect-designed spaces, I was prioritising places that stage and express imagination, excitement or communal experience.

Now a lot of what I've listed doesn't address key issues of recession such as food, shelter, transportation and security - or at least directly.

But they do suggest that in a time of 'more for less' we should

• highlight business and entertainment solutions to social problems
• continue to shift creativity away from edification to the nurturing of talent and self-help
• make social spaces in which that talent can collectivize and excel
• take a leaf out of Facebook and launch hundreds of new applications every day

And a given is the principle scratched on the beam of a studio in East London, photographed by Viktor Vauthier: 

So here are my lists:

 For Creative Places...

Hub, Angel, Islington, London

Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield

Kitchen at the St. John restaurant, London

Latitude Festival, Suffolk

Union Street Orchard, London

People dancing beside a lake in North Beijing, China (seen a few years ago)

Wardrobe making studio, Scottish Opera, Glasgow

Chictopia - a website for user-generated fashion content

The offices/flat of culture website http://www.lookatme.ru, Moscow

Gardens of Musee Branly, Paris

Backstage, New York Fashion Week (seen a few years ago)

Upstairs room - turned in to a bar - of Malcolm, a former coal-worker, Castleford, Yorkshire

Chalk drawings for a vintage clothing store, pavement, Shoreditch, London

Studio of Georg Baselitz, Germany (seen a few years ago)

 

For Creative Culture...

Work of Manchester dupstep/2-step producer Synkro

Streetstyle photography of Yvan Rodic

Fashion blogger Wedge Heel

Cycling cafe 'Look Mummy No Hands'

Park Slope food co-operative, Brooklyn

Grameen Bank and other micro-finance organizations

Florence and the Machine's live performances

Green Demolition company Buffalo Re-Use

Social innovation project Southwark Circle

Under Age Festival, Hackney

Work of fashion designers Rodarte & Stolen Girlfriend

X-Factor
 

Feel free to hate what's here - but please do your own list.

In the meantime, I'll

Images courtesy of: 1. Pasquale Ottaiano. 2. The New Black. 3. Jake and Dinos Chapman. 4. Viktor Vauthier. 5. Banksy via Tony Hisgett.