David Barrie

Innovating a London 2012 Olympic Park

According to last week's Architect's Journal, the team behind the London 2012 Olympics are searching for answers to some key questions on the legacy use of the site:

there are still large chunks of land in the park masterplan – some designated for temporary infrastructure and venues during the Games – that remain blank in legacy mode. According to one source close to the project, ‘there is a map doing the rounds with big white areas on it that no one knows what to do with yet’.

This is the map:

Ideas have been published to divide The Park in to five main quarters, each with its own residential areas and community facilities including marinas, schools, nurseries and parklands and other ideas are circulating, such as creating a programmed cultural space like Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. 

The vision is set by Baroness Margaret Ford, boss of the Olympics Legacy Company, who says she wants the future park to be beloved by Londoners in the same way Central Park is in New York.

Can I make two suggestions that might help turn us on?

1. Crowdsource it

It is one of the great mysteries of our time why, in an age of digital swarming, crowd-sourced finance, distributed innovation and devolved governance, one of the most sophisticated communications and service economies in the world limits itself, when engaging the taxpayer in urban development, to a palette of public meetings, opinion surveys and balloon-days-out with hands-on play.

These techniques are great at building consensus and photo opportunities but they don't raise confidence, create movements for change or exploit the real, long-term value-uplift of wholesale social involvement. They're also slightly hum-drum foreplay to the act of falling in love.  

The U.K. Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal [subscription required] has just published a paper by me with case studies that presents a broader, more distributed approach to the task of deciding what to do and where in a way that's about social innovation not war - in other words, crowd sourcing urban renewal (and if you want a copy of the paper, just email me).

In another space, a Policy Green Paper on localism called Control Shift published earlier this year by the U.K. Conservative Party, made great play upon the value of Direct Democracy, citing local referendums as an instrument for reviving civic life and creating a situation in which communities are once again trusted to be in charge of their own destinies.

Now decentralization may be the honey language of the political hustings and empowerment of communities may be Motherhood and Apple Pie vogue, but London 2012 offers a massive opportunity to maximize Direct Democracy and the taxpayer's say in legacy.

It's just the case that this needs to be prioritized: or if it's already going on, promoted. 

2. Utilize user-led design

Public engagement in urban development is often written off as letting the ill-informed natives in on an intense series of privileged architectural or economic investment decisions.

Of course there are technical and financial issues that are complex but a culture of closed professionalism can lead to asymmetries of information and a loss of trust that can scupper long-term sustainability and viability of an urban project.  

There is an ever-growing body of evidence that reinforces the value of user-participation and user-developed modifications in product and service design. It's known as Democratizing Innovation.

It's also almost a given now that contemporary commercial and social culture is about creating opportunities for people to generate their own choices and content, be it selecting pizza toppings or building a platform for people to upload or share something they care about and like.

This is not just about 'enabling culture' - but what Professor Eric von Hippel of MIT shrinks in to eight words: Users are the customers, they get to choose.

Within the Olympics orbit, are there people working with 'lead-users 'of public spaces around the world who have taken a strip of land and made it work more effectively for them and their community?

Are there teams of free-runners, park-keepers, urban farmers, mobile-phone swarming teenagers or basketball-players who are sick of multi-surface play areas being asked to design spaces that might, in time, not just host but also innovate mainstream, commercially-attractive pursuits?

The answer to all of these questions may be yes, yes and yes again.

However, the article in the Architect's Journal - even if it's half true - suggests that legacy development of the 2012 Olympic Park might benefit from not just new ideas but a process that shifts the gearbox a notch beyond an architect/masterplanner approach to the people. 

Some useful resources: 

Legacy Now - a website on the Olympic Games 2012 legacy. 

Hackney Council's 2012 Unit - their website carries a useful list of Government agencies and organizations working on the Olympics and what they are responsible for.

The London 2012 website carries a checklist of cultural projects that will form the Cultural Olympiad.

Images courtesy of clevercupcakes and Legacy Now. 

Crowdsourcing action against climate change

On 26th September, the town of Middlesbrough, North East England, will host its annual town meal.

At the event, people will feast on food that they've grown at home, in kitchen gardens and on formal or informal plots of ground across the town.

The Middlesbrough Meal initiative started in early 2007, supported by Middlesbrough Council, the U.K. Design Council, real estate developer BioRegional Quintain, Groundwork North East and local public agencies. 

Towards the end of 2006, service designer and former NESTA Creative Pioneer Nina Belk, artist and educator Debra Solomon of Culiblog and me put a call out to local people, asking them if they wanted to grow food and to choose their preferred location. 

Over the next year, over a thousand people in the town, clustered in local groups or connected by social networks, grew food in public places. 

They brought their early harvest to cookery classes called 'kitchen playgrounds', inspired by meal-assembly centers in the United States.

The final harvest delivered the base ingredients for a town meal, curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith, attended by an estimated 8000 people - and reported by the Observer newspaper to be part of a wider move for harvesting food as art. 

 

You'll find more on the project throughout this blog (and I should give it a rest, I know):

- on its relevance to freeing-up of inter-human communications

- on the value of master-planning productive urban landscapes in cities

- or the clue it offers to making additional money from the development of urban land

Now this is all terribly fascinating - or not (please keep reading) - but the real legacy is now starting to come through from a process that was consciously designed to trigger mass participation, sow the seeds of a more localised food supply chain and strengthen social ties - in retrospect very connected to Michel Bauwens and his ideas on Peer-2-Peer Collaboration.

A forthcoming report on Green Infrastructure by CABE, the U.K. Government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space, will outline some of the project's key legacies:

• 14 new allotments have been created in local schools
•  a training allotment has been set up in a deprived part of town
• three new food co-operatives have been set up in three districts of the town
• a social enterprise restaurant for 13-19 year olds is being set up to help careers in catering
• urban farming was at the core of a successful bid to the U.K. Government for what is now an £8m ($13.5m)  fund aimed at helping the town become a healthier place

This is not to brag. But to make some simple points about public participation in the transformation of the physical fabric and the quality of life of our towns and cities. 

Mass participation at the most local level can generate real, additional value.

Sometimes what matters is orchestration of human activity, not just its production. 

And sometimes it helps people to have a script - in order to write their own.

Images courtesy of Tubbyphunk.

Liberating the lone blogger: some resources

To quote the Canadian cyberspace maven Pierre Lévy in 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. 

Yeah, right. So?

Well, if we buy in to this, and accept that the challenge of the net is to find ways and means to create a fully transparent market for ideas, arguments, projects, initiatives, expertise, and resources, we need to set to work not just on enabling people to get online but also finding ways and means to liberate and connect the lone bloggers - or people locked in the pleasure or pain of this flaming tomb:

 

There's amazing work going on in the UK just now devoted to encouraging people to win access to the net and 'connect the connected'.

The work is led by some key individuals like Will Perrin of Talk About Local, Helen Milner of UK Online Centres, David Wilcox of Social Reporter, Dominic Campbell of Future Gov and the team behind the social media handbook Social by Social, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Initiative is fuelled by U.K. Government policy that's determined to broadband the nation, media organisations trying to realign themselves to "the people formerly known as the audience" and a bubble of evangelism for online social media.

But how to capture what Lévy called the potential of cyberspace to implement a form of computer-mediated civility?

How to connect the dots at the most local level - and for social good?

In the run-in to our online social media workshop in Butetown, Wales last week, a group of people shared examples of web-spaces that seek to liberate the lone blogger and aggregate content at the most local level.

Some were posted at the Digital Engagement website. Others at our Digital Butetown Google group. So I thought it useful to collect them in one place:

B13 - a site that aggregates information from blogs, feeds and other sources related to the suburb of Moseley in Birmingham, West Midlands.

Created in Birmingham - a site that links the city's creative communities online presence. 

Digbeth is Good - a blog looked after by Nicky Getgood who uses subscriptions and searches in her Google Reader and then feeds them into the blog via postalicious.

Hylocal News Wire - created by Jon Bounds, "a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them".

Kings Cross Pageflakes - created by Will Perrin that takes feeds from local websites and scrapes sites without RSS

The Londonist - a journalist-written blog whose breadth of source material speaks to the idea of aggregating a diversity of grass-roots content.

Vetnorblog and Pitsnpots (Stoke on Trent) which both aggregate some content and look and feel like replacements for local newspapers.

Planet Balham - a site that 'takes' feeds from a district of South London and its surrounding area. 

Everyblock - that combines photos, local government announcements, data and news items for 15 major U.S. cities.

Some of these sites speak to the idea of journalists as "community weavers" and the great American tradition of community media, digitally vitalized by initiatives such as the Knight Foundation's News Challenge.

But all establish and explore the value of aggregating content at the most local level and (potentially) look forward to a moment when, much like community partnerships in urban renewal, there may be an opportunity to network networks and create a local 'knowledge space'. 

The link between this work and social and economic renewal is now starting to be captured in a group called Local Communities.

We've started to see what we can capture in Butetown with a search on Addictomatic and search on Netvibes.

They don't collect much intelligence though. There's insufficient supply of locally-generated content and the platforms are controlled by outsiders. 

At our design workshop, we discussed a process by which Butetown might start to connect the dots and look to develop a 'hyperlocal' knowledge economy - something that I'll report back on soon but that also, critically, local net users need to decide to advance.

But in the meantime, power to the force that Lévy described as new proletarians, auxiliary workers devoted to effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts.

Sources of first two images lost. Network mapping courtesy of netmaptoolbox. Digital Butetown is an initative supported by British Council Wales, igloo Regeneration and the British Telecom Group.

Building digital bridges

The U.K. Government has recently published Digital Britain, a plan that seeks to establish the framework for the roll-out and use of broadband technology in the country in the future.

Part of the plan is to establish ways and means by which the 'digitally excluded' can have access to the vast resources offered by the internet, rather than become the untouchables of the knowledge economy.

There's a huge amount going on in the field of Digital Participation just now - and some of the biggest shouts have to be reserved for the grassroots activism of Will Perrin, Talk About Local and the Digital Engagement network in the U.K., the ideas being generated by the Network Weaving group in Ohio, Australian academic Marcus Foth's work on how 'interactive systems' can be designed to support social networks in urban neighborhoods and, as ever, the guiding lights of Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater.

But as young people's digital engagement consultant Tim Davies writes in his post on the website of the Royal Society of Arts' Connected Communities program:

sometimes it seems like there can be a gulf between the economics focussed vision of Digital Britain, and the social justice discourse coming from grass roots and hyper-local social media and digital inclusion projects.

Meaning: there's a huge amount going on just now on the framework and supply side of digital inclusion but there's a gap in the middle.

Implication: if we don't sort out ways, means and opportunities to connect the dots of public involvement online, alongside boosting participation and access to technology, society and culture won't capture maximum benefit.

This is an image of a bridge that I helped deliver in Castleford, West Yorkshire. It's a major piece of new infrastructure for a small town that has won awards. Yes, it was designed by an architect. And yes, it was paid for by the state. But underpinning its commissioning and design evolution was a process that aggregated community effort and organization across the entire town and which spawned the formation of a new community group who acted as client and key driver of the bridge project. 

This is a composite image of an event held in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England in 2007 that was attended by 8000 people and was the culmination of a process through which over 60 different community organizations grew food in over 240 different spaces and places across the town.

A framework for participation and a narrative was established, then local people elected to get involved, then more and more people got involved, participating on their own terms and, in the end, their aggregated effort has had important impact upon the future of their community.

These projects demonstrate two things that I think are relevant to innovation around digital inclusion.

Both have been successful in generating a community return and triggering new external financial investment - the bridge has been central to Castleford leveraging over £200m ($320m) of new investment, Middlesbrough a new £4m ($6.5m) program linked to supporting a healthier town, with urban agriculture at its center. 

But more importantly, both have established mid-level platforms or enabled processes that have collected up existing local initiative, networked them, helped consumers establish a vision for their community and created a narrative that has allowed other groups and people to self-organize.

Now none of this is brain-surgery: those experienced in community organization and urban renewal have been doing similar things for years, boosted by the need to mobilize volunteering, the privatization of public services and the need for smaller towns and cities to construct business cases for investment around a mixed bag of diverse and fragmented land assets.

I have also posted on this theme quite a lot - forgive me! - linked to networking data-gathering, approaching development sites as 'ecosystems' or the value of middle-up innovation in local government.

So what's the relevance to Digital Britain?

• There needs to be acute focus pulled on building the community collective online, if what's been called 'digital maoism' is not to create another billion community activists, this time online, who are as disenfranchised as those in the real world
• It would be helpful for policymakers to link to those involved in community organizing in urban regeneration and renewal, since they have expert experience at creating and enabling what's known as 'bridging capital'
• Whether our romantic streak likes it or not, economic and urban policy nowadays is devolving to the regional and metropolitan level. This system demands localism but suggests that hyper-localism might benefit politically and economically from being joined up somewhere higher in the local political order
• Community organization in urban renewal and the delivery of urban policy benefits from a thematic, non-stove-piped approach to the design and delivery of public services. In digital participation, the provision, receipt and generation of news as a public service seems to be emerging as a key to delivering this. 

All of this leads to two questions:

• What's the infrastructure that can act as both frame and driver to digital participation in the future?
• What's the hook that will encourage people to use the Internet for positive actions or what Clay Shirky has called "online barn raisings"?

In urban renewal, the hook is the opportunity to contribute to improving your prospects and the world outside your front door.

If we believe that social technology can have social benefit, it might be useful to be led by this and think harder about promoting the immediate benefits of online existence.

On one level, humanity is already doing this, using Twitter to get the message out from the streets of Teheran and Moldova and then news networks and academics picking up on the use of digital media as an instrument of expression and freedom. 

But perhaps on a more mundane level, policy makers and digital practioners might think more on the line of networking existing online social media activity. 

If this effort were connected with the larger process of economic improvement of towns, cities and commuities, it's uninpsired name would be the phrase  'digital renewal'.

Images courtesy of knittingskwerlgirl, McDowell Benedetti & Partners and the Design Council.

Capturing attention online

One great mystery of our time is how to hold an audience.

Simon Cowell seems to achieve it: so cosmetic dentistry is one answer.

But the rise, rise and rise of real-time apps like Twitter and OneRiot and then linked apps like Twitterfall suggest that capturing attention is about to become more infuriating and elusive than ever, as the age of handling things in nicely timed, spaced batches disappears. 

In their excellent survey of Media Predictions, consulting firm Deloitte says that in the online social media part of this elusive world, people are wrong to look to make money out of collective engagement upstream but should go estuary:

If members are hard to monetize, the focus may need to shift to generating revenues from the aggregated value of their actions and behavior.

Fine. But that doesn't offer much of a clue as to how to do it. 

Filtering content and trending topics may be in vogue. But to capture value from stuff that happens in real-time, there's a need to do more than track and edit.  

Call me old-fashioned but to extract significance from something, it needs to be held in a space or place that allows value to be captured, aggregated, indexed and extrued. 

A recent story in the London Financial Times gave a slightly Guantanamo/psychodrama name to this, pulled from the ideas of Ronald Heifetz of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In the 1980s, Heifetz suggested that leadership was not the same as authority or management but instead it was the activity of mobilizing "the community" to tackle difficult problems.

A key to mobilizing communities, Heifetz' suggested, was to create a holding environment, defined as

any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of another in order to help them face up to their problems.

The term (apparently) originates in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and patient.

Could it be applied to the ebb and flow of not just social but also digital relations?

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".

Broadcasting as social innovation

Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kevin McCloud: these are the names of television presenters in the U.K. who are delivering us from evil.

Historically, the purpose of television has been to inform and entertain - and the medium's been a one-way street in which the viewer has had to sit up and listen to the wisdom - or not - of producers, served up as vaudeville or reportage.

But in recent years, TV in the U.K. has begun to deal in other forms of traffic and become a place for ideas with social goals that have sought to use the medium as a catalyst to change in the real world, not just a world of fictional reality.

Live Aid was a watershed moment.

The 400 million viewers who watched the event showed the power of broadcasting to scale, diffuse and connect public experience across the globe.

And the £150m the event raised for charity showed the ability of people to link broadcast media and social action.

Since then, several forces have affirmed the connection in the U.K.:

• an enduring tradition of broadcasting as public service

• producers fancying themselves as cultural patrons not scuzzy manipulators

• the need for media to become more relevant and personal to peoples' lives

• the popularity of ‘constructed reality’ programming and

• celebrities increasingly wanting to express themselves as social activists

What's more, the growth of satellite and online media has forced broadcasters to focus on competitive advantage and the scale and ambition of the cinema has led audiences to expect epic narrative.

So the pressure has been on for broadcasting to extend its impact and reach in new ways - and find new sources of cash to do it. 

One route has been to originate ‘tiny epics’: off-screen initiatives with on-screen lives that are structured as public-private partnerships, with the broadcaster acting as an early investor or entrepreneur.

Now it might be shocking to cultural snobs but this is social innovation - a role for the media beyond that set down in a recent (and brilliant) paper published by the Young Foundation. 

Take the work of Channel 4 Television, the advertiser-funded, U.K. public broadcaster:

In 2005, Channel 4 commissioned chef Jamie Oliver to team up with school dinner lady Nora Sands and take over the direction of the state school meals service in the London Borough of Greenwich.

This 'social experiment' was designed to show how children could be fed fresh, more nutritious meals. It became a national campaign for new standards for school meals and two series of prime time television programmes. It has been responsible for investment of £280m in school food and skills and the creation of a new Government agency to do the work.

 
Three years earlier, the Board of Channel 4 decided to donate £100,000 to the urban renewal of the former coal-mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire and help establish a project that emphasized citizen participation, grassroots innovation, co-design and networked public management.

The project became a £14m programme of capital investment in the town’s public spaces that has been credited with raising over £200m of additional new investment in the town; and it was broadcast as a series of four TV programmes.

Earlier this month, it was announced that over 20,000 people had registered on Landshare, a web platform run by Keo Films in partnership with Channel 4, that links people who want to grow their own fruit and vegetables - but don’t have a site - with people or institutions that have available land.

In social innovation-speak, this is an "enabling service" designed to foster a new network of local food production - and it was set up off the back of a series of TV programmes in which six families cultivated an acre of land provided by Bristol City Council.

All of these projects reveal broadcasting as a third-party agent of change - no accident at a time when our trust in institutions and the state is at an all-time low.   

But they also represent something more exciting – a wave that 4IP, Channel 4’s new media service seems out to capture.  

Media audiences are dispersed. Video production is now almost totally accessible. And people enjoy personalizing entertainment and information experiences on their iPods and computers, using playlists or RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’).

In effect, the situation is now ripe for broadcasting to build on a first phase of work and evolve in to a distribution platform for dispersed innovation.

It's amazing really how long it's taken us to get here: a measure of the traditionalism, risk-aversion and dominance of an anti-hippy, post punk elite obsessed with literature, cinema and controlling the cultural agenda.  

But broadcasting as a medium for social innovation is still in its infancy - and we need to take care.

For there are certain conditions that need to be met if we're to progress to the next stage:

• the state has to be comfortable with self-organization

• the state has to be prepared to see broadcasting as a space for sharing information

• our idea of a sustainable society needs to include an effective, efficient flow of communications

• and media bunnies need to continue to believe - or continue to have reason to claim to believe - that “worthy” does not mean “dull”.

Farewell Jil Sander. Hello Snow + Rock. 

Image of TV set courtesy of craig1black. Other images sourced from Google Images.

1 small lesson for organisations about supporting network innovation

Two organisations in the U.K. - the Royal Society of Arts and NESTA - are carrying out research in to how people can innovate in networks, rather than either on their own or simply with the person the other side of the waste basket.

In another part of the park, J.D. Stanley at Cisco has been working hard for several years on Digital Swarming: or how to combine inputs from people, machines and other data sources, digitize them and place them on to networks. 

All of this work falls in to the category of trying to understand how people can create, collaborate and share new ideas across dispersed places and spaces.

It's exciting, important and without a doubt what matters in a world in which the connectedness of people, information and technology is all-pervasive. But is there something missing?

Sometimes, animals don't relate but share stuff and copy one another.

At other times, states or experiences change by accident or projection.

In other words, some relationships form on the basis of what writer and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry once called sympathetic vibration and saw in the behaviour of a violin:

The A string of a violin is designed to vibrate most readily at about 440 vibrations per second: the note A. If that same note is played loudly not on the violin but near it, the A string may hum in sympathy.

Put another way, what may matter in networked innovation is not just mechanics or structure, but also tone - a tone that's set not just by trust but also momentum, and the design of a stage upon which people feel able and want to perform.

Image of Eliasson installation courtesy of Anna Maria Leon, horses by grandylion, window reflection by lux fecit.

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?

Urban renewal: approaching sites as ecosystems

Over at U.K. construction magazine Building, urban renewal specialist Jackie Sadek comments on the impact of the recession on the industry and makes the point that

Developers who can respond, not just on ability to deliver but on a range of social objectives, stand to become "partners of choice"....We urgently need a new paradigm.

There's a clue to that paradigm in the familiar but esoterically called world of 'multi-sided platforms'. 

These aren't the sort of platforms that enable one to move from A to B as in a caper by Super Mario:

But the world of Facebook:

And according to a recent paper published by Harvard Business School, TopCoder, HBS and the 12-hectare sprawling "mini-city" of Rappongi Hills in Japan (above and below):

The example of Rappongi Hills is not convincing but the idea of multi-sided platforms (or MSPs) and their links with the process of designing and delivering urban renewal is tantalizing.

In their paper for HBS, Kevin J. Boudreau and Andrei Haigu define MSPs as

platforms which enable interactions between multiple groups of surrounding consumers and "complementors".

Platforms are defined as products, services or technologies which serve as foundations upon which other parties can build complementary products, services or technologies.

A multi-sided platform is both a platform and a market intermediary: a place in which distinct groups of consumers and "complementors" interact through MSPs.

So what has this got to do with urban renewal and real estate development?

A lot. And it's way more than simple ideas of networks and network theory.

To the bottom right of the above picture is a site known as Roath Basin in the docklands of Cardiff, Wales in the U.K.

The site is being brough forward for development as a new mixed-use neighbourhood by a development company called Igloo Regeneration and joint-venture partners the Welsh Assembly Government.

As part of the development strategy for the site, Igloo has commissioned me and associates to work with public, private, voluntary and community groups in adjacent neighborhoods to ensure that the site is developed in such a way as to connect with the social, economic and cultural past, present and future of the area and that the area and Igloo can leverage mutual opportunity from the £150m ($225m) or so new investment in the area.

We are working with local organizations and Igloo on designing a sequence of all sorts of tangible and intangible, real, digital and layered 'interventions' to help make this happen.

This image is of a new bridge in Castleford, Yorkshire that me and an army of others helped make happen between 2002 and 2007.

The bridge was designed by designers and built by engineers: but it was actually realized by a co-ordinated confederacy of local interests - both institutional and communal - linked through a single initiative.

The initiative became a vehicle for transformational change not just because of the coherent, co-ordinated efforts of all but also the fact that connected to the main 'capital' programme was a series of social, economic and cultural initiatives and opportunities for people to organize their own projects and activities and co-opt or link them in to the main programme of work.

This is an image of a concluding event in a programme of work that me, a design company, artist and team of public agencies helped organize last year in Middlesbrough, North East England.

In the project, people grew food in vacant public places across the town, took cookery classes in neighbourhood centres and then, come the final harvest, cooked a 'town meal', in an event attended by over 8000 people and curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith.

The important point about this project is that over 1000 people in over 80 organizations across the town elected to grow food at diverse, dispersed locations: in school yards, public parks, the backs of community centers and front doorsteps.

Here's a picture of Margaret from Gresham Neighbourhood Centre taking it easy in an empty growing container: 

The sponsoring bodies of all three initiatives were/are an amalgam of public and private investors, non-departmental public bodies, charities, NGOs, arts organizations and individuals willing to grant time and effort.

But the unifying element of all three initiatives is that they see/saw physical development sites as an opportunity to create or support new ecosystems of economic, social and cultural activity.

And a process was designed around those opportunities that enabled people and institutions to self-organize and innovate.

None of this is new. It's going on all over the place. Except that more often that not, business models are unable to admit or compute the added value that these processes can bring to the original land asset.

And people often get land-locked in the mechanics and confines of the physical world.

In a recent event at Harvard Business School, James Breyer, an early investor in Facebook and a director of Wal-Mart Stores, commented on the difficulties of understanding and codifying the vast amount of new daily information generated on the Web.

To date, there is no company that allows one to take quickly all of this information 'in the cloud' and integrate it with the vast arrays of information in the physical world.

And Susan Decker of Yahoo! went some distance to start to profile the sort of outfit who might offer a solution:

Companies that will do pretty well will create a dashboard of simplicity that is very open to the whole Internet, not just the company it may be associated with, and will elevate social connections in a way that drives dollars.

Jackie Sadek is right. We urgently need a new paradigm in urban renewal.

And as Jackie writes, it is about reducing risk by using public sector assets.

But it's also about widening and changing our view of what is and isn't an asset.

It's about creating real, live, hydra-headed, multi-sided, open platforms to do the work.

And it's about finding new ways of valuing social connections: perhaps using new currencies, such as energy, food or the joint productive power of the Web.

The obvious challenge is to find ways to win a critical mass of adoption and demonstrate how the value extracted can be maximized. (And this is where the skill *really* comes in.)

But the sponsors of all of the above projects intuitively understand the opportunities of working a new paradigm.

The less obvious challenge is not to try to clone initiative but to push public and private sector organizations and individuals in your area or domain to get with that paradigm.

They need to become sustainably-minded social entrepreneurs.

Rappongi Hills by Marc Lee Pack. Mario capture by NES--still-the-best. Cloud by Reko.