David Barrie

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.

A new alphabet of sensation

It's a familiar human condition to find yourself in a space of communication but unable to string a sentence together.

But it's strange to find yourself in a space of communication that invites, say verbal communication, only to find, say, writing a message on a card and flashing it up a more effective and viable form of expression.

On the Net - and especially Flickr - there's a sub-genre of expression/exhibitionism/conceptual photography that involves creating and uploading images of things - but often yourself or your mate - covered in scrawled messages. 

This marker madness stretches from people saying hello, to declaring love or giving instructions on how to cook them.

As ever, Yoko One must have fluxed this years ago but in the context of the net and all it's supposed to be doing as a platform for seamless communication and exchange, it's puzzling - but interesting. 

Why the need to 'self-billboard' and send scribbled messages in a bottle if you're part of an epic, happy, super-friendly media party?

Plain old exhibitionism?

Experiment?

Or  evidence of the boundaries of the Net and ways people are trying to escape its isolationism.

In other words, a new language of Robinson Crusoe-isms?

Couch image by danske.  Come clean me by titania*A.

Someday it will happen...

The speed with which it's happening is worrying.

But the politics may be pleasing...

Exposure of the contradictions and fealties of the triumphalist capitalism we've lived through over the last ten years.

Newspapers in the UK are starting to fill with stories that demonstrate how the new money order is in crisis and political relationships and value systems are going up the Kyber.

First, the London Financial Times reports that the Russian government has made $50bn of state aid available to help finance the external debt of the country's oligarchs.

But then ES Magazine salivates over the opening of a new branch of Gagosian in Moscow.

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is caught soliciting money from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

But at the same time his party is pushing itself forward as compassionate conservatives devoted to social responsibility and fraternity -  and going to work on a bike, not a yacht.

As Charlie Leadbeater writes in a brilliant article in this week's Spectator

The crisis may make us turn away from cosmopolitan connections.

It may also turn us towards

a simpler, back-to-basics capitalism.

But in its wake will also come all sorts of stuff like exposure of sham values of honesty and humility, of lazy media punting exuberant capitalism and posh people posing as friends of the pauper.

The challenge has got to be to get ahead of all of this.

As Charlie says

We should be searching for a new kind of capitalism.

He's right.

But the question is, what's the currency?

Here's a list

• Cash
• Energy
• Food
• Online social networks

Take your pick.

Image by Kent Rogowski.

A painter speaks...

Here's another antidote to the daily news of irredeemable credit default swaps and synthetic collateral debt obligations that don't, er, add up.

It's a call to arms to the visceral by German artist Gerhard Richter:

I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.

So there.

Picture courtesy of Jorge Franganillo.

Filthy rich, sovereign wealth chic

 

One of the major cultural effects of economic catastrophe - a moment when it seems, as J.G. Ballard once wrote clock time is no longer valid - is what it does to wealth, its perception and celebration.

In their support for the part-nationalization of British banks, it's heartening to hear the leaders of the British Conservative Party calling for curbs on executive pay and bonuses - even if just a few weeks ago they were against a ban on short-term selling.

But what is - and will be - further revealed as the nightmare progresses is the total incongruity of all existing value systems of aspiration.

No less than three of ten 'news' pages in this week's Sunday Times newspaper in the U.K. told stories of the super-rich:

    * Lakshmi Mittal's paper loss of £16bn in the credit crunch
    * Charles Saatchi backing protest art in the Middle East
    * Roman Abramovich's new super-yacht

The previous week, the magazine carried four pages on the spending habits of Princes and Sheikhs - letting us know the amazing detail that in billionaire circles concierge services are known as my outsourced wife.

Look around you and filthy rich sovereign-wealth chic is everywhere.

It drives attention to Damien Hirst and Kate Moss.

It fills all of CNN's commercial breaks.

It's maidservants have played a big role in popularizing raunch culture.

And it provides acres of tidbits in the margin that we are supposed to buy and aspire to - like London-based organizing service Practical Princess who provide, according to a recent edition of W Magazine:

folding templates for sweaters, thin rubberized hangers that save space and prevent slippage; plastic boxes for off-season storage; clear cases for stowing costume baubles; and suede drawer liners for protecting fine jewelry

The stuff is needed, according to the company's founder because

Clothes are like food: if you make them look appealing, you're more inclined to reach for them.

Clients: Camilla Al Fayed, Melissa Odabash, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and the poster-girl for all this, Tamara Mellon.

But what happens to all of this as we enter an age of the super-rich selling up and disappearing from vision and the chic-est thing about sovereign wealth is the brown manila folder containing the $1bn cheque from the manager of the firemen's pension fund in South Korea?

Why bother to ask the question?

Because culture has been obsessed with excess capital and how to spend it over the last ten years.

Because early-adopting Notting Hillbillies have (ironically) driven consumer markets for ethical life values, such as sustainability.

And a key pivot of celebrity - as well as cures for loneliness - has been the Balenciaga handbag.

We love it. I love it. But it's not going to float boats any more.

Time to become a South Korean fireman?

Or just gloat at New Conservatism and the right-wing press tie itself in knots, celebrating the filthy rich while equally donning the mantle of austerity?

Lehman Brothers, Robert Mugabe and the Death of the Giant Handbag

Always one to ask the key questions...

Now that Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy, Robert Mugabe has been tamed and the Beijing Olympics are over, is the age of the epic handbag, the supertanker Tote almost over?

It was this Ferrgamo bag spotted in a shop window in Florence back in 2006 that first got me thinking. It was retailing at $18,000.

Then came a stray reference in the Financial Times to bundles of financial derivatives being called synthetic collateral debt obligations - and pictured on the net as something like this:

Then came the ubiquitous Dior ads on the back page of magazines like Vanity Fair:

Then there was Mark Levinson's book on how the shipping container changed the world economy:

Self-portraits by fashionistas on the net of their handbags - and themselves: 

Then Fortune Magazine reports that Bain & Co. forecasts that

the $270 billion luxury goods market will grow about 2% this year once exchange rates are factored in; that's still in positive territory, but sharply down from the 6.5% growth in 2007.

Then art critic Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker reports that the catalogue to an exhibition of contemporary art at the New Museum in New York made reference to

earthquake and flooding in China, the cyclone in Myanmar, the tornadoes and flooding in Iowa.

Then you notice Hermes Birkin bags on Flickr just left behind on seats of Swiss trains:

Then finally Grazia magazine publishes a Bag Special that declares

Mary Poppins gets an 08 Makeover. The newest bag shapes right now are boxy and ladylike.

So farewell complex financial derivatives.

And goodbye to Lehman Brothers.

Farewell the giant tote.

And good riddance to 'handbag elbow'.

Image of SDO chart courtesy of Bionic Turtle. Evergreen container: jot.punkt. And apologies to sophierosensvard for taking her image out of context.

60 out of 87 acres

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

So here it is.

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

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

So why does he grace this space?

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

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

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

an estimated 60 of Soho’s 87 acres

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

Astonishing!

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

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

But enough of that.

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

Yuk.

Time to move on.

Deep pan localism

Over at real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], news arrives that as the credit crunch tightens, Domino's Pizza is opening outlets in the U.K. at the rate of almost one store a week.

In an article in a recent edition, a business development manager spills the beans - no, I'll forget the metaphors - that the local is the global, vice-versa and upside down.

We typically set an eight-minute delivery boundary, so that there can be quite a few stores in a small area that don't compete with each other because people order very locally.

The best performing 'customer category' is "Happy Families" -

typically a household in which both parents are working and living in a detached or semi-detached house on a new housing estate.

And according to the article, those who fall into the category of "Urban Intelligence" are also enthusiastic pizza consumers.

This term has little to do with IQ - it is simply people who tend to live in cities, and in apartments rather than houses.

I don't know whether any of this is true but it does make for a neat marketing formula:

Gentrification does not = organic fruit-bread sellers but = inorganic tuna and sweetcorn on spun dough.

And 'local' = a franchised global brand working within an eight-minute radius.

Image courtesy of Jill Greenseth.

Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan

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

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

According to an article in today's Times newspaper

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

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

The new town square, designed by Hudson Architects:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project Management: MACE. Cost Management: Gleeds.

Stickier media

Just now, broadcasters in the U.K. are angsting over the role and meaning of public service broadcasting.

The personalisation of media, growth of the Internet and disappearance of traditional ideas of public realm have thrown the meaning of the public value of the media in to crisis.

What's great is that new platforms promise to end monopolies on narrative and its traditional form. 

So should old media players just pack their bags and go home?

No.

In the real world, there is a crying need for 'connectors' to bridge between people, government and life.

The return on investment required by the public and private sectors in the built environment place ever more importance on the social, not just physical infrastructure of place.

And companies increasingly recognize that there is competitive advantage to be had in sustainability, not just in the resource flows of material culture but also social and human capital.

What's exciting is that broadcasters now understand that new media platforms are just that - platforms and not pipes through which information can flow.

What's clear is that the public still identify and want some form of support to enable them to manage real and personal economies.

The challenge for broadcasters is whether they can meet their pledge to use new media to support public service - and define what that service is.

For if it's to mean more than acting as a nodal point for information and social networks, it needs to engage with the dreaded 'm' word...moral purpose.

In my mind, there's no dread in this.

And there's a willing audience out there. 

Why?

Because people innately understand through their everyday experience that communication matters.

The challenge is to embrace this understanding, take on the 'm' word and be inspired by the words of John W. Gardner, the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson and founder of Common Cause:

Communication in a healthy society must be more than a flow of messages; it must be a means of conflict resolution, a means of cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community.

Image of TV courtesy of  Niemster. Cross Story Platform Telling by Russell Davies. Video shared by yannoucs.