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

Reach for the Skies

With the arrival of new government legislation in the form of the Localism Bill, improvements to neighbourhoods in the UK that are popular, small-scale and fit in to larger plans for their area are likely to become simpler to achieve, through instruments known as neighbourhood development orders.

Last year, we advised an initiative of Sky Television in the UK called The Great Treehouse Challenge in which three communities across the country designed and delivered three new treehouses, supported by a team of designers, engineers and others led by architect Alex Shirley-Smith.

Our role was to advise from the outset on the opportunities and challenges of building a treehouse, the expertise required to deliver new structures and how to find a path of least regulatory resistance.

Thanks to Shirley-Smith, the communities, authorities, landowners and the driving determination of project producers Jeremy Daldry and Liberty Smith, the process of design and delivery took just eight months.

While the terms of the Localism Bill have and will continue to be fiercely contested, a new regime that seeks to democratise development and liberalise the regulatory regime should lead to the speedy design and build of more of these sorts of minimalist, meaningful, hyper-local projects.

Here are films of the three final built Treehouse Challenge structures.

Project: Wild Fox Treehouse. Community group: Wild Fox Community Project. Location: Paignton, Devon.

 

Project: Lochcarron Treehouse. Community group: Kirkton Woodland Heritage Group. Location: Wester Ross, Scotland. 

 

Project: Tadworth Treehouse. Charity: The Children's Trust. Location: Tadworth, Surrey. 

 

Useful resources:

Sky 1 HD on Vimeo: Alex Shirley Smith: Building your own tree house

International Listings: 10 Astonishing Tree Houses You'd Love to Live In

This Big City: Green Spaces in Cities: What's a Tree Really Worth?

 

 

 

 

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).

 

'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.  

Venturing not marketing: 10 Big Society projects

The Big Society Network was launched last week in the U.K. by Prime Minister David Cameron.

The Network is a platform for activating citizen involvement in public affairs, with a mission and modus operandi that is the subject of feverish debate - track it by following the #bigsociety tag on Twitter. 

Because the Big Society is associated with the new Government, our economy has entered an age of austerity and You have to keep dancing while the music's still playing - to quote Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup from an earlier age - Big Society is fast becoming a bandwagon.

This isn't a bad thing. Bandwagons attract the private sector and corporates have a massive role to play in building public engagement in society just now. In a low demand economy, community building is a form of market-making and successful businesses need confident, self-fulfilled customers.

But a problem with bandwagons is that they can invite an overdose of social messaging and strategy-think and over-complicate the basic business of fostering and wiring grassroots economy and activism.  

As an antidote, here's a selection of ten simple, brilliant initiatives, enterprises and ideas - low-budget ventures with lo-fi marketing - that get on with the job of triggering and networking public association for public good: 

1. Renew Newcastle

An area-based, non-profit revitalization project in Newcastle, New South Wales that over the last 18months has created over 50 new creative businesses, galleries, studios, and enterprises in the fading commercial district of the city. (HT @unsungsongs)

2. Buffalo ReUse

A not-for-profit social enterprise concerned with the long-term sustainability of the city of Buffalo, New York with a green demolition/salvage company division that deconstructs built structures like houses and garages for materials to be used in other buildings. (It would be great to set up a version of this in a re-purposing city in the UK!)

3. Open Books

This is another enterprise ripe for replication - a non-profit social venture that operates a bookstore selling recycled books, provides community programmes and promotes literacy not landfill in Chicago.

(My U.K. fantasy: take a dead shop, refurbish it as an informal local library, create a neighborhood book recycling scheme, collect, sell and lend the books from the shop and invest any financial surplus in iPads with pre-downloaded novels, for people to put a deposit down on and take away.)

4. The People's Supermarket

A new co-operative supermarket in the London Borough of Camden, inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York. [Declaration of interest: I'm involved.] Anyone can shop in The People's Supermarket but in return for a small fee and four hours volunteer time per month, members win a discount on their food shopping - and can save on the usual premium prices charged for healthy, independent or locally-sourced food.

5. Union Street Urban Orchard

A large disused site next to railway line in Bankside, South London has been transformed in to a garden featuring countless examples of food growing, a zero-carbon pod and a skip turned in to a tennis-table. It's part of a larger programme to revitalize a string of disused public spaces in London known as Bankside Urban Forest and the brainchild of designer Heather Ring.

  6. Southwark Circle

A membership organization that connects members to each other to share interests and enjoy themselves and members to local, skilled people called Neighbourhood Helpers, who provide flexible help with things like DIY tasks, gardening or Internet lessons. Created by Participle, a social innovation company, the Circle is designed to allow people to be 'each other's solution'.

7. Silicon Roundabout

Not an initiative at all but a road junction where London’s Old Street meets City Road, the grunge epicentre of EC1, a district that is home to hundreds of tech businesses dating back to dot com days. The most famous local hero here was last.fm, the online music community bought by CBS for $280m (£140m) in 2007, one of the largest UK web company buyouts of recent years. This is just an intersection - and a deadly, dumpy one at that. But a thing that shows that association just happens through natural networking and clustering of people and what they are in to, not by putting a gun to their heads. 

8. Bikeworks

A community cycle centre in Tower Hamlets, East London, that offers a range of services including cycle training courses, rental, repairs, bike-recycling, travel planning and sales of new and second-hand bikes. This is an award-winning social enterprise that sells you bikes of known (not stolen) provenance and is nifty for getting across town to Look Mum no Hands!, a new (and heaving) bike workshop and cafe for city cyclists - a for-profit enterprise that understands people as communities of active interest, not couch potato demographics in a media plan. 

9.    Livity

Another social enterprise in London, Livity is a youth communications agency that co-creates campaigns and content for brands, broadcasters, charities and local and central government and seeks to achieve client objectives whilst improving the lives of young people. Projects include the award-winning Dubplate Drama, an interactive TV series, Live Magazine and clients include Coca Cola, O2, Playstation and Channel 4 Television. (HT @SamConniff, @MichelleLivity and @gavineale)

10.    Wayfarer

This project started in 2007 as a live improvised realtime game and multimedia event in Sydney, Australia, produced by artists Kate Richards and Martyn Coutts. Designed for four performers, four audience groups and passersby, each audience group, using their voices, directed performers to explore and undertake a series of tasks inside a new and largely unknown building, hidden from the audience’s view - and the audience tracked their performer’s progress via streamed video, audio and locative data on large exterior projection screens. The initiative has since grown in to a bigger series of participatory, locative art projects, with the second Wayfarer project taking place in Melbourne in 2009. (HT @lcarroli)

What's exciting about almost all of these enterprises is that they tend to merge the profit motive with a moral imperative - and many directly confront social need through the businesses themselves.

Almost all of these ventures - in a politically non-partisan way - trigger volunteering and social action and act as touch-point for providing a public service, be it care for seniors, healthy living, food security, literacy or managing waste in the built environment.

Most are trading systems. Almost all elicit support by association. All are optimistic.

Images courtesy of 1. Viktor Vauthier, 2. uddin/elsey, 3. Buffalo ReUse, 4. consumatron, 5. Liz & Max Haarala Hamilton Photography, 6. foe, 7. Southwark Circle, 8. moleitau, 9. Bikeworks, 10. Livity website, 11. Wayfarer, MySpace

Frugal innovation

In the spirit of the Paris Commune(ish), political elections and the debt crisis in the U.K. are forcing those with an interest in real estate and urban regeneration to pen manifestos and articles of faith. 

Industry insiders have published several big picture statements, be it the Regeneration Manifesto of New Start magazine, a Framework for Regeneration by BURA or Collaborate to Regenerate, an initiative of several private sector professional services companies.

Setting down a creed fits in to a political environment that's foregrounding social change, led by the Conservative Party and its promotion of the Big Society: a future in which Big Government is counterbalanced by small-scale grassroots civic activism.

In my experience, designing and delivering large-scale, popular social and economic initiatives, effective civic or social activism often needs a framework to succeed. People need permission to act. At the same time what's needed are modest targets and successes - something that the Big Society seeks to capture but many of the articles of faith manage to miss.

Call it Frugal Innovation. 

On behalf of a real estate development company, my company has just completed a proposal for the implementation of a series of small-scale social, economic and cultural innovations in a town in England.

Called "A 1000 Little Things", the programme is directed at improving the lives of residents and visitors, supporting and extending the existing work of local government and bringing intended acceleration and benefit to the work of a new strategic property vehicle.

An inspiration for this (and pretty much all of our work) is a form of Frugal Innovation - an approach that the text books say is characterized by a very careful, insightful and economical use of resources, both human and material.

Frugal innovation is what many companies are now following in the BRIC countries and was the subject of a recent special report in The Economist.

What does Frugal Innovation regeneration-style look like? 

One dimension has to be small-scale, inexpensive urban innovations that act as catalysts to change, emphasize repair and re-use and help deliver more efficient and effective public and private sector services.

But don't be too quick to don a hair-shirt. Sometimes the exotic and unusual can change the weather and can cost - much like the £122.00 (€140) tasting menu of super-chef Heston Blumenthal.

 

Here's a list of the sort of thing that I mean, seven small-scale, practical developments that reverse out of the needs of people who want to effect social and economic change and could help re-wire public life: 

• Provide existing community leaders with training in using Doodle or other online scheduling software
• Provide new or aspiring social entrepreneurs/enterprises with a toolkit on how to build members, clients and markets
• Create a movie club with a group of elderly people and turn an old shop in to a temporary cinema
• Co-ordinate providers of grant funding and come up with a standard funding application form for non-profits
• Get local and regional government to post economic and social output indicators on their websites for reference by project partners and taxpayers
• Create a register of accountants and lawyers who want to lend non-profits volunteer support - and shape the offer to support the needs of the sector, not output targets of CSR departments
• Create a directory for cities of locations available for installation art 'tryouts' and band practice

Think of this as an approach that makes new connections, small improvements to local services and economies and seeks to fill gaps in knowledge and data.

It's a kind of craft approach to the making of cities and towns.

There's a modesty here that may irritate and shrinks in the face of macro instruments of change and value, such as the tax and benefits system and new technology.

But for all the principled manifesto-writing around just now, small-scale innovations like these work wonders for creating a micro-climate of confidence and change.

What's more, they follow a minimalist ethic that sits comfortably with a key product of economic recession - counter revolution.

Images: all dishes served at Michelin-starred The Fat Duck restaurant, courtesy of great fashion and culture blog My New Favourite Thing.

A Magic Box of New Media and Urban Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

Hope the links are of use.

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

City development and innovation

All places, even countries - as brilliantly satirized in this image - are distinctive clusters of people, communities, organizations, institutions, beliefs, tastes, personal and public mania.

Go out on to the street, slip on a pair of psychological x-ray spex, forget the physical ways in which we organize ourselves and start to see the city as a zoo that encloses a multitude of social, economic and personal struggles.

Convention has it that the best, most effective form of strategy-making and public engagement in the development of real estate is to consult widely, draw differing strands together and then forge a consensual route forward. 

This approach may have been proven to work but the prospect of a hung Parliament in the U.K. and the coalition-building that will follow may throw in to question the effectiveness of continuing to take a consensual 'everyone-gets-something-and-no-one-gets-nothing' attitude. 

Does the current approach to engaging people in development just now capture all of the energy, commitment and excitement that people invest in their lives?

Maybe there are other ways to gather, collect and maximize the sum value of the social, commercial and personal struggles that make up urban living.

I'm just starting a process around the development of a large site in a major city in the U.K. that's directed towards putting together a forward plan of actions that help the real estate developer and local government create a world-class creative and socially innovative place.

What I am planning to do is yes, gather opinion, yes, build consensus and yes, create a forward plan but also to scope the design of what U.K. policy guru Geoff Mulgan (inelegantly) called in a recent book a horizontal support.

In the generation and delivery of public policy, a horizontal support is not so much a framework for action or set of 'bottom-up' initiatives but a vehicle that acts as an engine of participation - think of it as a 'platform' that over time gets populated by people, organizations and activity and enables change. 

Inspired by investment vehicles like public-private partnerships and websites that act as network agents of content like Wikipedia, I've set up such 'platforms' in the past - for example, aggregating partnerships of public, private and Third Sector organizations that have enabled urban regeneration and loose emergent clusters of people framed by the common cause of growing their own food.

In a few weeks' time, a group of us are to experiment in another way and open The People's Supermarket. This is a start-up social enterprise that as our new Facebook page says, aims to turn a vacant retail store in central London in to a place that allows a community to come together and take charge of the food they buy and eat. Think of it as another kind of bearer and trigger of social value and change.

I need to 'visualize my lines' for the new piece of work linked to city development but am thinking up a kind of floating entity - a bit like a 'magic carpet' (!?!) - that enables social and cultural innovation to cluster and grow but forms its own consensus and keeps the creative and commercial struggle of people and their enterprise alive.

Some options: 

• a loose local organization that acts as a market-maker for ideas and aspirations
• an investment vehicle with power to assemble and is backed by creative, social and commercial assets
• a local stock exchange that provides trading facilities for commercial, creative, community and other groups and has the power to issue equity investment in new social, creative or community enterprise

If you have inspirational examples of initiatives that work this vein, I'd love to hear them.

I'll share what I come up with, so long as my vagueness takes a solid form!

Images: 1. Source unknown. 2. ANDWHATELSEISTHERE. 3. R9. 4. YoYo Games.     

Designing public participation

There are two things that commissioners and designers of work that engages the public need to focus hard on just now:

People are leading increasingly static lives.

And to win their involvement, they need to be offered compelling, not compulsory experiences.

These two facts of life are at the centre of trends like sustainability and localism - but somehow the complexity of the words and what they refer to can get in the way.  

Me and several creative/professional teams I've pulled together are working on all sorts of projects just now - and the centre of operations is the office whiteboard:

We're helping 

• public and private organizations in the development sector engage with communities
• a major fashion retailer in the U.K. promote the idea of collective creativity
• people living in a low-income neighborhood share experience and knowledge using online media
• an entrepreneur to start a new food co-operative that will be the subject of a series of primetime TV shows in the U.K.
• and an international cultural relations agency support an elite "flight-school" of urban entrepreneurs

And these all involve designing programmes of user-friendly, interactive experiences that trigger collaboration and help people achieve whatever they want to achieve more effectively.

A key to success is to structure a sequence of experiences that take people on a journey that has a larger cumulative meaning - much like a director writes a screenplay or time-lapse photographer frames motion:

What's exciting is to see this turned in to real life - and it doesn't come much better than a project that I came across on a visit to the USA late last year.

City Harvest is a public project in Philadelphia in which inmates of the city prison system start vegetable seedlings in prison gardens and greenhouses:

The seedlings are then taken to maturity at dozens of community gardens across the city:

Then SHARE, a nonprofit network that provides food to area food cupboards across the city, facilitates distribution of the grown produce to low-income neighborhoods, often to the very areas in which the families of the prison-growers live.

City Harvest is an inspiration. Why?

Because it is a project that expresses all of the warmness of sustainability and localism but also speaks to their cold reality - we lead increasingly static lives and to overcome this for the public good, there's value in creating a connected sequence of industrious, easy, participatory steps.

The initiative also respects a magic ingredient that is a key to all entertainment and largely missing from talk about "top/down", "bottom-up", "grassroots/non-grassroots" activity led by public and private organizations: we like things that are compelling, rather than compulsory.

Things that are compelling rather than compulsory make life worth living - and that goes for X-Factor, Celebrity Big Brother, even fierce fashion worn by Daphne Guinness, not just stuff that's useful and worthwhile. 

It's also a value at the centre of the most successful platform for human interaction and empowerment of our age: the internet. 

Images of City Harvest courtesy of PHS (The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society). Source lost for Happy Balls and skateboarder time-lapse (sorry!) 

Cultivating a new Butyrkskaya, Moscow

With the collapse in international bank lending comes a real opportunity in the world of urban development for investment in small projects and those projects growing over time to become catalysts to change.

In an earlier post, I called it (rather unsexily) 'Venture Urbanism' - and the good news is that there's an increasing amount of it about.

Earlier this year, the London Borough of Hackney, Design for London and the London Development Agency published Making Space in Dalston, a directory of improvements to public space in the district of Hackney that they hope to advance in the coming years. 

And last year, I was involved in the start of a physical and cultural masterplan called High Street 2012 that aims to  use the London Olympic Games as a catalyst for improvements to the very long (and very unwindy) road that runs from (what will be) the gates of the Olympic site to the centre of Tower Hamlets, taking in Whitechapel High Street, Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road and Bow Road.

These are brilliant frameworks for change that are already evidencing first moves, like the recent Dalston Mill wheatfield, a re-creation of American artist Agnes Denes' famous Wheatfield in Manhattan in 1982:

But what if for a moment we disposed of mega design-visioning and went for something hyper-local and more micro?

Last week, I participated in an event in Moscow called Promzone 2.0: a think-tank, organized by cultural organization the British Council, as part of their pan-European Creative Cities programme, centered on generating ideas for the adaptive - and communally regenerative - reuse of a former glass factory called Flacon. (Interest: I have helped the Council design their project programme in Moscow).

For a day, I worked with a team of residents from Butyrsky district, alongside students, journalists and generally committed citizens who came up with a suite of things that they would like to see happen in the area around Flacon that would improve lives today but might also, over time, seed popular, new uses for the former factory site. 

The group came up with an inspirational programme - inspirational because of its range, refusing to drill down to the usual bento-box of public art and postage-stamp green space revivalism.

What's more, rather than choose some kind of internationalist, in-flight, Lady Gaga brand identity, the group decided to theme their program to Friendship - to personalize and counter public association of the area with the brutalist Butyrka Prison, the central transit prison in pre-Revolutionary Russia. 

This is what the group came up with (with the final presentation, in Russian, available here):

Some highlights:

• In the proposed cultural program was the refurbishment of a dead public building in to a small cinema showing old movies for older people living in the district.
• In the social program, two great ideas: a communal wash-house and a ribbon ice-track that would wind its way through the neighborhood.
• In the economic program, a service exchange initiative.
• In the environment program, a makeover of dull buildings in shades of pastel pink and blue and an apple feast sourced from local fruit trees.

Now the wristy cynics amongst you might say - "yeah right, David, but this ain't exactly the sort of thing that's going to pave the way for Google to relocate to the district. What's more it's frivolous - and this isn't the right response to such a bleak economic landscape."

In part, you'd be right. 

But think of this as a prospective sequence of small, highly local projects that, if choreographed in an effective, integrated way, might start to turn around some of the negative sense and sensibilities of the district.

With a small degree of public participation, chances are that by word of mouth, they would start to replace fear or disinterest in the pro-social with curiosity.

The projects would be staggeringly cheap to implement. They would attract a disproportionate amount of interest and the value yield for local people, government and investors in the area would be high.

Put another way, think urban gardening not regeneration - and reap the reward. 

First image un-sourced. Dalston Mill courtesy of cakehole. Images of Flacon event: David Barrie and British Council Russia.