David Barrie

Cultivating a new Butyrkskaya, Moscow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some highlights:

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

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

In part, you'd be right. 

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

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

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

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

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

Declare Interdependence

From Berlin-based creatives Lars Schmidt , Stefa Roth and their organization Arts-Ecology-Education comes a 'Declaration of Interdependence' - an 'open experiment' - call it a 'manifesto'.

The Declaration sets down a list of shared principals, of hyper-tolerant, anti-indulgent, eco-aware values that the authors suggest will or should frame our lives post-Crisis.

Is this visionary?

Yes.

(but be aware of the poverty and some of the woozy, manic, at times desperate atmosphere of some squats in London in the late 1970s/early 1980s that once shared some similar values.)

If you like the Declaration, spread it. You'll find it here, at culturalrevolutionaries.org, on Facebook and with images at Social Design. Arts-Ecology-Education can also be followed on Twitter - @aeeproject.  

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.

Clouds, platforms and the future of the planet (no less)

It's proving to be a Summer in which design gurus join up the dots - and it's fantastic!

First up was John Thackara who in a brilliant paper called Clean Growth for Design Innovation Scotland promoted the idea of enabling platforms as a way of mobilizing the masses.

In answer to the challenge of pulling people together in support of sustainability - and in part inspired (perhaps, maybe, dunno) by work we've done together - John urges an approach that starts with existing grassroots activity and then moves on

to creating frameworks that enable these actions to grow and develop. The concept of enabling platforms is key here. A variety of tools and techniques has been developed by global business in recent times that can be re-purposed for ultra-local use. These range from service design, to technologies of co-operation, and systems of resource allocation - ranging from people to water.



Next up comes the mighty Ezio Manzini, Profession of industrial design at Milan University, a pioneer of slow design who I've met just once and exchange emails with from time to time - but God, this man is inspiring!

In a new book on service design edited by Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto, Ezio explores its role in an age of networks and sustainability - and forgive me, but it needs to be quoted in full:

The world is rich in potential resources. They are diffuse natural and social resources such as, for instance, solar energy and wind on the one side, and people's creativity and entrepreneurship, on the other.

Traditionally these resources were not considered, because the idea of economy of scale was blinding us, and we were unable to recognise their potentialities.

Today, we have learnt that, in the network society, things can be seen in a quite different way: diffuse resources can be valorised by distributed systems.

The Internet has made thinkable and practially feasible peer-to-peer organisational models that allow us to valorise diffuse knowledge and people's capabilities.

The result is that now we can see a solution in the richness of these diffuse resources, and most probably the only viable solution, to the current major problems of our Planet.

Wow!

But wow - to the power of two.

Why?

Because if you interleave these ideas alongside a definition of cloud computing by Luis Vaquero and recently cited in a paper by McKinsey, you start to see ways and means by which technology might support the delivery of a more sustainable tomorrow:

Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services). These resources can be dynamically reconfigured to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for an optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is typically exploited by a pay-per-use model in which guarantees are offered by the Infrastructure Provider by means of customised SLAs (service-level agreements).

Meaning: a radical and (perhaps) more sustainable idea of service provision is arriving and one which could have profound implications for certain industries, especially ones that have traditionally relied upon fixed assets - real esate for one. 

First image, source not known. Image of Manzini courtesy of Domus, anime dolls by Youngfook.

Digital Butetown: Building the community collective online

How can all of the excitement of sharing things on the Internet happen at the most local level?

How might online social media bridge communities and network local life in a collective way, much like an allotment site rather than a landscape of fenced private gardens?

Yes, there are community websites and local forums. Yes, applications like NetVibes. Yes, groups on Facebook. Yes, opportunities for networking via Ning.  And yes, lots of brilliant initiatives around the world that encourage digital activism, storytelling and new content creation.

But is there a process that can be rolled out over time locally that encompasses all of these things, brings them together, networks activity, pools interest, shares knowledge and could become a platform for collaborative local change in the future?  

These are some of the questions behind a digital design workshop that will take place in Butetown, Cardiff, in the Old Banking Hall, Bute Street,  July 24th 2009 (1000 - 1800hrs).

The workshop will pool the knowledge of people actively working on the development and application of social technology for social benefit.

It will be a practical session that maps existing online networks, matches them against offline communities and then comes up with a practical plan to implement what might be called - for a slightly hippy phrase - online community weaving. (with respect to June Holley and Network Weaving for inspiration). 

The event is being organised by Tom Beardshaw of Native Media, Jeremy Gould of Whitehall Webby and me. It follows research in to local internet use, analysed by Kelly Page of Cardiff Business School; and will be a backroom brainstorm in advance of an event in the Autumn which will invite local internet users to work with social media geeks to co-design a forward plan.

Butetown in Cardiff is home to 14,000 people and over forty-six different nationalities. It may be cash poor - but it is culturally super-rich.

There are many dynamic members of the community working together on renewal of the area and people keen to explore online media as a way of sharing information, experience and supporting local initiative.

Butetown has a Ning group, local people collect in Facebook groups, kids play games against each other online and there's busy file-sharing going on of music.

This is all great.

But the fragmentation of online social networking mirrors the fragmentation of real life - between new and old communities, diverse ethnic groups, communities of interest and different issues of concern.

If you believe in the power of communication and see the online space as a place that could be socially useful and productive, there's a job to be done to try and find a way to gather online activity effectively. 

And if you believe that a key to the future of public management is online public involvement, the digital space in a place like Butetown needs to be supported in such a way as to be ready and able to contribute to the social and economic planning of the area.

Please join our Google Group. Tell us there if you are interested in contributing to the event on 24th July. And look out for the hash-tag #digitalbutetown.

Digital Butetown is a British Council Wales project and part of a larger, pan-European initiative called OPENCities. And it is supported by igloo Regeneration, an investment fund managed by Aviva and described by the United Nations as "the world's first socially responsible property fund".

Street images of Butetown courtesy of  Paul Corcoran and Walt Jabsco.

digitalbutetown

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Supermarkets as rusting hulks

What kind of shopping experience do you prefer?

This:

Or this?

The first is a newly renovated Wal-Mart SuperCenter in Tabb, VA. The second is the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York.

Big Box Reuse is a book by artist Julia Christensen that charts the adaptation of big box retail units vacated by Wal-Marts and Kmarts for an even bigger box "supercenter" down the road.

In different parts of the United States, empty units have been turned in to things like a courthouse, a library, a school, even a church.

In the book, Christensen quotes a mayor of Bardstown, Kentucky with a good summary of what's been called the industrialisation of shopping:

The new supercenter in town is geared for tunnel vision, tunnel shopping. You go in, get what you need. You are only distracted by the other hundred things in your line of site that you feel like you need to buy.

When are these supertankers going to be turned in to spaces and places appropriate to an age of personalised entertainment or what Richard Layard has called "a time for less selfish capitalism"?

When might superstores take on some of the personality of the awkward, bumpy humanity that is the interior of Park Slope? 

Do we need to wait until a knobbly, dirty carrot becomes acceptable to buy?

Or with the rise of internet shopping, are these SuperCenters just spruced-up hulks - soon-to-rust relics of another age?

Images courtesy of Ryanrules and Heather Ring.

YCN, 72 Rivington Street, London

On the telephone the other day, I ended up staring at this: 72 Rivington Street, the new HQ of design agency Young Creatives Network.

In the window is a display of piled books by Anna Lomax and Lauren Davies of Jiggery Pokery:

 
What's great about the location is that a genius(ish) has decided to turn the downstairs of the building in to a public space and offer a lending library. 

A few years ago, I worked with a group of community activists in the town of Castleford, England and turned this empty furniture store:

in to a white-walled, wannabe Saatchi gallery:

The refurbishment was supported by several public agencies, including Arts Council England, English Partnerships (now the Homes and Communities Agency), Wakefield Council and social welfare charity the Coalfields Regeneration Trust.

The space has since been enjoyed by thousands of people and hosted art exhibitions of work by artists like Cuban Carlos Garaicoa and local abstract painter Blue Wilson:  

The U.K. Government recently launched a programme to revitalize vacant retail units on recession-hit High Streets and turn them over to community uses. 

This is great. The space in Castleford cost just £25,000 (USD$40,000) to refurbish, has now been extended to a property next door and has a permanent member of staff.

But the important thing raised by YCN is that private, as well as public places and spaces can be turned towards hosting and delivering different kinds of public experience.

Some empty stores in the U.K. are now being turned over to community services, like policing and children's learning - and I'm helping a chef  turn an old carpet shop in to a co-operative, grocery store.   

But the idea of turning what could be any old foyer or exhibition space in to a public lending library is a brilliant one.

Main street recession, mutualism and pop-up anything and everything suggests these kind of practical, public-facing, can-do projects are about to have their moment.

Question is, who's brave enough to go the whole way, commit to a supposedly "post-selfish" age and say, turn a disused branch of Woolworths in to a shop, use the income to buy the upstairs and turn the entire building in to a Christiana-style Danish commune?

It's been done countless times before.

Tempted? Visit Wanna Start a Commune?

Images courtesy of Guy Archard and YCN.  

An expresso needs more than a coffee bean and a cup

For the last few years, it's been a cliche of the commercial world that to operate in the middle of a market is suicidal.

The story has gone that it pays either to be an artisan at work in a shed or the employee of a corporate giant bloated on acquisition.

Scale has been a touchstone of competitive advantage.

To be middle-sized has been to be dull, fuzzy, a failing Old Maid kind of business.

And don't bother securitizing one mortgage. Wrap a bundle of them and find a better tomorrow.

Now all of this may be true. But I am starting to wonder.

In The Venturesome Economy, Professor Amar Bhidé of Columbia University takes x-ray specs to innovation:

For any new product, the underlying know-how ranges from the high-level general principles, to mid-level technologies, to ground-level context specific heuristics or rules of thumb.

Bhidé surveys a landscape of products that range

from high-level building blocks or raw materials (microprocessors or the silicon used to make them), to mid-level intermediate goods (the motherboards that contain the microprocessor in laptop computers), to ground-level final products (laptop computers).

And many of the more successful venture capital-backed companies Bhidé studies in his book operate at the mid-level, in a context where

different forms of innovation interact in complicated ways, and it is these interconnected, multilevel advances that create economic value.



Now none of this denies the value of the exceptional execution of an ordinary idea.

Or signals the commercial promise of a middle-sized business that lacks focus or is in the wrong market. 

But it does serve as a reminder that to make a great expresso, you don't just need beans and a cup but an efficient, effective coffee roaster.

It affirms the value of ideas, initiative and forces that operate at the mid-level - see my previous post on China -  phenomena that act as an interface between the high- and ground- levels in society, politics and culture.

Images courtesy of About_some.

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".

Beauty matters. But experience is all.

Thanks to Alexander Ostrogorsky, I've an article in the March 2009 edition of the Russian design magazine Interni.

The theme: coworking, citizen participation and the future of cities. (and forgive the slightly 'blobby' writing style - but it's for translation.)

In the next few decades, cities are going to become more expensive, complex places and many will shrink.

Money will become a scarcer commodity and as sustainable development and the internet advance, we will need to create and capture assets of urban life other than land, such as energy, food, communications and social relationships. 

In this world, collaboration between people and organizations to create new kinds of urban experiences and economies will be valuable: and co-working crucial.

Co-working is already taking place in many different ways in Russia and around the world. People are creating new ideas online. People are working with professionals and the authorities to design new public spaces and services. And people are working together to create new social enterprises that make a social, not just a financial profit.

There are few barriers to entering in to this social economy. All people need to be able to do is see value in working together and recognize that the design and delivery of small, highly local things can make a big difference.

In my experience, the key feature to a successful, socially entrepreneurial community is one that has a strong sense of identity, purpose, is prepared to experiment and, in the end, not stand in isolated opposition from other communities or the authorities.

But the challenge is to create an architecture within which divergent people, projects and organizations can flourish. Co-working needs to have a larger narrative so that it happens at a scale that is economic and outgoing. Sometimes this can be achieved by designing and establishing loosely-linked networks of initiative. In the future, the internet will unlock many of the challenges.

The outcomes of these efforts need not be aesthetically beautiful. Beauty may dignify but aesthetics is not all.  Lots of drum and bass music is “ugly” – but it doesn’t stop you dancing. Lots of alcohol is bitter – but still delicious. Lots of places are ugly – but they can be overwhelming exciting. Beauty matters. But experience is all.