David Barrie

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.  

Venture urbanism

Last week, our bridge in Castleford, Yorkshire was awarded the Palme D'Or - so to speak - of the U.K. urban renewal industry, at the annual Regeneration & Renewal awards.

The professional jury led by David Ubaka of Design for London commended the bridge for the quality of its design and the unusual and direct involvement of local people in its development. 

Six years ago, working in close alliance with local government, I led a group who asked people living and working in Castleford to nominate the ten improvements that they would like to see made to the town - and a new way of getting from the town centre to an area known as 'Duck Island' came out No.1.

Local people were instrumental to the choice of architect, design and many other aspects of the £4.5m ($7m) structure.   

With local government acting as convenor, project/technical manager and banker, local people were the client for the work - rather than just end-user consultee.

So yes, the award goes to the project team - Client: City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council, Designer: McDowell + Benedetti, Structural Engineer: Alan Baxter & Associates, Civil Engineer: Arup Water, Lighting Consultant: Sutton Vane Associates, Timber Consultant: Engineered Wood Products/Michael Berringer and Contractor: Costain Ltd.

And on the funding and support side, immense thanks needs to go to the local authority, English Partnerships (now Homes and Communities Agency), Yorkshire Forward, the Environment Agency, British Waterways, the Heritage Lottery Fund, SITA Trust and the project and cost managers of the broader initiative, MACE Group and Gleeds.  

But in the end, this is just set construction, cinematography and commendation all round for production services.

Because the Best Director slots need to be reserved for the three organizations who were instrumental to making the bridge happen: the Lock Lane Residents Association, Castleford Riverside Community Group and Castleford Town Centre Partnership.

Now before you reach for your hankie to wipe away a tear, can I just leave you with a thought.

Recession has stalled the momentum, value and yield of regeneration, renewal and construction in the U.K. and rest of the world.

With big investment gone from the sector, big projects are history.

Master planning will remain in some shape or form, not least because it evidences the fact that something major is going on or being thought through - but the writing has to be on the wall for that too. 

The flourishing of the Internet Economy suggests an age of direct communications, network relationships and more 'done with' than 'done to'.

The level of business insolvencies in the SME sector and the new relationship between the private and public sectors as a result of Government stimulus suggests a new dialectic of resilience and dependency.

So have we reached a moment of great opportunity?

A moment to develop and deliver small projects that build out in to larger phenomena?

We could follow the lead of Enterprise 2.0 and progress these projects in ways that involve ordinary people deciding who, what and when.

But this is about action, not feasibility, and choreography of initiative, not simply small-scale invention.

What should we call it?

Maybe start with "Venture Urbanism" (and find something sexier a bit later)? 

Recession, yoga and haikus made from fresh fruit

The Sunday Times in London reports that celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is to organise picnics in the U.K. to which everyone is encouraged to bring home produce.

According to journalist Jessica Brinton, it fits in to a new sobriety:

Fashion girls are retraining as yoga teachers - the same women who were cat-fighting at the Christian Louboutin sale are now morphing into self-styled spiritual entrepreneurs advertising yoga holidays in the Ardeche. Or doing charity bike rides. Or going on protest marches.

Now time will tell whether the closure of fashion boutiques like Paul & Joe and their peasant/boho chic will drive mourners to up sticks, fly to Kiev or Riga and support events that mark the possible collapse of central Europe.

But Fearnley-Whittingstall has cottoned-on to a nice idea.

Last Summer, architects Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn created an event that was part of the London Festival of Architecture called The Continuous Picnic.

It's currently on show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in an exhibition called Actions: What You Can Do With the City.

To encourage Londoners and visitors to think about urban food production and alternative uses of open space, Bohn and Viljoen and a team of architects, community gardeners and others - including me - organised a day-long event celebrating local food and the city.

For twelve hours only, an area behind the British Museum and an adjacent square became a public picnic area.

People were invited to bring produce that they'd grown within a certain radius of the city to an Inverted Market - a food installation that showed where the food had come from.

Alongside community composting, picnickers were invited to compose fruit and vegetable haikus conceived by architects charlick+nicholson.

The idea behind the event was to promote Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes - or sustainable use of urban spaces for production (urban agriculture, markets, gardening or recycling), connection (walking, cycling), and social activity (playing, working, meeting).

Architecture publishing magnate Peter Murray, Chairman of New London Architecture, was on hand to promote a special edition Continuous Picnic blanket:

And chef Oliver Rowe of Konstam judged the best produce of the day.

Now the Sunday Times says that Money is out of fashion, and we are looking elsewhere to find happiness.

For sure, the Continuous Picnic was a happy event. And it celebrated values other than cash (though I'll always take it, if you are offering).

But rather than a sanctuary for supermodels or happy-clappy empowerment, the event was about something brilliantly obvious and summed up by a bumper sticker found by Debra at Culiblog:

More information available from mail@bohnandviljoen.co.uk

Photographs courtesy of Jonathan Gales, Clare Brass - seed foundation, Richard Kaye, Natasha Nicholson and Irma Irsara.

The Continuous Picnic was supported by Arts Council England, London Development Agency, London Borough of Camden, Global Generation, London Food Link, CEEN, the University of Brighton and the Calthorpe Project.

Urban renewal: approaching sites as ecosystems

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

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

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

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

But the world of Facebook:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They need to become sustainably-minded social entrepreneurs.

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

Peripheral porn: Steetley Refractories, Hartlepool

Israeli sociologist Erik Cohen once defined tourism as involving movement from the cultural centre to the periphery.

In the North Sea port town of Hartlepool, England, park up on the edge of town, pass under a railway bridge, head towards the sea and you fall across this:

It's called Steetley Refractories.

The site of a factory that once extracted magnesia from the sea and reacted it with dolomite deposits in giant tubs, tanks and kilns.

This is what the site looked like in the 1960s.

And this is it today, a floor show of vast blue lagoons that push for attention as land art.

The BBC reports that there are plans to turn the site in to luxury flats.

But for the moment, it remains a classic English example of what Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of  The Center for Land Use Interpretation calls the contemporary landscape as museum.

And a way better piece of cinema than either Mongol or Prom Night.

For directions, go here.

A case of blurred vision

This is quite often how I see the world, especially in shopping malls.

Things just get blurred. And I don't take in the detail.

Until this week, I thought that I was crazy.

Then came a blinding light.

Social scientist Monica Degen and geographers Caitlin DeSilvey and Gillian Rose have studied people's experience of a shopping mall in Milton Keynes, England.  (God help them!)

In a recent paper, they wrote up their research and drew attention to what they call manoeuvring:

a broad surveying gaze which is used to move around objects, which acknowledges objects but does not engage in any depth with them.

In other words, focus-pulling on the move:

In this 'thin' or unfocused look, objects exist as part of a scene to be passed through, blurred together into indistinct background with little sense of form and detail. When one has a specific destination in mind, it is very easy to blank out the intervening content. A 'thicker', more engaged look appears when we approach the final destination of our walk and our eyes zoom in: a person we expect to meet, a specific shop, a desired object, a possible purchase perhaps - pull out from the stream of material stimuli.

All of this may be obvious to you.

But to me, it's near Biblical.

In effect, the potential qualities of a specific space are animated by how we engage with it.

This is another reason why places should be designed in ways that allow for accidental looks.

Why environmental phenomena like desire lines are so revealing:

And why, when you move through a landscape, it sometimes feels like you create your own space.

In other words, to steal a technique from long-distance swimming, you create your own water.

Image of Berling courtesy of dreasan.  Desire path by Fin Fahey.

The curse of architecture: de-clutter

This is an eagle-eyed view of a new square in the town of Castleford, England:

And this is what it was like five years ago:

An earlier age of crud:

Has given way to something brighter, more elegant and de-cluttered:

But my favorite image of the project is this one:

 

Why?

Because it makes me think about clutter - or more to the point, tidiness.

I was involved in the early stages of design development of the new main square in Castleford.

The selection and management of the design was devolved to a steering group made up of representatives of the local community - and by and large, people got what they wanted. 

The town is proud of the design. I am proud of the design. And there is little doubt that it has contributed to the $400m plus new investment that is now flowing in to the town.

But what gets me thinking is that for many years, the model for successful urban life has been the noise, disorderliness and messy mix of people and traffic of SoHo, New York.

Alongside, creativity has escaped linearity and order: be it ironic, awkward Britart, whimsy, casual Goldfrapp, the popularity of feature-length social documentary film-making, the chaos of social networking and exotic packaging of securitised debt.

And yet we're choosing to scrape the surface of our towns and cities and turn it in to clean, clear and crisp pavement.

In its wake has come outdoor food courts, not street markets and a sweep of control orders that segregate access to the streets.

An irony is that all of this has been done in the name of winning back public space.

Another is the derision that once greeted minimalist, conceptual art in '70s and '80s.

Why is the new public realm so out of sync with the grind, mess, whim and float of popular culture - and of our lives?

And how and why did the cult of de-clutter take hold?

Here's a quick list of some of the things that might have got us here:

• The cult of Copenhagen, Danish urban design guru Jan Gehl and the pedestrianisation of the city
• The stream of sparse, ambient Sigur Ros running through the veins of the design profession
• The massive, hidden influence of chic interiors by John Pawson
• The apolitical lure of an empty stage
• The rise of de-clutter and home cleaning TV shows
• Our un-ending anticipation - and expectation - that something big's about to happen

The problem is that quite often in these places, nothing big does happen.

It's as if city developers skipped the chapter in Jan Gehl, William Whyte or Jane Jacobs that said that "designed" public spaces will be empty of people most of the time if a user population doesn't live near by.

Is it time for the script to move on?

Time for urban designers and their clients to take all of that brilliant new energy and enthusiasm for public space, look at the popularity of artists like Peter Doig and realise something simple?

That what we like and what often works is not just tidy stuff but experiences and images that are colorful, casual and awkward?

Sustainability and fashion: wire is so passé

I can't resist sharing a second image from this week's Sunday Times' Style section, giving us all an inside track on the ultimate new fashion accessory: the cardboard box.

Move over Oskar Schlemmer.

Wire is so passé.

Urban agriculture - or fields of gold in the city

This is an image of the celebrated Not a Cornfield art and land project in Los Angeles:

 

And this is an image of the existing landscape of a housing estate in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England that was involved in an urban farming initiative I ran last year:

Yesterday, the price of wheat skyrocketed as Kazakhstan, one of the world's largest exporters of grain, said it would impose export tariffs to curb sales of wheat. The reason: to contain domestic inflation of nearly 20%.

Dear city mayors, planners and architects,

How about reviewing those renewal strategies based on physical, social and cultural build and write a Five Year Crop Plan?

Be inspired by the spatial planning of Not a Cornfield:

Or the first vision of architects Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn for the town of Middlesbrough as a productive urban landscape, in a project enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time, One North East and The Design Council, England:

Viljoen and Bohn's plan connected tissues of land that might be cultivated, from existing parkland, open green spaces and allotment sites across town to places that local people chose to grow food  as part of the initiative and would like to see urban agriculture happening in the future (red dots above/green dots below):

Not a Cornfield is described as a sculpture. Viljoen's plan for Middlesbrough: an edible town.

It remains to be seen whether spikes in commodity prices, peak oil, the dearth of productive arable land and the changing metabolism of compact cities will make all of this financially viable.

But you've got to admit that the vision of an urban design for cities as an unfenced Glastonbury Festival or embargoed Havana is compelling - even if Fidel Castro has stepped down and you don't like hippies.

Urban farming images courtesy of Dott07 Urban Farming. The project was enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time Ltd., One North East and The Design Council. All rights reserved. Urban Farming Project Site map, copyright of Middlesbrough Council.

Nuclear decommissioning: will it make a beautiful ruin?

They're back! Nuclear power stations that is - not the Spice Girls or dropped hemlines.

Time magazine reports on the comeback of nuclear energy and plans worldwide to build a new generation of 'zero-carbon' reactors.

The U.K. Government is making the running, with a recent announcement by the Business Secretary that he hopes to have a new reactor completed by 2020.

Time once again to ask a question that teams of designers, artists and others wrangled with in 1994 in the U.K. in a project I ran called Power to Change.

Four teams of architects, landscape designers, engineers and others, including environmentalists, writers and artists were invited to brainstorm the future of the site of a decommissioning nuclear power station in Snowdonia, Wales.

The Trawsfynydd Magnox power station was opened in 1963, generated power for twenty-eight years, closed in 1993 and it was estimated that it would take 135 years to dismantle.

The question posed by the project was

What should Trawsfynydd become and how might the future of its site bring new prosperity to the community?

After a year of design brainstorming, community projects, access to the station and exploration of its surrounding landscape, a series of ideas was born, critiqued by local people and a panel of experts that included design guru Cedric Price and artist Rachel Whiteread.

Team 1 proposed celebrating, not burying the site and turning it in to a model decommissioning factory.

Led by architect Will Alsop and artist Bruce McLean, the team included writer Mel Gooding, theater director David Gothard, engineer Matthew Wells and regeneration developer Roger Zogolovitch and argued:

If the Tate Gallery can open branches in relevant artistic communities like St Ives, Cornwall, the Science Museum should have a presence in a place which will witness one of the most significant developments in twentieth century technology.

Team 2 was led by Ove Arup & Partners and proposed burying the station's turbine halls in hills of slate, vegetating it, then up-lighting the surrounding hills with narrow beams of projected light.

Team 3 was led by architect and artist James Wines of Site Environmental Design.

James proposed turning the site in to a resource and polemic on the global lack of information on waste management. 

He proposed ripping down the turbine halls, greening the surfaces of the station, instigating research in to water contamination, cleaning up the site using phyto-remdiation and creating an International Energy Communications Center to hold relevant data on the decommissioning of all the world's nuclear stations.

Team 4 was made up of architects Ushida Eisaku, Kathryn Findlay, engineer Tim Macfarlane and music composer Gavin Bryars.

Their response - the fruit of video-conference visioning between the U.K. and Japan - was 

rather than leave two large, stainless steel skips in the landscape, let's get dermatological!

The team proposed turning the site in to a media center, exploiting the skills of electrical engineers, Snowdonia as a popular film location and the value of the site as a place of technology and solitude.

And using the metaphor of right brain intuition and left brain logic

We'll cover the reactor halls in a podded, white PVC skin and enclose certain activities. By covering the outmoded technology of the station with the new technology of our centre, we'll stimulate the brain's constant replacement of dead cells and strike up a new connection with the surrounding landscape - its "body".

Fourteen years ago, climate change and the cult of zero-carbon weren't understood as the context for either the construction or de-construction of such sites.

Architectural design may also have been slightly stuck in a groove of making and remaking facades. 

But now that energy and economic cycles have created a new logic for nuclear power, a challenge remains for designers, landscape urbanists, politicians and engineers alike.

And it continues to be best expressed by Basil Spence, the original architect of the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in a question he asked back in 1963: