David Barrie

Sites as ecosystems

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

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

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

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

But the world of Facebook:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They need to become sustainably-minded social entrepreneurs.

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

Peripheral porn (in 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.

Slaves to the cult of 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?

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.

Fields of gold

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.

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:

A sexy graph

Buried in a survey of sovereign-wealth funds in the Economist is this sexy graph.

It shows the extent to which those obsessed with sustainable development, one planet living, energy security and peak oil have to set their sights firmly on the financial markets.

The graph shows how much the value of equities outdid oil between 1985 and 2007.

And it tells a simple story:

Better for an exporter to sell as much oil as it can today and invest the proceeds, than to leave the stuff in the ground in the hope of spreading production over the decades.

In other words, produce now while the going is good.

In my work in urban development, I'm starting to work on ways and means in which financial products linked to property might induce a more sustainable, efficient and healthy local market.

But the graph from Morgan Stanley suggests that innovation of consumer products is almost beside the point.

Financial performance of major listed companies and the relationship between sustainability and shareholder value is what matters.

And elsewhere in the Economist, there's bad news.

In a survey of corporate social responsibility, the magazine reports that two of the best-known indices - the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good - under perform the market.

And that AccountAbility, a British think-tank

admits to the inconvenient truth that its 2007 ranking of the Fortune Global 100 companies by their progress on building sustainability into their business shows no connection with their financial performance.

There is a message in this.

Unless and until we find ways to boost the price and value of virtue, sustainability may remain a composite, common sense, piecemeal phenomenon, rather than a critical object of competitive advantage.

Alien invaders

I was in a park in London earlier today and spotted several ring-necked parakeets, part of a larger 'invasion' of our shores from Africa, South America and South-East Asia.

It is estimated that there are 30,000 ring-necked parakeets now in the U.K. - see pictures here. It is all very serious, so serious that the BBC reports that The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is considering a cull and

The Government is currently developing a framework for dealing with non-native species - such as the parakeets, Chinese mitten crabs and grey squirrels - and assessing the impact of native species to these shores.

I started to pay attention to the issue of parakeets after I read Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan's guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles - Volume 1.

In their book, the artists identify new alien species, outline efforts given to their control and create an hilarious, understated, pseudo-scientific satire on what can only be called 'migrant neuroses'.

It's an illness that's catching on in the U.K. just now.

The media carry and then recycle news stories about white people becoming a minority in the cities of Leicester and Birmingham: after research carried out at the University of Manchester.

Then there's me earlier this year preparing a major TV investigation in to official statistics on immigration. The film didn't enter production but the story did break, causing the Government lots of angst.

How to deal with rising numbers not of migrants but of increasingly hysterical journalists who cover immigration?

Maybe Cartwright and Jordan have an idea for parakeets that could be adapted:

Captured birds could be sent to the Phillipines to compensate a decline in their native parakeet population, caused mainly by the birds being used for military target practice.

Image courtesy of Damien.

What the hell is happening in Red Hook?

This is a snatched image of a street corner in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In a recent edition of New York magazine, Adam Sternbergh contributed an article with a tantalising opening line: What the hell is happening in Red Hook?

Just a year ago, the neighbourhood was a text book model of gentrification.

As reported by The Brooklyn Paper,

Last summer, anything seemed possible on Van Brunt Street. Big-time broker Barbara Corcoran had recently paid $1-million for one of the drag’s narrow, 19th-century buildings. Fairway foodies were stopping at the Old Pioneer for post-grocery beers, and every balmy evening brought another fancy-people caravan to eat small plates of costly, farm-raised food at 360 and the Good Fork.

But Red Hook's prospects have since changed. The Posh 360 store is closed. The Old Pioneer is closed. And a Time Out New York cover story entitled Red Hook Has Arrived: 27 Reasons to Go Now is just a distant dream.

In his article, Sternbergh reached for an answer as to what's going wrong in Red Hook. He blamed poor transportation, a short supply of housing stock and regular flooding of basements.

Geography professor Winifred Curran drew attention to a wider failure.

A lot of developers in Red Hook have gotten ahead of themselves by charging gentrified prices without providing any of the services the gentrifiers expect....People who can afford to spend a million dollars on an apartment want to be able to get to work in less than an hour and a half. They want a supermarket. They want a bank. And in my opinion, a lot of the redevelopment in Red Hook is not actually very nice.

In his piece, Sternbergh made a useful distinction between gentrifiers who sow the seeds of development of a place and harvesters who reap the rewards. And he suggested three ways in which gentrification can burn itself out.

One, an economic downturn douses people's ability or willingness to relocate. Two, the seeders, in search of cheap new space, get driven out of the city entirely. Three, the gap between what the seeders seek out and what the harvesters will accept becomes too wide for the cycle to continue.

Over the last decade, countless towns and cities in the U.K. have fought to differentiate their 'offer'.  Often what has followed is a hike in property values and glut of investments geared to 'value uplift'.

But how many of these places have put in the software of renewal without the essential hardware? The regeneration of public space, without improved train services?  New town squares without  a local skills revolution? Public art without new flood defences?

Sternbergh's article on Red Hook was entitled Embers of Gentrification.

How many other dying embers are there in the U.K. and United States, places that are supposed to have  gentrified and are dying - but whose fate is ignored by the wish-fulfillment of social, political and financial investors?

Photo courtesy of ...neene... on Flickr.