David Barrie

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.

The People's Supermarket

This is English chef Arthur Potts-Dawson. He's on a mission to create The People's Supermarket: a not for profit, co-operative grocery store that will feature in a series of TV shows on Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2010.

The People's Supermarket is designed to offer an alternative use for the thousands of empty retail units on our high streets and counter the belief that you can only have either cheap or good food - and never both. 

Over the last few months, Arthur, me and a Panzer division of people working in design, retailing, property and project management in the U.K. have been working up plans for the new social enterprise. 

The supermarket is inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn that was started in 1973 and now has 17,000 members, offers them a saving of 20%-40% off their weekly grocery bill and enjoys a turnover of $32m. 

Anyone will be able to shop at The People's Supermarket. You'll find our shelves stacked with a wide range of product, from conventional breakfast cereal to locally sourced produce, seven days a week.  

For an annual fee of UK£25.00 ($41.00) - reduced for older citizens, the unemployed and students - and a commitment to volunteer four hours time per month, members will earn a discount on their shopping and a share and role in the management of the enterprise. 

The People's Supermarket is about a great shopping experience, collectivizing the enthusiasm and skill of its members, direct democracy and affordability through participation. 

Just take a look at the message board at Park Slope to see the value of "a shop that you can call your own": 

 

We're hoping to raise thousands of members. 

We're creating a simple product that we hope other entrepreneurs, communities and people across the U.K. will copy.

And we are looking right now at several different empty retail units in the U.K. - here's an image of one, but I can't reveal the location, since it will simply inflate its price.  

The People's Supermarket connects with the growing band of people interested in supporting innovation in recession.

And it expresses utopia, resilience and the power of mutuality.  

 

Do you?

If the answer's "yes", become a member of The People's Supermarket or lend us your support and register at our new website. 

Please show link love and pass this post on. 

If you want to get involved, just drop me a comment here. 

And if you know a philanthropist or investor who wants to support innovative, collective and profitable social enterprise, send them my way. 

The blood, sweat and (let's say) joy of securing the premises, forming the co-op and members' first experiences of running the enterprise will be the subject of a series of prime-time shows on Channel 4 Television in 2010. 

And The People's Supermarket will be published in a book, available in all good stores, featuring recipes created by Arthur from ingredients for sale. 

Images courtesy of Elizabeth Pascoe, Park Slope Coop, Heather Ring, APD and Marcus Foley.  

Fashion is...

, originally uploaded by mis_gabbana.

:)

Things are getting worse. Please send chocolate.

There are lots of posts here on the theme of food.

There are recipes for cooking dog in Vietnam. Thoughts on why culture has turned celebrity chefs in to society's new investigative reporters. There's been the trauma of the loss of Barbar the Elephant. And food with provenance becoming as luxurious as a felt rug from Kyrgyzstan.

So what's the big deal?

Well, for a long time, I've thought of food as not just a thing that we, er, have to eat to survive but also a bit like art, or at least Nicolas Bourriaud's idea of art as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements.

Quoi?

Well think about food for more than a nano-second and you're instantly thrown in to what it's made of, where it comes from, who has it, who doesn't, its expense, cheapness, how sexy is (friend of Jay Kay) Jamie Oliver, how sincere is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and why does the following expression always seem so true:

Now I think that I might have the answer. And its nestling in the biog of Canadian geographer Dr Betsy J.Donald, author of the book Food Fears:

Food is a prism through which to explore many dimensions of sustainability -- from local economic development to better ecological practice to social stability and opportunity.

*is slightly in love*(?)

Images of grumpy man and meringue courtesy of Tubbyphunk. Chocoloate image unknown. 

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 Farming: not a load of old bananas

Last November, the city of Detroit introduced a Neighborhood Stabilization Plan, a $47m plan to accelerate renewal of the housing market in areas most severely impacted by foreclosure and abandonment. 

A key element of the plan is alternative use of land - and as Bloomberg reports, Detroit is already one step ahead as: 

close to six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 500 ``mini- farms,'' demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive.

One 'farm' is Birdtown Community Garden, where private land and vacant city lots were turned in to a place for growing food: 

Over here in the U.K., foreclosure is growing but not on the same scale as in the United States and the national social security system is a key safety net.

But recession is putting pressure on housing market renewal, private sector finance of renewal and the boss of the national urban renewal organization has now acknowledged that we need to find new ways of financing urban renewal.

In other words, if we don't innovate fast, the country is to be scarred with more and more of this:

 
Empty land.

And more and more of this:

Empty shops.

Three weeks ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that he would bring forward £10billion of spending planned for public works such as school and hospital repairs, environmental projects and IT schemes to provide employment.

In November, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced a 45% tax rate on earnings over £150,000 from 2011.

What are those "environmental projects"?

What's to be the return on public investment for those in the new higher tax bracket?

Increased use of land for food production - a local boost to local foodie culture - seems a practical, political no-brainer.

I mean how irresistable is this image of a food growing site in an Italian city?

As opposed to this....

....a manicured stretch of barren English housing estate.

But there's an additional thought.

For the last year, I have been running a programme of advice to house-builders and providers of social housing on how to meet U.K. Government targets on climate change.

At an event last week, Brian Mark of Fulcrum Consulting made it clear that a key route to delivering viable carbon-efficient housing is to super-size development and introduce community energy systems.

And Peter Walker of EcoCentroGen decribed releasing capital to support the additional cost of low carbon and renewable infrastructure by applying a rent to the present and future provision of energy to development sites.

What if a significant proportion of the land on which a development is to sit were given over to food production and you could project a yield of fruit and veg that promised residents a considerable saving on their weekly food budget?

What if against that saving - as well as utilisation of the site's waste - you charged rent for use of the land - but not two groats and a shilling - but say £600.00/year/plot?

What if you bundled this with other services that could be 'rentalised', such as broadband provision?

Now this is no recipe for turning England in to Chianti - and any way why should we? - but this does start to become a route to seeing urban agriculture as less of a shampoo-free, urban eco-hugger zone, and more about bundled services that extract new value from land.

Do this on a city-wide scale - especially in places where there is a surplus of land laying derelict and with next to nil value - and doesn't it start to turn urban farming in to something way more than touchy feeley bananas?

Could you eat an elephant?

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik remembered the trauma of Barbar the Elephant's loss of his parents and the need to up sticks from the wild and make his fortune in the big city. :(

Barbar was a key moment in us granting the elephant human qualities, sentimentalizing the wild and providing zoos and fun parks dramatic license to present staged realities of the wild.

And the entertainment that surrounds the elephant is unforgettable: Colonel Hathi in the film of The Jungle Book. Dumbo. And the fantasy of elephant tea parties.

The stock of elephants may be falling in West, Central and East Africa and the conservation movement working hard to save them but now in some parts of Southern Africa, there is a problem of too many animals and in some places elephant culling and the animal's meat is back on the menu. 

In a programme that will be shown on Channel 4 Television in the U.K. next week, two of England's most original, environmentally-conscious chefs - Fergus Henderson and Jeremy Lee - challenge their and our food taboos.

Fergus and Jeremy attempt to eat their way up the ladder of animals considered taboo for consumption in the U.K. but part of the diet of other cultures. They travel the world. One place they visit is the Kalahari Desert in Namibia at the time of an elephant hunt. I directed the documentary. 

The population of elephants in Southern Africa is now increasing due to conservation and the changing course of water supply across the continent.

In countries like Namibia, villagers and elephants compete for water and vegetation and stories are legion of attacks and killings of humans by the animal. 

Because of conservation, regulation of hunting and food price inflation, there are often shortages of meat to eat in the country.

And in need of investment, Namibia makes a market in the professional licensed hunting of elephants.

At $30,000 upwards a pop, wealthy Europeans and Americans visit the country in the summer to hunt for 'trophy' meat. Once the animal is killed and the hunters taken their 'prize' - be it the animal's feet or head - villagers are invited to cut up the carcass and share the meat.

All of this is done in the name of ecotourism, "sustainable population management" and villagers love the taste of elephant meat. 

In a landmark decision last year, the South African government lifted the moratorium on elephant culling in the Kruger National Park.

I couldn't eat an elephant. But plenty do.

What interests me more is that while in one culture, an animal is mythologized; in another, people happily kill and eat the thing.

Now there's nothing either shocking or surprising about that - except that liberal right-on-ness says that today we should eat real food and celebrate authentic, local and seasonal food culture. And eating elephant in Namibia appears to be all of these values writ large. 

Authenticity is a huge currency of popular modern culture. 

There's the honesty and integrity of Obama.

A limitless diet of TV shows on extreme eating, tribal living and meddling with lost tribes - i.e. Discovery Channel +1, 2 and +36.

And in an age of frugality, supermarket shelves are filling with offal and foodie culture is going gooey at the thought of eating food down on the farm.

To almost all of us, eating elephant is an authentic step too far. (as is dog - see my earlier post)

It transgresses taste, cultural preferences and personal style.

But doesn't Namibian relish for elephant start to make our commitment to 'real', 'local' and 'authentic' food look like a load of old parochial chic?

Image of dead elephant courtesy of Abby's Mom.

Domino's Pizza and localism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Jill Greenseth.

Provenance is a luxury

In a recent edition of Metropolis magazine, Bruce Sterling wrote an article on Slow Food - and took no prisoners:

The upshot is an obscure piece of rural heritage reengineered as a curated service/product in Europe's modern-food heritage industry.

At the centre of Slow, according to Sterling, is a rigorous system of authenticating and anointing  local products like

The Cornish Pilchard. The Chilean Blue Egg Hen. The Cypriot Tsamarella and Bosnian Sack Cheese.

In another part of the ball-park, Lucia van der Post opens an article in the London Financial Times saying:

These days, among sophisticated consumers, provenance counts. Where the fish is caught, how the product is made, whether the makers are properly paid and whether the materials are ethically sourced are no longer just polite questions but real considerations.

Van der Post goes on to extol the virtues of decorative felt rugs that retail up to $10,000, are handmade by nomadic peoples in Kyrgyzstan and fragrantly marketed with Capital Letters as

Unique felt rugs from the Mountains of Heaven.

Once upon a time, there was a heritage industry: today, it's authenticity.

Now authenticity is no bad thing but it does have a habit of converging with business planning for sophisticated  consumers, get smothered in sincerity and it's at times over-liberally sprinkled with words like 'sustainability' and 'democracy'.

So by the time it hits the plate - as food or anything else - it carries high life-cycle costs and is expensive.

As Sterling writes,

In a globalized "flat world", the remaining peaks soar in value and become natural clusters for a planetary elite.

In other words, things that are authentic and have provenance become a luxury item.

So what?

Well there is a casualty.

And it's something really basic:

The thrill, excitement and subversion of imitation.

Cartoon courtesy of Gastonomica.

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.