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.

Delivering Digital Inclusion

'Aggregating intent' is fast becoming a cliche of the age.

Everyone just now is busy finding devices to collate content, be it Hank Paulson and toxic debt, Google gathering services in the clouds or users of Linked  In amassing 'friends' to convert in to streams.

The U.K. Government has published a plan for delivering digital inclusion - to enable the estimated 17 million people in the country who are not using computers and the Internet to benefit from what it offers.

The plan is a massive, commendable, and totally exciting effort. It aggregates policies, best practice examples, academic research and international comparators. And it headlines serious integration and co-ordination of initiative at the highest levels of government. 

Now it is only a consultation document but there appears to be one key omission from all of this pooling together of knowledge and intent: there's no creative strategy.

The consultation is good on establishing the terrain, frameworks and infrastructure of initiative - also at pointing out inspirational examples of good practice.

But then it falls in to a danger of pipe-laying and plumbing - thinking about structures, not about fluids - and so falls under the spell of project-itis.

It suggests 'pathways to digital inclusion' - but dare not declare a preferred route. 

We know that use of technology and media is highly subjective and often non-linear.

We know that the challenge of public service is to support individualized needs for advocacy and support and bridge the disconnect between the individual and organizations designed to serve them.

But without an up-front creative strategy, these objectives become harder to deliver and consultation becomes an epic, energetic scoping exercise rather than a supportive, guiding hand on where to start and how to make it all work.

This is not to diss the authors.

This is a problem endemic to a 'stakeholder economy' and the cult of feasibility: a space in which partners and different interest groups are brought together for common cause, only for no-one to be brave or bold to jump off the cliff and deliver a narrative.

With the nationalization of some banks in the U.K. and a new understanding starting to emerge that the market doesn't necessarily act in either its share or stakeholders' interest, is it time for Government to stop fine-tuning the art of building frameworks but take hold of the story and declare its colors as a creative force?

Creative need not mean a return to command-and-control.

It can mean being imaginative, responsive to the market and declaring an understanding that processes of self-organizing often need leadership and a helping hand. 

Images courtesy of Adult Swim and youngfook.

A new alphabet of sensation

It's a familiar human condition to find yourself in a space of communication but unable to string a sentence together.

But it's strange to find yourself in a space of communication that invites, say verbal communication, only to find, say, writing a message on a card and flashing it up a more effective and viable form of expression.

On the Net - and especially Flickr - there's a sub-genre of expression/exhibitionism/conceptual photography that involves creating and uploading images of things - but often yourself or your mate - covered in scrawled messages. 

This marker madness stretches from people saying hello, to declaring love or giving instructions on how to cook them.

As ever, Yoko One must have fluxed this years ago but in the context of the net and all it's supposed to be doing as a platform for seamless communication and exchange, it's puzzling - but interesting. 

Why the need to 'self-billboard' and send scribbled messages in a bottle if you're part of an epic, happy, super-friendly media party?

Plain old exhibitionism?

Experiment?

Or  evidence of the boundaries of the Net and ways people are trying to escape its isolationism.

In other words, a new language of Robinson Crusoe-isms?

Couch image by danske.  Come clean me by titania*A.

Listen to the Panda

Architecture writer Arjen Oosterman has collected a brilliant series of essays in the current edition of Volume magazine.

'Engineering Society' is a wholesale investigation in to the vogue for popular/citizen/'service user' involvement in the making of cities.

What interests me in particular is an essay by Peer 2 Peer theorist Michel Bauwens.

Bauwens surveys the basic business models emerging around peer-production - what he defines as the ability to create value in common - and attributes the success of Linux and Wikipedia to our need for third parties - platforms for bridging or strengthening ties between people.

Now the neeks out there will know that all sorts of mechanisms and vehicles have been created in recent years to try to bind people together to the cause of social progress, ways other than command-and-control government, war or other forms of peer-group pressure.

And there's much discussion going on in the U.K. at the moment to experiment with how the Net might play a role in acting as a network agent of change in poor communities - and next year, I'm planning to give it a go in my own social media project.

But one question nags...what does a third party look like? What are its constituent parts? What does it do?

Here's one answer, scribbled on a scrap of paper by my friend Ben, after three hours of professional therapy and East 8 Hold Up cocktails at Milk and Honey:

The mix might help define the role of 'cultural broker', 'transformational designer' and/or what we have in our heads when we use the phrase 'enabling government':

2 parts - Thought Leadership
4 parts - Stakeholder Management
6 parts - Social Entrepreneurship
8 parts - Project Delivery, not Consultancy

What do you think?

Picture by Zhao Bandi, Laid Off, 1999.

Seriously messed up

To accompany Jennifer Leonard's brilliant hotel sign posted on Flickr is a juicy quote from former English TV executive Sam Brick in a recent edition of Grazia:

I'd put my soul into my job only to find out TV was a shallow industry in which loyalty meant nothing.

To which the best reply has to be Geordie designer Tom Jenkins' scribbles in his notebook during a talk by Dick Powell of designers Seymour Powell:

The grandest design of all

The project I have been slaving away on for six years has started to come out from under wraps.

Its centerpiece is Renato Benedetti's stunning new S-shaped sweep of a bridge.

You'll find more on the bridge element of the renewal program known as The Castleford Project here:

Channel 4 Television

Dezeen Magazine

World Architecturenews.com

Building Design

A series of four one-hour TV programs that follow the design and delivery of these and other projects will be broadcast on Channel 4 TV in the U.K. from Monday, August 11. The series is presented by Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs.

For those not based in the U.K. or who are sunbathing/don't have a telly/in Tuscany reading their primers on philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the series should be available online from on Channel 4 'Catch Up' - and I'll post the link as and when I know it.

Stickier media

Just now, broadcasters in the U.K. are angsting over the role and meaning of public service broadcasting.

The personalisation of media, growth of the Internet and disappearance of traditional ideas of public realm have thrown the meaning of the public value of the media in to crisis.

What's great is that new platforms promise to end monopolies on narrative and its traditional form. 

So should old media players just pack their bags and go home?

No.

In the real world, there is a crying need for 'connectors' to bridge between people, government and life.

The return on investment required by the public and private sectors in the built environment place ever more importance on the social, not just physical infrastructure of place.

And companies increasingly recognize that there is competitive advantage to be had in sustainability, not just in the resource flows of material culture but also social and human capital.

What's exciting is that broadcasters now understand that new media platforms are just that - platforms and not pipes through which information can flow.

What's clear is that the public still identify and want some form of support to enable them to manage real and personal economies.

The challenge for broadcasters is whether they can meet their pledge to use new media to support public service - and define what that service is.

For if it's to mean more than acting as a nodal point for information and social networks, it needs to engage with the dreaded 'm' word...moral purpose.

In my mind, there's no dread in this.

And there's a willing audience out there. 

Why?

Because people innately understand through their everyday experience that communication matters.

The challenge is to embrace this understanding, take on the 'm' word and be inspired by the words of John W. Gardner, the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson and founder of Common Cause:

Communication in a healthy society must be more than a flow of messages; it must be a means of conflict resolution, a means of cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community.

Image of TV courtesy of  Niemster. Cross Story Platform Telling by Russell Davies. Video shared by yannoucs.   

Architectural salvation

Coming soon to a screen near you will be the first genuine exposé of the pleasure and pain of designing public space.

In 2002, Channel 4 Television in the U.K. decided it wanted to corporately socially invest in the renewal of the former coalmining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, England. 

In parallel, it commissioned the production of a wholly independent series of TV shows to track the process, presented by Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs.

With vast amounts of innovative public involvement and commitment, nine projects have now been completed - with two in second phases led by community groups.

And an initial grant of £100k ($195k) from Channel 4 has become a capital and revenue works programme valued at over £11m ($22m) and led by over 11 public agencies.

I once spent a lot of time with a senior officer in the British army who served in the Falklands.

In the heat of The Battle for Goose Green, with his commander dying of wounds, a bullet came the way of this second-in-command. In his pocket was a book. He claimed it saved his life. It was by the 20th century desert mystic Carlo Carretto.

Now for all those involved in urban renewal or wanting to bring a town or city forward for transformational change - and deliver it - you'd do worse than strap a book to *your* chest, but by another desert mystic, of sorts: co-author of a famous homily to Las Vegas, Nevada, architect Denise Scott Brown.

In her book The Public Realm (1985, now out of print), Scott Brown wrote:

Where civic design succeeds it is usually because it is sponsored by a civic organization that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder, maintainer, and supporter of the project and because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community.

If you want to support a town, public agencies or communities renew the world in which they live, you'd do well to have this wisdom strapped to *your* chest.

Images courtesy of McDowell & Benedetti, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and Tim O'Connor.

The Cinderella of the Volga

Here's Natalia Vodianova on a recent tour of Russia raising funds - and promoting Nina Ricci - for her charity, the Naked Heart Foundation:

Vodianova's tour manages to grab no less than 22 pages of this month's Vogue: a Versailles Revisited romp through an orgy of fund-raising gigs that includes a 220 ton ice palace and, God help us,

A Slavic Tania Bryer lookalike called Polina Kitsenko paying €90,000 for a privately performed love song by Bryan Adams.

Vodianova's charity is devoted to creating modern parks for less fortunate children in Russia, spreading health and happiness in Natalia's homeland, according to her charity's website.

But not once does Vogue tell you what the organization does other that it somehow relates to children and Vodianova thinks that play is therapeutic.

Over at Vanity Fair, there's a ten or so page spread given over to Madonna to promote her new album:

The piece contains a shockingly pretentious comment on her new documentary on Malawi:

I feel this film was seriously influenced by Godard...He's the one film-maker I was always inspired by...

(Godard would love this - I interviewed him once and he's a total slave to pop.)

Once again, there may be mention of a generic concern for children but the article doesn't give readers the faintest idea what the charity she represents does.

There's something in all of this that says that you can personalize a brand but you can't personalize a cause.

You can attach your name to something: but the media is interested in you, not what you think or hope others will think you're about.

In effect, what may be genuine conviction becomes myth-making, as Vodianova and Madonna harness their image-making credentials and abilities to a cause but can't escape being represented as a brand.

Madonna continues to be Queen of Pseudo Fetish Super Pop.

And for the umpteenth time, Vogue recycles Vodianova as Cinderella.

Vodianova image by Mario Testino. Madonna by Steven Meisel.

Unravelling the spaghetti

This is an image of the Spaghetti Junction interchange in the West Midlands, England.

In 1990, several architectural designers came up with some alternative design ideas for the area over and under the Junction: an infrastructural megastructure that's magnificent to see from above and travel through but that cuts up communities living either side.

Robert Adam, the classicist English architect, decided to accentuate the interchange as a gateway to the city:

American internationalists Swanke Hayden Connell  decided to condense the structure by building on top and around it with offices and housing: 

Annoyingly I don't have an image of the scheme by Melanie Sainsbury, a former partner in crime of Nigel Coates and the Narrative Architecture Today group.

But Melanie imagined a fabulous, Hamburg-style nightclub beneath the interchange piers:

And alongside recent RIBA Gold Medal winner Edward Cullinan, Finnish landscape architects Pirkko Higson chose to use the scale of spaces beneath the interchange

and imagine a jungle:

Five architects, five revisions of a public space: oh God! another architectural ideas initiative!

Yes. But there's a small but important dimension to this project.

Over at BLDGBLOG, there's speculation on the relationship between architecture and the media.

How are architectural ideas communicating through...various media? Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what specific way? How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged for discussion in these various forms?

The project on Spaghetti Junction contributes to the discussion because it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was broadcast as a special edition of an innovative arts TV series called The Late Show.

The person who came up with the project idea - er, me! - wanted to speculate upon the different pictures of the world in architectural designers' heads, suppressed by tight top-buttons done up and the virulent anti-architectural spirit of the times, triggered by Prince Charles' outburst against the National Gallery extension by Venturi Scott-Brown. 

Nothing much has happened to the space since this outburst of creative visioning, perhaps confirming in the abstract architect Bernard Tschumi's thought that

No spatial organization ever changes the socio-economic structure of a reactionary society.

But one principal stands tall.

Architecture need not be communicated by the media simply through reportage.

It can be communicated by the media acknowledging that it has a role as a protagonist in the public realm and that it can make its presence known as commissioner and cultural speculator.

In some places or situations, civic organization is dead and buried.

In others, it is fractured in to bowling associations, amenity groups and people obsessed with the world on their doorstep.

In others still, local government has given up the job of curating the physical quality of public life.

The question is whether the media can and is willing to fill the void and become an activist promoter of civic value and support the common sense prescription of architect Denise Scott-Brown when she wrote:

Where civic design succeeds, it is usually because it is sponsored by a civic organisation that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder, maintainer, and supporter of the project because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community.

Yes, the media is entertainment. And yes, it's devoted to making money. It would be deadly if it were otherwise.

But if architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as the enclosure of its walls, ditto the media.

Somewhere between the two there is common purpose.

So the job has got to be to get media corporations to not just commission superstarchitect head offices but become activists and sponsors of design and social innovation.

And for architects to not take such a snobbish, PR-orientated attitude towards the media, acknowledge a mutual role as shapers of the public realm, not hide in the basements of their buildings...and PLAY!

Pictures of Spaghetti Junction courtesy of Tim Ellis.