David Barrie

Rewarding Localism

 

Taking a collaborative, community-based approach to real estate development is about to become a requirement - and not just a nicety - of city planning and placemaking in the UK.

The UK Government has published legislation that it describes as a new era of people power, a Localism Bill that will change the way that development is permitted in towns, cities and neighbourhoods and create new opportunities for communities to exercise their rights - and there's a useful cheat-sheet by Colin Buchanan here.

Once the broader programme of reform of the new Administration takes effect, it will become clear whether this is a part of a redistribution of power or a form of devolution of dependency.

In the meantime, the new legislation is a call to creativity and innovation to address certain questions and there are two in particular that we're working with a client to get ahead of just now:

How best to reach people?

And how to sweeten the deal and make them an offer that they can't refuse?

As ever, part of the answer rests in incentive and reward: and there are two ways in which we're proposing to engage with this in a programme of community participation that we've just designed.

First, by using online social media.

There are hundreds of tools available just now that seek to foster online involvement in offline civic or local affairs - and there are some resources and precedents in an earlier post, presentation and the work of an outstanding UK initiative called Social by Social.

Yes, you can reach people through exhibitions, leaflets, surveys and public events but to ignore online media - and online social media in particular - is a bit hoop and stick when 82% of people in the UK use the Internet and almost a quarter of their time is spent exchanging knowledge and experience in online communities, social networks and blogging sites - a virtual real estate brilliantly captured here by Brian Solis of Future Works:

A key challenge is to create a service that both invites curiosity and facilitates altrusim.

And it seems common sense also to root that service in some basic human motives that we have learned from successful community organizing but that Beth Kanter and other inspirational experts point up consistently as a key reason why millions of people across the world use services like Facebook and Twitter - and as a routine, not just as a product:

• Making new friends
• Keeping up friendships
• Succumbling to social pressure from existing friends
• 'Paying it forward'

A second strategy that we've also just recommended is the introduction of a system of rewards.

Considering that the last thing that people tend to like on their doorstep is new urban development, are there new ways in which we can enable YIMBY ("Yes in my backyard") movements - like People Plan Toronto, Great City in Seattle or Liveable Places in Los Angeles?

Also as much as we might like to think that people rise up spontaneously in support of a local cause, is there a way in which participation can be rewarded and that reward match the interests, schedules and lives of people, rather than simply call upon the scare resource of goodwill?

The rewards system that we have just designed seeks to address the fact that people want recognition, achievement, personal benefit and early evidence of outcomes in return for getting involved in local affairs - and there is no reason why you couldn't launch a local 'rewards card' for community participation.

Places to start on this...

Dr Peter North's book Local Money. The ideas of dunhmumby, creators of the Tesco Clubcard. And some of the incentives at work in Ruby's Bequest, an alternate reality game developed by the Institute For The Future in California. 

Images courtesy of 1. Allie Brock 2. Maffashion 3. Brian Solis 4. Jennifer Snyder.

'Open source' place-making

How to deliver a Big Society - a place that acts as a catalyst to and inspires grassroots local activism - in the most bureaucratic, statist and controlled public space of them all: the built environment?

Here's one answer: 'open source' place-making.

This is an approach to urban development that centres on the making of an implementable 'social action plan' first - not a master plan - is inspired by the autonomy that many people want from their lives and seeks to create places through an unfolding process of interaction design first, architecture second.

You can download an essay by me on the idea, its roots and implications, with case-studies here.

Strapline: 'a collective approach to the development of cities in an age of Big Society, digital media and social enterprise'.

In its most naked form, 'open source' place-making is about taking a development site, establishing a very basic planning framework for it, triggering population of the site and then through its unfolding occupation form a forward plan for its development.

In effect, run an alternative to the standard planning and development process, enable occupation of spaces and places that's a physical equivalent of what's known as digital swarming and free real estate developers from having to be generalissimos of a war-game to theatrical managers.

A second dimension to open source place-making is to innovate the management of a neighbourhood, prioritise opportunities for tenants to benefit from short leases, self-build and self-management of the way in which they relate to buildings; also support different terms of trade and promote internal markets in goods and services on a barter basis - perhaps even follow a model by which tenants provide services-in-kind to external grant funders of a site, in lieu of rent.

A third ingredient in 'open source' place-making is to prioritise commercial occupancies of sites that service residents and other tenants on a collaborative, shared-risk basis.

No problem reserving a place for a branch of Zara or Jamie Oliver's Leatest Eating Experience but why not actively support the formation of co-operatives, mutuals and social enterprises on site, entities that tenants can direct, benefit from and that help build community? 

There's no need to fight shy of enabling this to happen at the centre of the consumer economy - see the new co-operative corner shop a group of us have recently founded in London, The People's Supermarket. 

What's more, there's no need to be narrow-minded on the terms and conditions of business responses to social problems. All of us have problems that need attention - but not all of them are dire.

For those who suffer from a lack of thrills: do a deal with Ferrari or local Scraphead Challenge types, turn an empty warehouse in to a showroom/playground and you could incubate a cluster of engineers.

For those who want autonomy: cluster their talents and provide an opportunity for them to excel. Say if they are good cooks, offer them vacant space on site and encourage them to form a new micro-food enterprise.

In other words, be a talent scout, recruit and capitalise upon its momentum.

On one level, 'open source' place-making is asking the development sector to open its mind up to a different way of thinking about design and site assembly: what tech people call interaction design.

Start to see physical space as a form of sovereign real estate - much like a web page - who's personality unfolds through the involvement of users - and see activity on site as a sequence of what geeks call transient interrupts that develop, die or mutate in to profitable enterprises over time.

Create a development framework that is less command-and-control zoning and more a theme that enables an early idiomatic understanding of the space that over time, through public engagement and interaction, acquires a personality and resolute business case.

On another level, 'open source' place-making is a plea: to slim down bureaucracy, open up development to taking an equity stake in the customer and reflect the fact that in an internet economy, people are loyal to data and experience and 'modal switch' between platforms; what's more, maximise opportunities to win a return on investment in certain markets or market-makers: such as social enterprise, independent retail, consumers who live in online, as well as offline spaces, and those who want autonomy.

Where's the capital receipt?

The pragmatic answer is that there's nothing stopping landowners from holding on to the most lucrative bits of real estate that will generate the highest short-term return.

The better answer is that to outsource development sites as enablers of change is to create and capture new (and higher) values.

Why bother with this advanced potion making? :)

Earlier this year, the Social Investment Task Force reported that investment by Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Funds in the UK was running at an estimated £764bn.

At a similar time, the BBC reported that one in every four and a half minutes spent by people online is on social networks and blog sites.

Meanwhile, urban development has wound right down, with producers and consumers of land either deleveraging or starved of bank credit.

You don't need to be Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve to realise that in this climate, it might be profitable - as well as more effective - for the real estate and renewal sectors to follow people and their money more resolutely in to online and social markets, and start to behave like those markets.

You don't need to be a nu-folk hipster to realise that stimulus investment in green infrastructure in the USA and UK is starting to confirm our age as a decade of sustainability as offensive strategy, to quote Gardiner Morse in the Harvard Business Review.

And you don't need to be Che Guevara to recognise that if grassroots citizen action is going to have an impact upon the design and delivery of public services - and become a key player in a new value chain - there's no better place to start than in a key market place for those services, the public realm.

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The paper on 'open source' place-making is part of a larger programme of work - "Growing the People", a social action plan for the development of Speirs Locks, Glasgow, Forth & Clyde Canal - commissioned by Architecture + Design Scotland, the Scottish Centre for Regeneration and part of the Scottish Government's Sustainable Communities Initiative.

An army of outstanding creative thinkers working in real estate, economic development, design, the creative industries and architecture have fed in to this work - including Diarmaid Lawlor of Architecture + Design Scotland, Chris Brown of igloo Regeneration, Stuart Gulliver (former Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise Glasgow), Steve Dunlop (Head of Regeneration, British Waterways), Gary Watt (ISIS Waterside Regeneration), design writer John Thackara, city development consultant Roy van Dalm (former associate of Richard Florida) and social innovator Rohan Gunatillake.

Please subscribe to this blog if you want to know more. I'll be posting a video and links to other stuff here in the coming days.

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Images courtesy of: 1. Not known (lost). 2. Mauricio Guillen. 3. Yvan Rodic. 4. James Joyce. 5. Haarala Hamilton Photography. 6 & 7. wearesnook.com (Lauren Currie). 8. Jan Chipchase, Frog Design. 9. Via my veil of stars.  

Cultivating a fashion for change

 

If you want to design ways for people to associate, innovate development or spread an idea, read a fashion blog. 

Fashion blogging is a fantastic online space, drunk on creativity, enthusiasm, networking - and yes, pushiness, careerism and an orgy of affiliate marketing and product placement too. 

But follow fashion blogs and you'll soon discover a treasure-trove of ways and means that like-minded souls express their interest, exchange and share enthusiasms and enlist slaves to their cause. 

As I've posted before, fashion online is a space full of amateurs turned pro/semi-pro who've assumed a status that gets them flown worldwide for fashion events and reserved seats on the front row of Fashion Week. 

One clue to the influence of fashion bloggers is how they associate with one another and are organized online.

Fans contribute in their thousands to user-generated content sites, like Chictopia and Lookbook.

They share knowledge and affiliations via community networks like Independent Fashion Bloggers.

Friends collaborate to bulk up content and reach - see Anywho.

And while websites like Freshnet foster and aggregate blogs to sell advertising, Bubbleroom hosts them to direct audiences to their online shop.

What you end up with is enthusiasts starring in their own shoots:

Brands and patterns spreading like wildlife, like Balmain - see MCM and Chicmuse - and most recently - see Studded Hearts and Belle de Couture - Miu Miu's swallow print:

Alongside fans winning careers, thousands of square miles of new online real estate - 'personalized surfaces' - are created for advertising.

It may offend sensitive minds - and now may be a difficult time to talk of things that invite excess - but this all now (weirdly) seems (to me at least) very relevant to the cause of increasing citizen participation, fostering local activism and seeding grassroots economies - an obsession just now in the U.K.

The scale and dynamism of fashion blogging shows what happens when people have the freedom and space to develop their passion.

The diverse ways in which bloggers organize and associate shows how individuality can be networked and collectivized effectively, so long as raw enthusiasm remains up front.

What's more, these blogs show that enthusiasts can grow in to communities, so long as there's a degree of permission to participate - in this case, granted by owners of intellectual property - and options available to make money, should people want it.

Some fashion bloggers earn money by associating with large and small company partners, others through advertising.

Flip this for a conclusion:

marketing people are starting to see some amateur enthusiasts and what they're up to as an effective route to market and valuable source of profit.

As ever, forget fashion at your peril. :)

Images courtesy of 1.Yvan Rodic. 2. Jak & Jil Blog. 3. Yvan Rodic. 4.Late Afternoon. 5. chicmuse. 6. fashiontoast.

Venturing not marketing: 10 Big Society projects

The Big Society Network was launched last week in the U.K. by Prime Minister David Cameron.

The Network is a platform for activating citizen involvement in public affairs, with a mission and modus operandi that is the subject of feverish debate - track it by following the #bigsociety tag on Twitter. 

Because the Big Society is associated with the new Government, our economy has entered an age of austerity and You have to keep dancing while the music's still playing - to quote Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup from an earlier age - Big Society is fast becoming a bandwagon.

This isn't a bad thing. Bandwagons attract the private sector and corporates have a massive role to play in building public engagement in society just now. In a low demand economy, community building is a form of market-making and successful businesses need confident, self-fulfilled customers.

But a problem with bandwagons is that they can invite an overdose of social messaging and strategy-think and over-complicate the basic business of fostering and wiring grassroots economy and activism.  

As an antidote, here's a selection of ten simple, brilliant initiatives, enterprises and ideas - low-budget ventures with lo-fi marketing - that get on with the job of triggering and networking public association for public good: 

1. Renew Newcastle

An area-based, non-profit revitalization project in Newcastle, New South Wales that over the last 18months has created over 50 new creative businesses, galleries, studios, and enterprises in the fading commercial district of the city. (HT @unsungsongs)

2. Buffalo ReUse

A not-for-profit social enterprise concerned with the long-term sustainability of the city of Buffalo, New York with a green demolition/salvage company division that deconstructs built structures like houses and garages for materials to be used in other buildings. (It would be great to set up a version of this in a re-purposing city in the UK!)

3. Open Books

This is another enterprise ripe for replication - a non-profit social venture that operates a bookstore selling recycled books, provides community programmes and promotes literacy not landfill in Chicago.

(My U.K. fantasy: take a dead shop, refurbish it as an informal local library, create a neighborhood book recycling scheme, collect, sell and lend the books from the shop and invest any financial surplus in iPads with pre-downloaded novels, for people to put a deposit down on and take away.)

4. The People's Supermarket

A new co-operative supermarket in the London Borough of Camden, inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York. [Declaration of interest: I'm involved.] Anyone can shop in The People's Supermarket but in return for a small fee and four hours volunteer time per month, members win a discount on their food shopping - and can save on the usual premium prices charged for healthy, independent or locally-sourced food.

5. Union Street Urban Orchard

A large disused site next to railway line in Bankside, South London has been transformed in to a garden featuring countless examples of food growing, a zero-carbon pod and a skip turned in to a tennis-table. It's part of a larger programme to revitalize a string of disused public spaces in London known as Bankside Urban Forest and the brainchild of designer Heather Ring.

  6. Southwark Circle

A membership organization that connects members to each other to share interests and enjoy themselves and members to local, skilled people called Neighbourhood Helpers, who provide flexible help with things like DIY tasks, gardening or Internet lessons. Created by Participle, a social innovation company, the Circle is designed to allow people to be 'each other's solution'.

7. Silicon Roundabout

Not an initiative at all but a road junction where London’s Old Street meets City Road, the grunge epicentre of EC1, a district that is home to hundreds of tech businesses dating back to dot com days. The most famous local hero here was last.fm, the online music community bought by CBS for $280m (£140m) in 2007, one of the largest UK web company buyouts of recent years. This is just an intersection - and a deadly, dumpy one at that. But a thing that shows that association just happens through natural networking and clustering of people and what they are in to, not by putting a gun to their heads. 

8. Bikeworks

A community cycle centre in Tower Hamlets, East London, that offers a range of services including cycle training courses, rental, repairs, bike-recycling, travel planning and sales of new and second-hand bikes. This is an award-winning social enterprise that sells you bikes of known (not stolen) provenance and is nifty for getting across town to Look Mum no Hands!, a new (and heaving) bike workshop and cafe for city cyclists - a for-profit enterprise that understands people as communities of active interest, not couch potato demographics in a media plan. 

9.    Livity

Another social enterprise in London, Livity is a youth communications agency that co-creates campaigns and content for brands, broadcasters, charities and local and central government and seeks to achieve client objectives whilst improving the lives of young people. Projects include the award-winning Dubplate Drama, an interactive TV series, Live Magazine and clients include Coca Cola, O2, Playstation and Channel 4 Television. (HT @SamConniff, @MichelleLivity and @gavineale)

10.    Wayfarer

This project started in 2007 as a live improvised realtime game and multimedia event in Sydney, Australia, produced by artists Kate Richards and Martyn Coutts. Designed for four performers, four audience groups and passersby, each audience group, using their voices, directed performers to explore and undertake a series of tasks inside a new and largely unknown building, hidden from the audience’s view - and the audience tracked their performer’s progress via streamed video, audio and locative data on large exterior projection screens. The initiative has since grown in to a bigger series of participatory, locative art projects, with the second Wayfarer project taking place in Melbourne in 2009. (HT @lcarroli)

What's exciting about almost all of these enterprises is that they tend to merge the profit motive with a moral imperative - and many directly confront social need through the businesses themselves.

Almost all of these ventures - in a politically non-partisan way - trigger volunteering and social action and act as touch-point for providing a public service, be it care for seniors, healthy living, food security, literacy or managing waste in the built environment.

Most are trading systems. Almost all elicit support by association. All are optimistic.

Images courtesy of 1. Viktor Vauthier, 2. uddin/elsey, 3. Buffalo ReUse, 4. consumatron, 5. Liz & Max Haarala Hamilton Photography, 6. foe, 7. Southwark Circle, 8. moleitau, 9. Bikeworks, 10. Livity website, 11. Wayfarer, MySpace

A Magic Box of New Media and Urban Policy

In a recent podcast of the Economist magazine on online social networks, US technology correspondent Martin Giles said that in Silicon Valley the acronym URL stands for "Ubiquity First Revenue Later".

For those in the commercial and non-profit sector seeking to generate and capture value from sustainable products and services, the ubiquity offered by the internet is a magic box waiting to be opened.

The net is a potential treasure-trove of social sustainability, offering easy-to-reach educational facilities, employment, inclusion of traditionally marginalized or under-represented groups and a public place that generates new identity and opportunity for social interaction.

What's exciting for urban regeneration, urban renewal and real estate is that the internet brings a massive new dimension to the meaning of 'place' and the way in which websites work and how we interact with them starts to make cities feel like platforms for the delivery of services and government like a form of applications service provider, like Yahoo.

What's even more exciting - but also challenging - is that the personalization of products and services intrinsic to use of the internet might make physical 'place-making' more important than ever but also it starts to make some conventional answers to a timeless question feel a bit limp.    

There are countless developments in new media just now that are starting to engage with this issue and you need look no further than the current edition of Next American City - a brilliant Philadelphia-based magazine that's also profiled in an article in this month's Monocle.

Reporting on a conference last October called "Open Cities: New Media's Role in Shaping Urban Policy", Next American City serves up a great directory of people, tools and widgets that seek to take new media technologies and apply them to enhance urban sustainability and quality of life.

Some highlights:

• DIY City - a website that seeks to apply open software to solve urban problems
• Hub2 - which uses tech tools to engage the public in urban planning
• the Open Planning Project - an organization advocating for open government and "civic empowerment" software
• PublicStuff - an online platform that allows residents to access service requests and local government information
• The Collaboration Project - a forum of leaders committed to leveraging the interactive web and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government's complex problems
• Smarter Cities - a project of the Natural Resources Defense Council that, among many things, encourages citizen journalists to talk about their perception of the city
• EveryBlock - a "microlocal" website for several American cities, by neighborhood
• SeeClickFix - a service that allows local people to log non-emergency complaints and so alert one another to shared concerns

There is a full account of the conference proceedings on the Next American City website - and many of these tools or initiatives have their cousins or clones here in the U.K.

To quote the Canadian cyberspace maven Pierre Lévy in his book Collective Intelligence:

New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge.

In urban regeneration projects in Cardiff, Moscow, Glasgow and elsewhere, my project design and delivery company is bleeding these systems in to the process of delivering urban development or seeking to create conditions in which they can thrive. 

Hope the links are of use.

Images: 1. Source lost. 2. absolutelyoblivious. 3. Project for Public Spaces.

Punk Regeneration

This is artist Laura Oldfield Ford's sardonic dig at the gentrification - or yuppification - of urban life, using a combination of pseudy Socialist Realism and Special Offer stamps. It's hilarious. 

Oldfield Ford is an East London Warrior Princess who expresses Class War by depicting - according to the Tate Britain website (sic) - dystopian scenes, class conflict and urban ruins using ballpoint pen, fluorescent spray paint and acrylic.

 

As the Tate website says, Ford makes work that both imagines a future London whilst simultaneously sifting through the detritus of history.

 

Ford's work is in part motivated by what she sees as an absence of herself and other people's selves in the development and regeneration plans of cities - “I’ve looked into the future and I can’t find myself ANYWHERE.”

And she reserves special blame for the real estate sector - in the following work, St Modwen Properties, a company involved in bringing forward some key development sites in the UK:

Now all of this dystopian stuff is sexy in its counter-cultural-biro-ness. It chimes well with a view of the U.K. as Broken Britain, sits pretty in an age of post-apocalyptic nihilism - for another view, see Russian artist Vladimir Manyuhin's visions of a decayed world - and is a miserabilist drone that syncs well with the retro bits of people's iTunes playlists - in my case, the greatest, angriest hits of Crass and Part Chimp.

But hold on! WAKE UP!

In an age of huge public sector deficits, private sector investors are not the villains but the cavalry. 

We need to Make Poverty History, not update and adapt Europe After the Rain by Max Ernst - one of the greatest works of twentieth century art.

What's more, there have been tremendous advances in recent years - for instance in new media technology and online urban advocacy - that enable people to start to call a city or place their own, rather than simply become the thirteenth tribe of urban renewal, The Deleted. 

These advances fly past Ford's view of urban life: a comic/zine aesthetic that's ticklish, needs to be noticed since it's the tip of an exciting neo-punk thing but in the end is only for folks with fetishes for images of war-damaged Chechnya or those nice yellow Bic biro ballpoint pens that used to snap and leak in your pocket. 

More on Oldfield Ford's work:  

• Podcast of the artist talking about her view of the city and the apocalyptic painting of John Martin - a Tate Conversation Piece - can be downloaded from iTunes (December 2009)
• More images of the artist's work available at sjrobertson at flickr.com (March 2009)
• Article on Oldfield Ford's work in Frieze magazine (February 2009)
  
• The artist has a website and publishes a zine called Savage Messiah. (But both websites down at time of writing.)

Images randomly pulled from the net. Apologies to the artist for theft.

The new gift economy

This is 122 Leadenhall Street, an office development site of real estate developer British Land in the City of London, as it looked two years ago.  

Before a new development designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the existing building was destroyed from the ground up around its central concrete core, leaving it to look like an ice-lolly or unfinished game of Jenga.  

The structure has since been demolished but because of the impact of recession on demand for office space, no new building has been created, work has stopped on site and it was recently announced that the site would be used in the meantime as a city farm. 

There's a lot of similar temporary uses of development sites going on in the U.K. just now.

The massive site of a former hospital in North London is to be temporarily turned in to an allotment site, after a campaign by art dealer Rebecca Hossack.

And Chelsea Barracks, a site in West London once destined for hyper-luxurious development by Candy & Candy, is to be the temporary location of an art fair.

On one level, this is simply short-term commercial pragmatism: do something useful with a development site, preferably something that gets noticed and is socially useful, and so mitigate the decrease in value of the site and its surrounding land were it just to lay fallow.

But I think that there's something going on here beyond temporary measures and it's to do with an instinct for gifting now taking hold in culture - the giving of things unwrapped that don't come in paper bags.  

Across culture, millions of people are giving stuff away just now - and it's across the scale.

• Hundreds of millions are sharing knowledge via links and downloads on Twitter
• Thousands of architects are gifting their skills to design structures for communities in crisis, thanks to Architecture for Humanity
• More locally, people in the London Borough of Southwark are giving time to help their neighbors in the Southwark Circle project, created by design consultancy Participle 
• Choose What You Read is handing out second hand books at selected London subway stations, giving people the opportunity to choose a novel over a free newspaper
• At the London College of Fashion, M.A. student Alina Moat is running a project that leaves clothes in public spaces to be appropriated by the people who find them

Now some of this might be noticeable because of recession.

There may also be a dimension to it all of selfless selfishness: new age narcissism cloaked in humility.   

But people do seem to want to use the public realm to give away or share what they own, permanently or temporarily, in exchange for something else - be it knowledge, shelter or well-being.

There's pure gratuity in here - a socially responsible variant of the early days of Facebook and its extreme-gifting of flowers and donuts. 

It is affirmation that people appreciate different ways and means, different media - be it clothes, books, talent or land - to bind people together and generate value.

Perhaps it's noticeable because, like the rise in popularity of social networking, there isn't a shortage of 'content' but ways to exchange and share it, so when an opportunity arrives, it's attractive.

But what seems certain is that in an age that increasingly values social economy, people are recognizing that there's new real estate to be captured and a key to unlocking it comes in the form of a gift.

Image of ACNE bag courtesy of Lastnightstrash.

Designing public participation

There are two things that commissioners and designers of work that engages the public need to focus hard on just now:

People are leading increasingly static lives.

And to win their involvement, they need to be offered compelling, not compulsory experiences.

These two facts of life are at the centre of trends like sustainability and localism - but somehow the complexity of the words and what they refer to can get in the way.  

Me and several creative/professional teams I've pulled together are working on all sorts of projects just now - and the centre of operations is the office whiteboard:

We're helping 

• public and private organizations in the development sector engage with communities
• a major fashion retailer in the U.K. promote the idea of collective creativity
• people living in a low-income neighborhood share experience and knowledge using online media
• an entrepreneur to start a new food co-operative that will be the subject of a series of primetime TV shows in the U.K.
• and an international cultural relations agency support an elite "flight-school" of urban entrepreneurs

And these all involve designing programmes of user-friendly, interactive experiences that trigger collaboration and help people achieve whatever they want to achieve more effectively.

A key to success is to structure a sequence of experiences that take people on a journey that has a larger cumulative meaning - much like a director writes a screenplay or time-lapse photographer frames motion:

What's exciting is to see this turned in to real life - and it doesn't come much better than a project that I came across on a visit to the USA late last year.

City Harvest is a public project in Philadelphia in which inmates of the city prison system start vegetable seedlings in prison gardens and greenhouses:

The seedlings are then taken to maturity at dozens of community gardens across the city:

Then SHARE, a nonprofit network that provides food to area food cupboards across the city, facilitates distribution of the grown produce to low-income neighborhoods, often to the very areas in which the families of the prison-growers live.

City Harvest is an inspiration. Why?

Because it is a project that expresses all of the warmness of sustainability and localism but also speaks to their cold reality - we lead increasingly static lives and to overcome this for the public good, there's value in creating a connected sequence of industrious, easy, participatory steps.

The initiative also respects a magic ingredient that is a key to all entertainment and largely missing from talk about "top/down", "bottom-up", "grassroots/non-grassroots" activity led by public and private organizations: we like things that are compelling, rather than compulsory.

Things that are compelling rather than compulsory make life worth living - and that goes for X-Factor, Celebrity Big Brother, even fierce fashion worn by Daphne Guinness, not just stuff that's useful and worthwhile. 

It's also a value at the centre of the most successful platform for human interaction and empowerment of our age: the internet. 

Images of City Harvest courtesy of PHS (The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society). Source lost for Happy Balls and skateboarder time-lapse (sorry!) 

Links for 2009-10-30

Kim Gordon Rodarte Exhibition Art [hypebeast]

Otis College-trained Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth's artwork on sale: Failing Lights, Noise Nomads, Dude War, and Pussy Galore. 

Yes, Anastasia [Superqueen]

"The shape of Kristina is reminiscent of the infamous Yves Saint Laurent Cocoon wedding dress, and the scale-like gold satin, with those black appliques as decorations, bring the Fabergé Imperial eggs to my mind."

Access to News Wildly Unequal in U.S. [Washington Post]

Walter Isaacson, President of the Aspen Institute and a former Time managing editor: "Nations that will succeed in the 21st century are those in which citizenry has access to the free flow of information."

Promoting Food Security and reducing carbon emissions through the London Orchard Project [ERM]

"The particular vision of the London Orchard Project is to create mini-orchards across London, thereby developing communities’ access to local food now and in the future; contributing to carbon absorption; reducing the carbon footprint of fruit consumed in London and supporting biodiversity conservation."

And one of the first films I ever made (!):

The Late Show on 8vo Design [Cerysmatic Factory]

"BBC2's The Late Show, 1990; this was a ten minute manifesto/profile of 8vo Design. They were approached by the BBC to do a piece about English type-based graphics and it developed from there. It was organised around a series of statements/themes such as 'Simplify Design', 'Design Not Craft' and these were introduced by titles (designed by 8vo) and film of the 8vo designers themselves speaking the statements in a layered glass stage set. This was interspersed with shots of 8vo's work (such as Haçienda 4, and Haç 7) and footage of them talking about their work."

 

E-serendipity: Digital inclusion, social media and super-communicators

In super jargon, doomsday for the internet comes as cyberbalkanization - or fragmentation of people in to like-minded groups.

Hellfire then rages in the idea that the net discourages serendipitous encounters - accidental, involuntary, on-the-fly, human interplays that allow for take-your-breath-away, progressive, life-changing moments.

In the words of Harvard Professor Cass R.Sunstein in Going to Extremes:

In countless domains, the Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.

In other words, welcome to cyberspace, a place full of spaces to populate but with lines tricky to cross, much like the Kosovo/Serbian border. 

A passport to migration across digital territories is said to be collaboration between those online that tips in to large-scale community building: an activity flagged in a recent McKinsey paper as use of the internet that is neither mass content creation nor 'decision support'.

But a key barrier, as ever, is the fact that less than a quarter of the world's population are online. In the U.K., according to a presentation by Helen Milner, 23% of adults do not use the internet, 35% of households don't have access to the internet and 70% of people who live in supported housing aren't online.

But I'm confused.

Take Tiger Bay, or Butetown, an area in Wales that hosts the second poorest housing estate in the country.

36% of the area's 4500 residents live in council or assisted housing, 36% have no qualifications, a fifth of the population in 2001 were born outside of Europe and 62% of the children attending a local primary school receive extra support learning English. 

 
We have just carried out a survey for a project called Digital Butetown in to internet use by 11-19 yr old students who attend the most prominent secondary school in the area: Fitzalan High School.

Over 1300 people completed a simple survey and results were analyzed by Dr Kelly Page at Cardiff Business School.

Here are the headlines:

• 92% of students said that they can access the Internet/Net at home
• 46% use the web on average for up to one hour a day from home
• 46% use community access points, e.g. internet cafes and libraries
• 88% of respondents said they owned a mobile telephone
• 49% said that they sent over 50 SMS messages a month
• 55% said that they had taken a photo with their phone
• Favourite websites: YouTube, Friv and Google
• Favourite social network sites: MSN, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace

The results suggest some obvious things.

There's a generation of users at the most local level who are web-literate super-communicators.

Access to the internet is a limited measure of the digital divide.

And if sowing the seeds of experimentation is important to increasing the uptake of participation technology and polarization of opinion is a risk in the new online economy, it may reap dividends to hyper-target the young.

But then the challenges pull sharply in to focus.

Opportunities need to be easy to find, forward and act upon.

And how to channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further an overall goal?

This stands to reason as one effective way forward for collectivized, non-polarized engagement - and was an important element in the success of the Obama campaign, according to a recent report by Edelman.

Some great first ideas on a forward process were raised at a workshop in Butetown last month. RSS-me to catch that update and join our Google Group for more. 

 

Images courtesy of ornithes, cabiria8, photojennic and Paul Corcoran.