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.

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.

An Intellectual Property

For those who struggle with assigning

all copyright and all neighbouring and database rights and moral rights, registered designs, registered and unregistered design rights, or any rights or property similar to the foregoing in any part of the world whether registered or unregistered together with the right to apply...etc. etc.

and others who try to make an argument for a site becoming a hive of cultural activity...

enjoy the joke that someone once had at somebody else's expense on a billboard in Vancouver :

Image courtesy of thorbak.

Communities in Control

Slowly but surely, the relationship between the state, taxpayer and local change in the U.K. is being re-aligned - looking towards a new dawn for the Enabling State.

The Conservative Party has bought in to localism hook-line-and-sinker - with next to no detail  - and newspapers over the last few days have given lots of space over to Prime-Minister-wannabe David Miliband's ideas on 'double-devolution'.

But a key moment was reached last month with the Government's publication of Communities in Control, a statement of policy

to generate vibrant local democracy in every part of the country, and to give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of active citizens.

What's interesting is that hidden behind velvety stuff on community empowerment, an iron fist is emerging that could send to oblivion nicey-nicey, PR-ridden 'engagement' of people on local affairs.

From April 2009, all of the country will be subject to a Comprehensive Area Assessment that will relate people's experiences of living in an area to how local agencies work together and how local public services can be improved. In time, this will become a measure for evaluating public management. 

But what's exciting - and please stay awake - is that alongside this regulation, you can start to see pots of money becoming available to people to directly administer.

For alongside the Government paper, a wide range of reform of the planning system is taking place.

Since 1990, local authorities in the U.K. have been allowed to enter in to legally-binding agreement or planning obligation with a land developer over a related issue: and this has often delivered stuff we need, like roads, schools or parks.

In October, a new piece of legislation - the Planning Bill - will come before the House of Commons.

The Bill carries provision for a new regime called the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). The Levy is bascially a new tax on developers on top of existing obligations but one more directly linked to profits.

What's important is that the recent Government paper infers that this is an opportunity for

local communities to get involved in decisions on where to spend money.

If this happens, say goodbye to old-style, PR-led 'community engagement' in which the community is consulted on development plans - but basically told what's going to happen.

And hello to new style 'community involvement' in which the powers that be actively ingratiate themselves with folk bearing cashflow.

 

Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan

Here are images of almost all of the design projects that form The Castleford Project: an urban renewal initiative in the forming coal-mining town in West Yorkshire.

A TV series on the design and delivery of these projects and the pleasure and pain of renewing a town will be broadcast by Channel 4 in the U.K. for four weeks from Monday, August 11 at 2100hrs. It is called Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan and produced by Talkback Thames. 

According to an article in today's Times newspaper

the physical results are impressive. Talkback attracted serious talent. On the steering committees are leading lights such as Roger Zogolovitch, one of Britain’s most influential, design-led developers, and Peter Rogers, brother of Richard and the founding CEO of developers Stanhope. Architects included rising stars such as DSDHA and Hudson Architects, plus international luminaries including Martha Schwartz.

Here are two views of the new pedestrian bridge, designed by McDowell & Benedetti.

The new town square, designed by Hudson Architects:

A new pedestrian subway and public space to the south side of the town centre, designed by DSDHA with lighting artist Martin Richman.

The initiative features the renewal of three open spaces in housing neighborhoods across the town as public spaces and play areas.

Here is the new Playforest at Cutsyke, designed by Estell Warren Landscape Architecture and Allen Tod Architecture:

The new playground at The Green Ferry Fryston/Airedale, designed by Parklife:

A new public space at New Fryston on the site of former mining cottages by American landscape designer Martha Schwartz:

In addition to these physical transformations, the Project enabled the creation of a forward plan for the town's riverfront by architect Sarah Wigglesworth.

And a new master plan for a housing district known as Wilson Street, adjacent to the town centre by architects Allen Tod.

The design team was supported by Roger Zogolovitch, AZ Urban Studio and design writer Lee Mallett.

The public space strategy of the initiative was advised by Gehl Partners, Copenhagen.

Project Management: MACE. Cost Management: Gleeds.

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.

Dark and new Satanic Mills

Over the last ten years, according to the London Financial Times, loans for prospective small-scale landlords have risen from 2% to 10% of all mortgages.

Thousands of newly built flats have been constructed in English cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham to fuel and sate demand.

But over-valuation, fake discounts, skimming by lenders, increases in mortgage costs and a simple lack of demand is witnessing thousands of these flats remaining empty or let at rents that do not cover mortgages.

Newspaper reports highlight the plight of investors with portfolios valued in millions now turning to dust, personally owing millions and fearing repossession of their own front doors.

Time to re-cast a famous poem?

And did those feet in ancient time

walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine

shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

among these dark Satanic Mills?

Pictures courtesy of Aeschli, Martin Q and  Sternology.

Civic revolutionaries

This is the clean and simple, inspirational image of cities that we like - and it's fantastic.

But in the London Observer, design writer and curator Dejan Sudjic offers a great reminder of some of the complicated and dirty casting that delivers this reality:

Cities are made by an extraordinary mix of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators.

They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary.

The hole-in-one here is that cities are made by people - and (more than) occasionally mad ones at that.

Not just the real estate dealers in their sheepskin coats, or the shady, cynical operators in City Hall but also the total fanatics.

This is an image of some of the bloody-minded obsessives that I have been working with over the last few years on an urban renewal project in the U.K.

There are about ten people missing from the shot but this picture includes community leaders, an architect, a property developer, a former school cook and a janitor who won an Order of the British Empire - in part for her commitment to the cause.

Every town or city in the world has such a group.

Dejan calls them urban obsessives.

Doug Henton of Collaborative Economics has a positive, more romantic catch-all description of the cadre. 

He calls them civic revolutionaries.

Go forth and aggregate

One of the key business technology trends of 2008, according to The McKinsey Quarterly [registration required], is making businesses from capturing information.

As we know from shopping sites and business-to-business product directories on the net, there's money to be made from accumulated pools of data.

But something we're failing to do in parallel is understand and exploit the value of accumulation and - more importantly - aggregation to social and economic progress.

A huge amount of information and relationships accumulate in national local government.

Extensive networks of diverse social, economic and physical assets aggregate around the commercial redevelopment and regeneration of towns and cities.

A vast diaspora of hopes and interests sit in devolved off and online groups of people, be it 5-a-side soccer leagues, Facebook groups, community gardeners or moderators of Wikipedia.

There's a vast amount of dispersed energy, enthusiasm, activity and innovation out there. And it's brilliant.

But a key challenge has to be how public managers - not just designers of online entertainment platforms - public initiatives - not just pressure groups - and central and local government - not just eccentric entrepreneurs or innovators - can aggregate this activity.

Why bother?

Because new value might be captured for the benefit of all.

So, here's a message for Lent:

Go forth and aggregate.

And start trading and packaging social, not just physical assets.

 

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?