David Barrie

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.

I ran the project for three years.

In 2003, we ran an architectural competition and the new generation of British architectural stars stepped forward, including Renato Benedetti, Sarah Wigglesworth, Deborah Saunt of DSDHA, FAT and Alex de Rijke of DRMM.

Here's FAT presenting their scheme:

Five years later, here's an image of Benedetti's (almost complete) bridge:

Wigglesworth's early designs for a new pontoon on Castleford waterfront:

And Saunt's new subway underpass under construction - and for completion within the next few weeks:

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.

What's more, the process has been credited with helping leverage over £2o0m ($380m) of new commercial and residential development in the town.

The TV series and its design content will be revealed over the next few weeks - and I'll post some stuff here. Blogroll me.

But for now I wanted to make a small point.

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?

Fields of gold

This is an image of the celebrated Not a Cornfield art and land project in Los Angeles:

 

And this is an image of the existing landscape of a housing estate in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England that was involved in an urban farming initiative I ran last year:

Yesterday, the price of wheat skyrocketed as Kazakhstan, one of the world's largest exporters of grain, said it would impose export tariffs to curb sales of wheat. The reason: to contain domestic inflation of nearly 20%.

Dear city mayors, planners and architects,

How about reviewing those renewal strategies based on physical, social and cultural build and write a Five Year Crop Plan?

Be inspired by the spatial planning of Not a Cornfield:

Or the first vision of architects Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn for the town of Middlesbrough as a productive urban landscape, in a project enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time, One North East and The Design Council, England:

Viljoen and Bohn's plan connected tissues of land that might be cultivated, from existing parkland, open green spaces and allotment sites across town to places that local people chose to grow food  as part of the initiative and would like to see urban agriculture happening in the future (red dots above/green dots below):

Not a Cornfield is described as a sculpture. Viljoen's plan for Middlesbrough: an edible town.

It remains to be seen whether spikes in commodity prices, peak oil, the dearth of productive arable land and the changing metabolism of compact cities will make all of this financially viable.

But you've got to admit that the vision of an urban design for cities as an unfenced Glastonbury Festival or embargoed Havana is compelling - even if Fidel Castro has stepped down and you don't like hippies.

Urban farming images courtesy of Dott07 Urban Farming. The project was enabled by Dott07/Designs of the Time Ltd., One North East and The Design Council. All rights reserved. Urban Farming Project Site map, copyright of Middlesbrough Council.

Revolting local events

This is Belgain artist James Ensor's famous Christ’s Entry into Brussels:

This is an image of the March of the Dissenters, a series of opposition protests that took place in Russia in 2006 and 2007:

And this is an image of a community event held in Yorkshire in 2004 to raise public interest in the renewal of a dead-beat public space:

All three are images of carnival.

In a recent edition of Mute, journalists Dmitry Vorobyev and Thomas Campbell made a scathing attack on the development of Saint Petersburg in Russia, a city

besieged by elite-backed architectural mega-projects and micro-interventions.

The authors described the activities of Living City, a group who protested against proposals by authorities to turn Palace Square, the heart of the Russian Empire, in to a gigantic skating rink.

Living City decided to make public its 'support' for this initiative on behalf of all sporting enthusiasts. Armed with ski poles, swim fins, an inflatable mattress, and a basketball, activists appeared on the square, where they began frantically engaging in their favourite sports.

They thus drew attention to the fact that the authorities hadn't yet thought to 'renovate' Palace Square and also make it a venue for skiers, swimmers, and basketball fanatics.

The skating rink went ahead. :(

But two weeks ago, a Court ruled that its construction was illegal and ordered it to be closed and dismantled. :)

According to the writers in Mute, this is one small victory for groups and movements in Russia in which

thousands and tens of thousands of ‘non-aligned’ individual activists and ordinary concerned citizens can express their distress at the direction their beloved city has taken.

But it's also ammo against those who think that community events and civic participation are naff; and carnival is just something ecstatic and Latin American - or a cheesey, awkward essay in pointless juggling.

For be it people pretending to ski on a city square or ordinary citizens laying down in a long line in park, carnival is about performance, as well as celebration and community. 

Carnival can also be a form of protest.

Transforming society spud-by-spud

This is a photo of artist Kathryn Johnson's giant and very weird potato presentation at the Really Super Market art fair earlier this year in Middlesbrough, North East England.

Johnson's latex and polyester sculptures were a high point in an event curated by Bob and Roberta Smith and the culmination of a design project on food systems in the town.

Here's artist Bob and Roberta taking it easy during the event - and yes he's one person...

...and here's a dish served up at the event that was created from fresh produce cultivated by a thousand new 'urban farmers' in containers across the town.

Over 6000 people attended the Super Market event; and the food project - Dott07 Urban Farming - was a great success.

On one level, it fostered new enthusiasm for growing produce in the town. The town's new 'urban farmers' plan to run the process again in 2008. Local government is planning to release vacant lots across the town for new urban food production. And plans are moving forward to create a new restaurant in the town that will be organized as a co-operative social enterprise and supplied by the town's new farmers in the future.

But the initiative wasn't just a success because it offered people an opportunity to grow stuff. It worked because it created a new opportunity for people to communicate - and it now seems no accident that the culminating event was framed by an artist.

In his book on relational aesthetics, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud writes of

the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place.

In discussing the work of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Carsten Holler, Bourriaud celebrates the end of modernity's regressive fantasy of sacredness and singularity.

He sees in their art a reintroduction of the idea of plurality

...inventing ways of being together, forms of interaction that go beyond the inevitability of families, ghettos of technological user-friendliness, and collective institutions on offer.

In Bourriard's  mind, this is an urge towards creating new models of sociability.

In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.

More often than not, urban renewal and public involvement projects keep their creative and intellectual thrust hush-hush.

The sociability of public art also often plays second fiddle to imaging and market.

But it's interesting to start to see participatory design, art, social and economic renewal projects in the same frame as, say, Carsten Holler's metal slides at the Tate.

And be reminded that these projects are not just confirmation of how great it is to be alive, kicking and sociable. They are also microscopic opportunities to transform society step-by-step, spud-by-spud. 

Potato image courtesy of earth2potato.

What the hell is happening in Red Hook?

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

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

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

As reported by The Brooklyn Paper,

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

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

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

Geography professor Winifred Curran drew attention to a wider failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marching brands

Gentrification is often expressed in terms of displaced residents and loss of amenity. The story goes that poor people and honest retailers move on for Soave-drinking investors and retailers of expensive lampshades.

A recent article  in real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required] gave a richer insight in to both cause and effect.

In the early 1990s, fashion brand J Crew occupied a shop on Prince Street, SoHo, New York at $60 per sq ft.
Today, rents stand at $400 per sq ft. Do the maths yourself.

The watershed moment for the market in Soho was in 2004 when mainstream brand Bloomingdale's took a store at 504 Broadway. The effect on the real estate market and personality of the area was seismic:

Imagine Selfridges taking a store in Hoxton, and you begin to get an idea of the significance.

The comment doesn't just reflect the supertanker-ness of some real estate investment in urban areas but also is a reminder that gentrification is about brands dislocating cool and marketers acquiring new positions, not the Korean-style trans-shipment of urban underclass.