David Barrie

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative

 

This could have been the closing caption for a private "summit" on urban renewal held in London this week.

Sponsored by Eversheds and King Sturge, the event was a wake/brainstorm for an industry that has ground to a halt - but for the design and delivery of the 2012 Olympics and its East London after-burn. (my regeneration Bhagwan Jackie Sadek has also posted on it here.)

The last twenty years has delivered some remarkable urban regeneration schemes in the U.K. - like Tate Modern, the transformation of Shoreditch, regeneration of Canary Wharf in London Docklands, the arrival of Westfield shopping mall in West London and new waterfronts in the cities of Newcastle-Gateshead and Liverpool, not to mention the Scandi-style minimalist repaving of most U.K. city centres.

But the debt-fulled boom is over: bank lending is tighter, house-building has slowed, the mathematical equations of 'value uplift' have been wrecked by falling land values and the number of people in poverty in the U.K. has increased, when the very purpose of regeneration is to help poor people become more prosperous - or at least that's what it says in the manual. 

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative. What might it be?

Well maybe...

...since in a speech this week called The Big Society, Conservative Party leader David Cameron laid out his thoughts on a new role for the state: directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal.  

Labour minister Tessa Jowell then unveiled public service partnerships, public management that champions co-operative working - call it The New Mutualism, the name of a key policy paper of over a decade ago: 

We think mutuals have a much broader potential across the public sector, especially now where they can become an expression of the new national soul post-credit crunch.

What do these two statements suggest for the future of urban renewal?

1. Economic change will be less reliant upon property developers, unless they are prepared to innovate by shifting to sustainable development or become increasingly transparent and flexible
2. Local development will be more answerable to 'the people' -  and we'll see less of a "massive- shopping-centre-with-a-town-attached" approach to urbanism  
3. 'Value' will be assessed on a broader basket of local currencies, over and above rental income
4. More time, attention and pride is about to be invested in local councillors and planning officers,
5. Small projects that trigger social renewal - rather than physical projects so big that they make the earth tilt - will come back in to vogue (cf City Challenge), and
6. New, non-aligned organizations or aggregated civic organizations at the most local level are about to become flavour of the month, since they offer a bridge between citizens and state, can engender trust, express identity and promote the welfare of the larger community above parochial Nimbyism

The poster boys and girls of this new mutualist world will be the army of activists and entrepreneurs who lead their communities, believe in collaboration and the welfare of their larger community.

These need not be either anti-capitalists or anti-development - just people who understand that enterprise in all of its many forms - social, as well as mercantile - is a key route to progress.

In the United States, these figures are lionized - just listen to President Obama at a press conference in June celebrating the work in particular of innovative non-profits:

At the centre of this new narrative are two of the oldest characters in the book. First - the taxpayer. Second - the consumer.

But the new element is the collective. The new formation: the non-profit. The new cast member - the social entrepreneur.

Either this is the dawn of a glorious new age of the social economy, political cynicism or the last bout of communal generosity as a post-industrial nation takes to the lifeboat.

What I do know is that I am yet to speak to a pension fund manager who is in the least bit interested in sharing an algorithm on life-cycle costs or dreaming up a vanilla-wrapped product that capitalizes upon social, as well as land, power, skills, knowledge and data assets.

I assume that's because the financial returns don't fit in to client demand, the terms of managers' annual bonuses and no bright spark has yet to work out a marketable link between carbon credits and the financing of urban renewal.

What I also know is that some - if not all - of this was the elephant in the room at the event this week: part of the paradigm shift that everyone cites, but an equity revolution that no-one really quite dares engage.  

Images courtesy of fliegender.

Cultivating a new Butyrkskaya, Moscow

With the collapse in international bank lending comes a real opportunity in the world of urban development for investment in small projects and those projects growing over time to become catalysts to change.

In an earlier post, I called it (rather unsexily) 'Venture Urbanism' - and the good news is that there's an increasing amount of it about.

Earlier this year, the London Borough of Hackney, Design for London and the London Development Agency published Making Space in Dalston, a directory of improvements to public space in the district of Hackney that they hope to advance in the coming years. 

And last year, I was involved in the start of a physical and cultural masterplan called High Street 2012 that aims to  use the London Olympic Games as a catalyst for improvements to the very long (and very unwindy) road that runs from (what will be) the gates of the Olympic site to the centre of Tower Hamlets, taking in Whitechapel High Street, Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road and Bow Road.

These are brilliant frameworks for change that are already evidencing first moves, like the recent Dalston Mill wheatfield, a re-creation of American artist Agnes Denes' famous Wheatfield in Manhattan in 1982:

But what if for a moment we disposed of mega design-visioning and went for something hyper-local and more micro?

Last week, I participated in an event in Moscow called Promzone 2.0: a think-tank, organized by cultural organization the British Council, as part of their pan-European Creative Cities programme, centered on generating ideas for the adaptive - and communally regenerative - reuse of a former glass factory called Flacon. (Interest: I have helped the Council design their project programme in Moscow).

For a day, I worked with a team of residents from Butyrsky district, alongside students, journalists and generally committed citizens who came up with a suite of things that they would like to see happen in the area around Flacon that would improve lives today but might also, over time, seed popular, new uses for the former factory site. 

The group came up with an inspirational programme - inspirational because of its range, refusing to drill down to the usual bento-box of public art and postage-stamp green space revivalism.

What's more, rather than choose some kind of internationalist, in-flight, Lady Gaga brand identity, the group decided to theme their program to Friendship - to personalize and counter public association of the area with the brutalist Butyrka Prison, the central transit prison in pre-Revolutionary Russia. 

This is what the group came up with (with the final presentation, in Russian, available here):

Some highlights:

• In the proposed cultural program was the refurbishment of a dead public building in to a small cinema showing old movies for older people living in the district.
• In the social program, two great ideas: a communal wash-house and a ribbon ice-track that would wind its way through the neighborhood.
• In the economic program, a service exchange initiative.
• In the environment program, a makeover of dull buildings in shades of pastel pink and blue and an apple feast sourced from local fruit trees.

Now the wristy cynics amongst you might say - "yeah right, David, but this ain't exactly the sort of thing that's going to pave the way for Google to relocate to the district. What's more it's frivolous - and this isn't the right response to such a bleak economic landscape."

In part, you'd be right. 

But think of this as a prospective sequence of small, highly local projects that, if choreographed in an effective, integrated way, might start to turn around some of the negative sense and sensibilities of the district.

With a small degree of public participation, chances are that by word of mouth, they would start to replace fear or disinterest in the pro-social with curiosity.

The projects would be staggeringly cheap to implement. They would attract a disproportionate amount of interest and the value yield for local people, government and investors in the area would be high.

Put another way, think urban gardening not regeneration - and reap the reward. 

First image un-sourced. Dalston Mill courtesy of cakehole. Images of Flacon event: David Barrie and British Council Russia.

Venture urbanism

Last week, our bridge in Castleford, Yorkshire was awarded the Palme D'Or - so to speak - of the U.K. urban renewal industry, at the annual Regeneration & Renewal awards.

The professional jury led by David Ubaka of Design for London commended the bridge for the quality of its design and the unusual and direct involvement of local people in its development. 

Six years ago, working in close alliance with local government, I led a group who asked people living and working in Castleford to nominate the ten improvements that they would like to see made to the town - and a new way of getting from the town centre to an area known as 'Duck Island' came out No.1.

Local people were instrumental to the choice of architect, design and many other aspects of the £4.5m ($7m) structure.   

With local government acting as convenor, project/technical manager and banker, local people were the client for the work - rather than just end-user consultee.

So yes, the award goes to the project team - Client: City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council, Designer: McDowell + Benedetti, Structural Engineer: Alan Baxter & Associates, Civil Engineer: Arup Water, Lighting Consultant: Sutton Vane Associates, Timber Consultant: Engineered Wood Products/Michael Berringer and Contractor: Costain Ltd.

And on the funding and support side, immense thanks needs to go to the local authority, English Partnerships (now Homes and Communities Agency), Yorkshire Forward, the Environment Agency, British Waterways, the Heritage Lottery Fund, SITA Trust and the project and cost managers of the broader initiative, MACE Group and Gleeds.  

But in the end, this is just set construction, cinematography and commendation all round for production services.

Because the Best Director slots need to be reserved for the three organizations who were instrumental to making the bridge happen: the Lock Lane Residents Association, Castleford Riverside Community Group and Castleford Town Centre Partnership.

Now before you reach for your hankie to wipe away a tear, can I just leave you with a thought.

Recession has stalled the momentum, value and yield of regeneration, renewal and construction in the U.K. and rest of the world.

With big investment gone from the sector, big projects are history.

Master planning will remain in some shape or form, not least because it evidences the fact that something major is going on or being thought through - but the writing has to be on the wall for that too. 

The flourishing of the Internet Economy suggests an age of direct communications, network relationships and more 'done with' than 'done to'.

The level of business insolvencies in the SME sector and the new relationship between the private and public sectors as a result of Government stimulus suggests a new dialectic of resilience and dependency.

So have we reached a moment of great opportunity?

A moment to develop and deliver small projects that build out in to larger phenomena?

We could follow the lead of Enterprise 2.0 and progress these projects in ways that involve ordinary people deciding who, what and when.

But this is about action, not feasibility, and choreography of initiative, not simply small-scale invention.

What should we call it?

Maybe start with "Venture Urbanism" (and find something sexier a bit later)? 

Innovating a London 2012 Olympic Park

According to last week's Architect's Journal, the team behind the London 2012 Olympics are searching for answers to some key questions on the legacy use of the site:

there are still large chunks of land in the park masterplan – some designated for temporary infrastructure and venues during the Games – that remain blank in legacy mode. According to one source close to the project, ‘there is a map doing the rounds with big white areas on it that no one knows what to do with yet’.

This is the map:

Ideas have been published to divide The Park in to five main quarters, each with its own residential areas and community facilities including marinas, schools, nurseries and parklands and other ideas are circulating, such as creating a programmed cultural space like Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. 

The vision is set by Baroness Margaret Ford, boss of the Olympics Legacy Company, who says she wants the future park to be beloved by Londoners in the same way Central Park is in New York.

Can I make two suggestions that might help turn us on?

1. Crowdsource it

It is one of the great mysteries of our time why, in an age of digital swarming, crowd-sourced finance, distributed innovation and devolved governance, one of the most sophisticated communications and service economies in the world limits itself, when engaging the taxpayer in urban development, to a palette of public meetings, opinion surveys and balloon-days-out with hands-on play.

These techniques are great at building consensus and photo opportunities but they don't raise confidence, create movements for change or exploit the real, long-term value-uplift of wholesale social involvement. They're also slightly hum-drum foreplay to the act of falling in love.  

The U.K. Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal [subscription required] has just published a paper by me with case studies that presents a broader, more distributed approach to the task of deciding what to do and where in a way that's about social innovation not war - in other words, crowd sourcing urban renewal (and if you want a copy of the paper, just email me).

In another space, a Policy Green Paper on localism called Control Shift published earlier this year by the U.K. Conservative Party, made great play upon the value of Direct Democracy, citing local referendums as an instrument for reviving civic life and creating a situation in which communities are once again trusted to be in charge of their own destinies.

Now decentralization may be the honey language of the political hustings and empowerment of communities may be Motherhood and Apple Pie vogue, but London 2012 offers a massive opportunity to maximize Direct Democracy and the taxpayer's say in legacy.

It's just the case that this needs to be prioritized: or if it's already going on, promoted. 

2. Utilize user-led design

Public engagement in urban development is often written off as letting the ill-informed natives in on an intense series of privileged architectural or economic investment decisions.

Of course there are technical and financial issues that are complex but a culture of closed professionalism can lead to asymmetries of information and a loss of trust that can scupper long-term sustainability and viability of an urban project.  

There is an ever-growing body of evidence that reinforces the value of user-participation and user-developed modifications in product and service design. It's known as Democratizing Innovation.

It's also almost a given now that contemporary commercial and social culture is about creating opportunities for people to generate their own choices and content, be it selecting pizza toppings or building a platform for people to upload or share something they care about and like.

This is not just about 'enabling culture' - but what Professor Eric von Hippel of MIT shrinks in to eight words: Users are the customers, they get to choose.

Within the Olympics orbit, are there people working with 'lead-users 'of public spaces around the world who have taken a strip of land and made it work more effectively for them and their community?

Are there teams of free-runners, park-keepers, urban farmers, mobile-phone swarming teenagers or basketball-players who are sick of multi-surface play areas being asked to design spaces that might, in time, not just host but also innovate mainstream, commercially-attractive pursuits?

The answer to all of these questions may be yes, yes and yes again.

However, the article in the Architect's Journal - even if it's half true - suggests that legacy development of the 2012 Olympic Park might benefit from not just new ideas but a process that shifts the gearbox a notch beyond an architect/masterplanner approach to the people. 

Some useful resources: 

Legacy Now - a website on the Olympic Games 2012 legacy. 

Hackney Council's 2012 Unit - their website carries a useful list of Government agencies and organizations working on the Olympics and what they are responsible for.

The London 2012 website carries a checklist of cultural projects that will form the Cultural Olympiad.

Images courtesy of clevercupcakes and Legacy Now. 

Crowdsourcing action against climate change

On 26th September, the town of Middlesbrough, North East England, will host its annual town meal.

At the event, people will feast on food that they've grown at home, in kitchen gardens and on formal or informal plots of ground across the town.

The Middlesbrough Meal initiative started in early 2007, supported by Middlesbrough Council, the U.K. Design Council, real estate developer BioRegional Quintain, Groundwork North East and local public agencies. 

Towards the end of 2006, service designer and former NESTA Creative Pioneer Nina Belk, artist and educator Debra Solomon of Culiblog and me put a call out to local people, asking them if they wanted to grow food and to choose their preferred location. 

Over the next year, over a thousand people in the town, clustered in local groups or connected by social networks, grew food in public places. 

They brought their early harvest to cookery classes called 'kitchen playgrounds', inspired by meal-assembly centers in the United States.

The final harvest delivered the base ingredients for a town meal, curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith, attended by an estimated 8000 people - and reported by the Observer newspaper to be part of a wider move for harvesting food as art. 

 

You'll find more on the project throughout this blog (and I should give it a rest, I know):

- on its relevance to freeing-up of inter-human communications

- on the value of master-planning productive urban landscapes in cities

- or the clue it offers to making additional money from the development of urban land

Now this is all terribly fascinating - or not (please keep reading) - but the real legacy is now starting to come through from a process that was consciously designed to trigger mass participation, sow the seeds of a more localised food supply chain and strengthen social ties - in retrospect very connected to Michel Bauwens and his ideas on Peer-2-Peer Collaboration.

A forthcoming report on Green Infrastructure by CABE, the U.K. Government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space, will outline some of the project's key legacies:

• 14 new allotments have been created in local schools
•  a training allotment has been set up in a deprived part of town
• three new food co-operatives have been set up in three districts of the town
• a social enterprise restaurant for 13-19 year olds is being set up to help careers in catering
• urban farming was at the core of a successful bid to the U.K. Government for what is now an £8m ($13.5m)  fund aimed at helping the town become a healthier place

This is not to brag. But to make some simple points about public participation in the transformation of the physical fabric and the quality of life of our towns and cities. 

Mass participation at the most local level can generate real, additional value.

Sometimes what matters is orchestration of human activity, not just its production. 

And sometimes it helps people to have a script - in order to write their own.

Images courtesy of Tubbyphunk.

The People's Supermarket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

We're hoping to raise thousands of members. 

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

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

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

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

 

Do you?

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

Please show link love and pass this post on. 

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Butetown: Building the community collective online

How can all of the excitement of sharing things on the Internet happen at the most local level?

How might online social media bridge communities and network local life in a collective way, much like an allotment site rather than a landscape of fenced private gardens?

Yes, there are community websites and local forums. Yes, applications like NetVibes. Yes, groups on Facebook. Yes, opportunities for networking via Ning.  And yes, lots of brilliant initiatives around the world that encourage digital activism, storytelling and new content creation.

But is there a process that can be rolled out over time locally that encompasses all of these things, brings them together, networks activity, pools interest, shares knowledge and could become a platform for collaborative local change in the future?  

These are some of the questions behind a digital design workshop that will take place in Butetown, Cardiff, in the Old Banking Hall, Bute Street,  July 24th 2009 (1000 - 1800hrs).

The workshop will pool the knowledge of people actively working on the development and application of social technology for social benefit.

It will be a practical session that maps existing online networks, matches them against offline communities and then comes up with a practical plan to implement what might be called - for a slightly hippy phrase - online community weaving. (with respect to June Holley and Network Weaving for inspiration). 

The event is being organised by Tom Beardshaw of Native Media, Jeremy Gould of Whitehall Webby and me. It follows research in to local internet use, analysed by Kelly Page of Cardiff Business School; and will be a backroom brainstorm in advance of an event in the Autumn which will invite local internet users to work with social media geeks to co-design a forward plan.

Butetown in Cardiff is home to 14,000 people and over forty-six different nationalities. It may be cash poor - but it is culturally super-rich.

There are many dynamic members of the community working together on renewal of the area and people keen to explore online media as a way of sharing information, experience and supporting local initiative.

Butetown has a Ning group, local people collect in Facebook groups, kids play games against each other online and there's busy file-sharing going on of music.

This is all great.

But the fragmentation of online social networking mirrors the fragmentation of real life - between new and old communities, diverse ethnic groups, communities of interest and different issues of concern.

If you believe in the power of communication and see the online space as a place that could be socially useful and productive, there's a job to be done to try and find a way to gather online activity effectively. 

And if you believe that a key to the future of public management is online public involvement, the digital space in a place like Butetown needs to be supported in such a way as to be ready and able to contribute to the social and economic planning of the area.

Please join our Google Group. Tell us there if you are interested in contributing to the event on 24th July. And look out for the hash-tag #digitalbutetown.

Digital Butetown is a British Council Wales project and part of a larger, pan-European initiative called OPENCities. And it is supported by igloo Regeneration, an investment fund managed by Aviva and described by the United Nations as "the world's first socially responsible property fund".

Street images of Butetown courtesy of  Paul Corcoran and Walt Jabsco.

digitalbutetown

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Building digital bridges

The U.K. Government has recently published Digital Britain, a plan that seeks to establish the framework for the roll-out and use of broadband technology in the country in the future.

Part of the plan is to establish ways and means by which the 'digitally excluded' can have access to the vast resources offered by the internet, rather than become the untouchables of the knowledge economy.

There's a huge amount going on in the field of Digital Participation just now - and some of the biggest shouts have to be reserved for the grassroots activism of Will Perrin, Talk About Local and the Digital Engagement network in the U.K., the ideas being generated by the Network Weaving group in Ohio, Australian academic Marcus Foth's work on how 'interactive systems' can be designed to support social networks in urban neighborhoods and, as ever, the guiding lights of Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater.

But as young people's digital engagement consultant Tim Davies writes in his post on the website of the Royal Society of Arts' Connected Communities program:

sometimes it seems like there can be a gulf between the economics focussed vision of Digital Britain, and the social justice discourse coming from grass roots and hyper-local social media and digital inclusion projects.

Meaning: there's a huge amount going on just now on the framework and supply side of digital inclusion but there's a gap in the middle.

Implication: if we don't sort out ways, means and opportunities to connect the dots of public involvement online, alongside boosting participation and access to technology, society and culture won't capture maximum benefit.

This is an image of a bridge that I helped deliver in Castleford, West Yorkshire. It's a major piece of new infrastructure for a small town that has won awards. Yes, it was designed by an architect. And yes, it was paid for by the state. But underpinning its commissioning and design evolution was a process that aggregated community effort and organization across the entire town and which spawned the formation of a new community group who acted as client and key driver of the bridge project. 

This is a composite image of an event held in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England in 2007 that was attended by 8000 people and was the culmination of a process through which over 60 different community organizations grew food in over 240 different spaces and places across the town.

A framework for participation and a narrative was established, then local people elected to get involved, then more and more people got involved, participating on their own terms and, in the end, their aggregated effort has had important impact upon the future of their community.

These projects demonstrate two things that I think are relevant to innovation around digital inclusion.

Both have been successful in generating a community return and triggering new external financial investment - the bridge has been central to Castleford leveraging over £200m ($320m) of new investment, Middlesbrough a new £4m ($6.5m) program linked to supporting a healthier town, with urban agriculture at its center. 

But more importantly, both have established mid-level platforms or enabled processes that have collected up existing local initiative, networked them, helped consumers establish a vision for their community and created a narrative that has allowed other groups and people to self-organize.

Now none of this is brain-surgery: those experienced in community organization and urban renewal have been doing similar things for years, boosted by the need to mobilize volunteering, the privatization of public services and the need for smaller towns and cities to construct business cases for investment around a mixed bag of diverse and fragmented land assets.

I have also posted on this theme quite a lot - forgive me! - linked to networking data-gathering, approaching development sites as 'ecosystems' or the value of middle-up innovation in local government.

So what's the relevance to Digital Britain?

• There needs to be acute focus pulled on building the community collective online, if what's been called 'digital maoism' is not to create another billion community activists, this time online, who are as disenfranchised as those in the real world
• It would be helpful for policymakers to link to those involved in community organizing in urban regeneration and renewal, since they have expert experience at creating and enabling what's known as 'bridging capital'
• Whether our romantic streak likes it or not, economic and urban policy nowadays is devolving to the regional and metropolitan level. This system demands localism but suggests that hyper-localism might benefit politically and economically from being joined up somewhere higher in the local political order
• Community organization in urban renewal and the delivery of urban policy benefits from a thematic, non-stove-piped approach to the design and delivery of public services. In digital participation, the provision, receipt and generation of news as a public service seems to be emerging as a key to delivering this. 

All of this leads to two questions:

• What's the infrastructure that can act as both frame and driver to digital participation in the future?
• What's the hook that will encourage people to use the Internet for positive actions or what Clay Shirky has called "online barn raisings"?

In urban renewal, the hook is the opportunity to contribute to improving your prospects and the world outside your front door.

If we believe that social technology can have social benefit, it might be useful to be led by this and think harder about promoting the immediate benefits of online existence.

On one level, humanity is already doing this, using Twitter to get the message out from the streets of Teheran and Moldova and then news networks and academics picking up on the use of digital media as an instrument of expression and freedom. 

But perhaps on a more mundane level, policy makers and digital practioners might think more on the line of networking existing online social media activity. 

If this effort were connected with the larger process of economic improvement of towns, cities and commuities, it's uninpsired name would be the phrase  'digital renewal'.

Images courtesy of knittingskwerlgirl, McDowell Benedetti & Partners and the Design Council.

A vision for urban renewal: write your own

All urban renewal needs a personal vision.

Cleaning my hard-drive yesterday, I found a slightly-cringey-"needs-a-chill-pill" creatif statement I wrote five years ago and shared with the designers and artists I was working with on an urban renewal programme.

Don't like the condition of the place in which you live?

I've blanked out the name of the place that I was working in. Now fill in the blanks to suit you, blow my stuff away and compose your own...

 
“I feel the hints, the clues, the whisper of a new time coming.” (Norman Mailer, 1956)

I first visited ________ in December 2002. On a rainy, overcast day, I was confronted by a landscape of vacant, windswept plots totally lacking in incident. Not here - relics of industrial archaeology. Not here – a morphology of landform that represented the erosion of history. Not here – the shadows on the wall, real or imagined, that represent ‘thereness’. Not here – surface, artifice or invention that represents habitation or expression.  What was here was the commitment of one woman – the Chair of The ________ Heritage Group – to see better for her town.

In a city like Monrovia, Liberia, identity is expressed in the built environment in two functioning traffic-lights, walls of banks pock-marked with bullet-holes and the declamatory billboard of a phoney gospel medicine-man.

In the empty landscape of the Sahara, identity is expressed through sediments shaped by wind and water in to towering urns, sleeping lions and pyramidal mountains of rock. Like Scalectrix track, a strip of man-made road drives destinies across its fate.

In the night-time streets of Nagoya, Japan, identity is expressed in knotted telegraph wires against a moonlit sky, the Hopper-like midnight liquor corner shop and the paedophile fantasy of a young salary man playing Rayman on his mobile.

Human beings know life through moments. I know mine through ten Liberian paramilitaries pointing AK-47s at my head, my wife hemorrhaging on a stainless steel table after the birth of our first son and the first time I sang aloud the first track from Adam and the Ants’ Dirk Wears White Sox.

All of these moments have a certain architecture – the tailgate of a truck, the floor of a carriage, the pony-skinned upholstery of a chair, Ghiberti’s doors – palimpsests cut in to the material of a life lived.

We expect places to declare equivalent moment. Sometimes, it can be profoundly human one – a place where divisive boundaries are crossed, experiences shared and differences mediated. At other times, it’s pompous, rhetorical and brilliantly superficial – something like the over-formal presentation of haute couture, “The Chanel bag with the inlaid silver chain” or “The Halter-Neck bikini with the fur-trimmed stitch”.

Sometimes, it’s monumental. At other times, fleeting. Sometimes, found. At other times sought or constructed: be it the doorstep painted by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch, a giant ad draped on the side of a faceless New York façade or artist Robert Smithson inserting mirrors in to the surface of the desert.

Not ________.

________ is like Tirana, Albania: a landscape of non-selective demolition that has witnessed seismic earthworks, above and below ground, without the legacy of an idea. It is a place full of ends of sentences and no commas. The aliens landed, The Earth Stood Still and what remains are edges of scorch marks known as buildings.

But what’s great about ________ is its foreground: thousands of people with attitude moving through it every day.

What’s great about the town is its underground: a road map of redundant mining galleries, voids of sand, Roman artefacts and an old trashed Mini lying at the bottom of the River Aire.

If the city is a microcosm of the world and the built environment is an essential feature of its personality, what is this world of ________?

All that I can say is:  Can you think of a place in the town that you’d like to have your picture taken?
 
Images: Pat Pat, Jooliah, Craig E. Laycock, National Gallery London.

YCN, 72 Rivington Street, London

On the telephone the other day, I ended up staring at this: 72 Rivington Street, the new HQ of design agency Young Creatives Network.

In the window is a display of piled books by Anna Lomax and Lauren Davies of Jiggery Pokery:

 
What's great about the location is that a genius(ish) has decided to turn the downstairs of the building in to a public space and offer a lending library. 

A few years ago, I worked with a group of community activists in the town of Castleford, England and turned this empty furniture store:

in to a white-walled, wannabe Saatchi gallery:

The refurbishment was supported by several public agencies, including Arts Council England, English Partnerships (now the Homes and Communities Agency), Wakefield Council and social welfare charity the Coalfields Regeneration Trust.

The space has since been enjoyed by thousands of people and hosted art exhibitions of work by artists like Cuban Carlos Garaicoa and local abstract painter Blue Wilson:  

The U.K. Government recently launched a programme to revitalize vacant retail units on recession-hit High Streets and turn them over to community uses. 

This is great. The space in Castleford cost just £25,000 (USD$40,000) to refurbish, has now been extended to a property next door and has a permanent member of staff.

But the important thing raised by YCN is that private, as well as public places and spaces can be turned towards hosting and delivering different kinds of public experience.

Some empty stores in the U.K. are now being turned over to community services, like policing and children's learning - and I'm helping a chef  turn an old carpet shop in to a co-operative, grocery store.   

But the idea of turning what could be any old foyer or exhibition space in to a public lending library is a brilliant one.

Main street recession, mutualism and pop-up anything and everything suggests these kind of practical, public-facing, can-do projects are about to have their moment.

Question is, who's brave enough to go the whole way, commit to a supposedly "post-selfish" age and say, turn a disused branch of Woolworths in to a shop, use the income to buy the upstairs and turn the entire building in to a Christiana-style Danish commune?

It's been done countless times before.

Tempted? Visit Wanna Start a Commune?

Images courtesy of Guy Archard and YCN.