David Barrie

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.  

An Architecture of Hope

Over the last few months, I've fallen in love(ish) with fashion website Chictopia and been lurking at networked fashion blogs like Devote.se.

These sites are brilliant.

Because whatever their commercial imperative and however cynical their wiring, these places are personal, bright and fun - and they network people and their passions smartly.  

I've picked up on the value of all of this in an article in this month's edition of design magazine Volume.

With a nod in the direction of the epic, the edition is subtitled Architecture of Hope.

In the magazine, I'm not confessing to a fetish for liquid leggings or multi-colored Heelys shoes - you'll be pleased to know - but sharing some first ideas on ways to capture and link the energy, commitment, enthusiasm and speed we invest in online social media to cities, their development and expression.  

Why bother? Because if you take a look around, you'll see cities full of extraordinary human diversity and energy turned in to identikit latte landscapes that are planned monotone or badged inert.

I've designed and am now starting to run two online social media initiatives in Russia (Moscow) and Wales (Cardiff) that try to link and apply the energy and brightness of one to the other. 

In Volume, I've set out the project in Wales, a nine-stage Road to Damascus in which

a multicultural community is not bounded by walls and windows.

It's a project that tries to engineer a process that allows for

improved flows and exchanges of experiences between people and existing groups and seeks to establish a platform for growth by supporting distributed activity and innovation. 

Here are some sketch steps in the project plan:

• research current use of online networks by local people on the net and mobile telephones
• identify sources of local knowledge on different aspects of the area's way of life, such as its environment, sports or shopping
• provide these people with training in writing and editing blogs and wikis
• create a homepage for the area that takes feeds from diverse digital content sources, such as personal blogs, photo blogs and micro-blogs
• encourage knowledge sources to upload and share what they know online
• share this web space with others and allow them to add to or edit its resources
• over time, re-position the site as a space to prioritize local issues and collaboratively action plan
• offer local government the services of this platform and its community to create strategies for the future public management of the area

Arjen Oosterman writes in his introduction to Volume 19 that:

The inclination to see the current crisis as merely passing and the tendency to say "take cover, then we can get on with it" is great. Yet every day makes is less likely that this will be sufficient.

Arjen suggests that one answer is to advance contemporary practices of communication development.

He's right.

Advancing communication development in cities is a precondition to enabling a new architecture of hope.

Images courtesy of crazybeautiful and VanityMale at Chictopia, "the people's fashion destination".

Beauty matters. But experience is all.

Thanks to Alexander Ostrogorsky, I've an article in the March 2009 edition of the Russian design magazine Interni.

The theme: coworking, citizen participation and the future of cities. (and forgive the slightly 'blobby' writing style - but it's for translation.)

In the next few decades, cities are going to become more expensive, complex places and many will shrink.

Money will become a scarcer commodity and as sustainable development and the internet advance, we will need to create and capture assets of urban life other than land, such as energy, food, communications and social relationships. 

In this world, collaboration between people and organizations to create new kinds of urban experiences and economies will be valuable: and co-working crucial.

Co-working is already taking place in many different ways in Russia and around the world. People are creating new ideas online. People are working with professionals and the authorities to design new public spaces and services. And people are working together to create new social enterprises that make a social, not just a financial profit.

There are few barriers to entering in to this social economy. All people need to be able to do is see value in working together and recognize that the design and delivery of small, highly local things can make a big difference.

In my experience, the key feature to a successful, socially entrepreneurial community is one that has a strong sense of identity, purpose, is prepared to experiment and, in the end, not stand in isolated opposition from other communities or the authorities.

But the challenge is to create an architecture within which divergent people, projects and organizations can flourish. Co-working needs to have a larger narrative so that it happens at a scale that is economic and outgoing. Sometimes this can be achieved by designing and establishing loosely-linked networks of initiative. In the future, the internet will unlock many of the challenges.

The outcomes of these efforts need not be aesthetically beautiful. Beauty may dignify but aesthetics is not all.  Lots of drum and bass music is “ugly” – but it doesn’t stop you dancing. Lots of alcohol is bitter – but still delicious. Lots of places are ugly – but they can be overwhelming exciting. Beauty matters. But experience is all. 

Urban Farming: not a load of old bananas

Last November, the city of Detroit introduced a Neighborhood Stabilization Plan, a $47m plan to accelerate renewal of the housing market in areas most severely impacted by foreclosure and abandonment. 

A key element of the plan is alternative use of land - and as Bloomberg reports, Detroit is already one step ahead as: 

close to six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 500 ``mini- farms,'' demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive.

One 'farm' is Birdtown Community Garden, where private land and vacant city lots were turned in to a place for growing food: 

Over here in the U.K., foreclosure is growing but not on the same scale as in the United States and the national social security system is a key safety net.

But recession is putting pressure on housing market renewal, private sector finance of renewal and the boss of the national urban renewal organization has now acknowledged that we need to find new ways of financing urban renewal.

In other words, if we don't innovate fast, the country is to be scarred with more and more of this:

 
Empty land.

And more and more of this:

Empty shops.

Three weeks ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that he would bring forward £10billion of spending planned for public works such as school and hospital repairs, environmental projects and IT schemes to provide employment.

In November, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced a 45% tax rate on earnings over £150,000 from 2011.

What are those "environmental projects"?

What's to be the return on public investment for those in the new higher tax bracket?

Increased use of land for food production - a local boost to local foodie culture - seems a practical, political no-brainer.

I mean how irresistable is this image of a food growing site in an Italian city?

As opposed to this....

....a manicured stretch of barren English housing estate.

But there's an additional thought.

For the last year, I have been running a programme of advice to house-builders and providers of social housing on how to meet U.K. Government targets on climate change.

At an event last week, Brian Mark of Fulcrum Consulting made it clear that a key route to delivering viable carbon-efficient housing is to super-size development and introduce community energy systems.

And Peter Walker of EcoCentroGen decribed releasing capital to support the additional cost of low carbon and renewable infrastructure by applying a rent to the present and future provision of energy to development sites.

What if a significant proportion of the land on which a development is to sit were given over to food production and you could project a yield of fruit and veg that promised residents a considerable saving on their weekly food budget?

What if against that saving - as well as utilisation of the site's waste - you charged rent for use of the land - but not two groats and a shilling - but say £600.00/year/plot?

What if you bundled this with other services that could be 'rentalised', such as broadband provision?

Now this is no recipe for turning England in to Chianti - and any way why should we? - but this does start to become a route to seeing urban agriculture as less of a shampoo-free, urban eco-hugger zone, and more about bundled services that extract new value from land.

Do this on a city-wide scale - especially in places where there is a surplus of land laying derelict and with next to nil value - and doesn't it start to turn urban farming in to something way more than touchy feeley bananas?

Moscow, Nokia and harnessing the power of citizen participation

I've been in Moscow the last few days, designing a project that seeks to foster a spirit of social enterprise and help the city become a better, positive and even more appealing place.

A scary peak of the visit was a lecture to an audience of 400 courtesy of the Center of Contemporary Architecture. You can find it here.

It's up to Moscovites to decide whether their city is enterprising or appealing enough.

And up to the Government to decide on the role of social enterprise in its new commitment to human capital and innovation.

What I know is that I met an astonishing cast of people who'd turned old factories in to arts centers, created successful internet start-ups, busy welfare organizations, dance companies and creative schools.

All of these people have pursued their dreams and aspirations, acquired specific knowledge of a specific field, turned it in to either a job or way of life and created their own unique micro-climate.

In Silicon Valley, 9000 kilometers away, the head of Nokia's research center, according to reports in the Financial Times, is working on ways in which the mobile telephone can tackle the problem of forecasting the weather.

It's unparalleled in history that we now have this distributed computing platform - 3.3bn mobile citizens worldwide.

The challenge for scientist Henry Tirri is to find a way to capitalize on the possibility of humans, equipped with phones that carry a battery of sensors to relay changes in physical conditions over a wide area.

The challenge is in part expressed by the change in the weather you might experience on a 60-mile road trip from Marin County to the depths of Silicon Valley:

There are 186 micro-climates from Sausalito to San Jose.

And Nokia's first move is the Mobile Millennium project - an initiative that aims to recruit up to 10,000 motorists in the San Francisco Bay area to report on traffic conditions via GPS chips in phones.

Moscow. Silicon Valley. Mobile phones. The head-teacher of an innovative school. What's the connection?

It's simple: but the answer is only available if you engage with another two questions...annoyingly!

How to tap and pool the knowledge of the dispersed entrepreneurs of Moscow and use that experience and understanding to enable others in the City to follow their own interests and passions?

How to aggregate intent, map the micro-climates and change the weather?

One answer has to be to create third-party events and devices to pool knowledge and strengthen weak social, economic and cultural ties.

But another is to recognize that the entrepreneurs in Moscow, like the folks on their phones cruising the Bay Area, are all data-gatherers. 

Both are harbors of knowledge.

And in every move they make they are gathering information and experiences that in aggregate could be of value.

Throughout the world, public authorities are inventing or using 'vehicles' for assembling and extracting value from land assets.

They take the form of public-private partnerships, 'special purpose delivery vehicles' or the opportunity every four years to host the Olympics. 

What vehicles could we create to maximize and capture the value of social and creative assets?

In the field of city development, how can we create public-private partnerships or renewal corporations that are about assembling people, ideas and enterprise, as well as land and structured finance?

Urban renewal: approaching 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.

What is a transformational designer?

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.