City development and producing urban experience

Just as the success of a photographic image relies upon not just the choice of subject but also how it is rendered, so successful cities and neighbourhoods rely upon the 'how', and not just the 'what', of human experience.

How can a vibrant public life thrive in a place? Who creates it? How does it connect with audiences? And how does it make the poor better off?

Several urban renewal projects that I am working on just now with business partner Micheal Pyner engage with these issues, and often they address the same challenge:

Increasingly, this dynamic dimension to the built environment, the non-physical 'software' of 'place', relies upon the generation of 'urban content' and content that is 'extensible' - flexible enough to be able to change to adjust to new situations in the future, modified by changing or adding features.

And we're having to apply these ideas just now to all sorts of projects, be it starting up a new venture philanthropy non-profit in London, devising a programme of social investment for a large mixed-tenure housing project to the south of the city, advising the revitalization of the centre of an industrial city in North America, or helping young people in Tunisia foster a new civic life for their new democratic country.

One thing that's exciting to me is that this content creation no longer looks strange in the totality of my creative life, which includes working in television, an industry all about creating and managing content and experience over time. (And above is a frame from my most recent production, Edward VIII's Murderous Mistress, a documentary film that I've directed and will be screened soon by Channel 4 in the UK)

In television production, as in the production of effective, prosperous urban life, there's a balance to be struck between quantity and quality, and not least because consumers are tuned in to volumes of stuff, often at the same time.

To make it all harder, we live in an age when just under a thousand software applications are launched every day, designed to enable an electronic device to be useful beyond running the device itself.

But say internet marketers Attacat, the average app has less than a 5% chance of being used for more than 30 days; and only around 20% of users return to an app the first day after they download it.

So one thing that we're learning is that clients may commission us to create suites of new integrated urban content - a gamut of new 'urban apps' for growth - but we need to take care and discriminate, just as you'd discriminate in putting together editorial.

For as TV critic A.A.Gill warned in a recent, scathing review in the Sunday Times, effective media is not about the stacking up of ingredients, but how they are cooked: 

Factual television hands out facts like scattering seed. Rarely does it make bread.

Images courtesy of 1. Amanda Shadforth, 2/3. Brandon M. Elrod, 4. Telesgop/Channel 4, 5. Ethereal Gold, 6. Sandra Hagelstam.