David Barrie

Investing in enterprise close to home: Wild Blue Cohort

The great American engineer, industrialist and pioneer of venture capital Ralph Flanders once said, “We cannot float along indefinitely on the enterprise and vision of preceding generations.” We need to invent. We need to renew. And we need to find smart, logical and productive means by which to construct and finance a new prosperity for our world.

This is one inspiration behind Wild Blue Cohort, a new network of private investors that has started up in West London, one of the most prosperous areas in the global city, home to many talented business people and entrepreneurs and the greatest concentration of CEOs and CFOs beyond the pages of the Financial Times.

Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham and Westminster are great centres of enterprise in London, be it scientific innovations born at the university Imperial College, global brands locally HQ'ed brands, such as Harrods, Virgin Group and L'Oreal, or as the birthplace of lifestyle and consumer empires such as the retailer Cath Kidston and estate agent Foxtons.

However, in recent years, because of an extraordinary rise in the value of property and the globalisation of banking and financial services – hotels, real estate and personal services are big employers in the district of Kensington & Chelsea,for example - the barriers to entry for start-up or growth enterprise in the area have risen dramatically. As a result, the fertile ecology of entrepreneurial inclusion that tends to lead to the growth of business ideas threatens to atrophy.

As independent neighborhood ventures are replaced by global brands, expensive boutiques and over-priced junk-shops, and financial institutions continue to focus upon their capital ratios and remain averse to lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, you have an environment that is no place to start or grow a company. Problem is, as acclaimed urban writer Jane Jacobs once put it, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

In 2013, I decided to put in place something that might start to turn the tide. I was born and brought up in Kensington & Chelsea and for over a decade I have founded for-profit and non-profit ventures that have sought to animate, innovate and newly capitalise local economies.

While people fret over the gentrification of global cities and technology is applied increasingly to urban life, it seems important now to look ahead, grasp the personality of cities 'after the storm' and innovate new soft infrastructure for that time - assuming that we'd prefer not to live in places that look or feel like the shopping, dining and entertainment areas of airport terminals, which at times does seem to be where we are headed.

It would also seem worthwhile to embrace the fact that over the last few years, in part because of the rapid progress of places such as Silicon Valley and Cambridge, places associated with technology transfer and its commercialisation, an approach to economic growth has begun to emerge that values clusters of specialist investors who identify with the local, not just the global.

Alongside the advance of global, institutional and venture capital, private 'angel' investment has grown rapidly around the world, with individuals preferring to invest their money within a 50km radius of where they live, tending towards, as one writer has described it, "Instagrams not Hyperloops"

The popularity and efficacy of this move towards local private finance coincides with other business ideas.

Looking at the impact of technology and globalism on employment, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, has emphasised the importance to job creation and the direction of regional economies of “tribal leaders...a self-organised, unelected group of talented people”.

Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, has pointed to the value of the local in a global, virtual world and “the huge competitive value that an evocative sense of place can confer on ambitious brands”.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, linked the 'liveability' of a place with the coherence of the local business community in a recent interview with Fortune Magazine: "If we have strong networks of people working together to build local commerce, it can drive people to want to stay and live in these neighborhoods, and it builds a strong underpinning for the whole nation."  

Supported by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, I have teamed up with local resident and business advisory specialist Deepali Nangia. Deepali is a passionate advocate for business development, entrepreneurship and the use of private wealth for productive, profitable purpose. (She is also exactly the kind of new international resident of London, who wants more from her city than luxury shopping and artisanal chic.)

Deepali and me are now growing a community of people, many who are seasoned investors and entrepreneurs, almost all of whom live in West London, who want to invest in early stage or growth companies that have an existing relationship with the area, or wish to do so in the future.

Founder members of Wild Blue Cohort, our new angel investment network, include experienced angels, individuals who have started up, built and exited several successful enterprises, and many international professionals. They work in banking, fund management, insurance, venture capital, healthcare, retail, technology, biotech, media, marketing and the food industries.

When it comes to investment, members of our network have no sector bias and typically consider early stage and growth capital investment opportunities that offer a minimum potential of 3-5x return on investment in 5-7yrs. They seek opportunities that require up to £1m in debt or equity finance at reasonable valuations, with priority given to enterprises that are eligible for Enterprise Investment Scheme or SEIS tax relief.

On applying to become members of Wild Blue, individuals are required to comply with Financial Services legislation and certify themselves as high net worth individuals or sophisticated investors. They also need to complete a non-disclosure agreement.

Through our network of members, in-house research, direct deal sourcing, referrals from investment groups and our extensive relationships with national and local organizations, Wild Blue identifies entrepreneurs and investment opportunities to promote within the group.

Wild Blue does not offer investment advice but prior to sharing opportunities screens them for several indicators, including their local value: perhaps the entrepreneur is resident in the area, the venture operates in it or, with an injection of capital and know-how, it might grow its market and create new employment for the area.

In Spring 2014, we ran our first presentation event. Seven firms pitched. One won investment from a member of Wild Blue. A second deal is close to term sheet. We have new pitch events slated to take place in September and December 2014, as well as February 2015 and our membership is growing fast, an average of one new member per week.

Growth economies need to encourage imaginative and progressive entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas for successful enterprise.

Angel investors are a good source of finance and know-how for entrepreneurs who have exhausted their first major round of funding – normally themselves – and offer capital appreciation in return for high-risk, relatively illiquid, direct investment securities.

As a successful, San Francisco-based veteran financial intermediary once wrote, “When entrepreneurs can raise money, they become credible.”

Similarly, when cities foster new communities of private investor and find new ways to apply their wealth and talent to local business, they sow the seeds for a new generation of prosperity and vitality - and they do it in a place that matters to all people, whether rich or poor, a place close to home.

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David Barrie is Founder & CEO of Wild Blue Cohort. Deepali Nangia is Investment Director. 

If you have a business that you would like members of Wild Blue to consider, please contact deepali@wildbluekc.com. If you would like to become a member or have another enquiry, write to me: david@wildbluekc.com.

The start-up of Wild Blue Cohort has been seed-financed by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. Please follow us at LinkedIn,Twitter: @wildblueKC or Facebook.

This post is based upon an article written for the technology quarterly Erly Stage Magazine.  

Images: I have lost the sources for all images, other than the first: Hayt86. Apologies but also thanks to their creators.

Building offline and online communities: a date with destiny

We now have a website for our work, designed by the super-talented Los Angeles based designer and illustrator Ophelia Chong. Please let us know what you think.

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The social activist, co-founder and CEO of Purpose Jeremy Heimans, in a recent talk at the Royal Society of Arts in London, shared his ideas around 'movement entrepreneurship'.

Heimans placed special emphasis, when working with people to advance change, upon fostering shared destiny - a value that anyone working with communities needs to pay special attention to just now.

In public culture at the moment, especially those aspects that involve technology, innovation and brand marketing, fostering communities and collectives of people is en vogue.

In the technology and innovation sectors, forming new communities is behind mainstreaming ideas such as open-source and crowdfunding, and success in it is central to the high valuations of social media platforms.

The nuturing, aggregation and curation of communities of people - and not their management - mirrors the values of an age that appears to prioritize the publisher, rather than producer, the mediator and not the boss.

One thing that’s becoming increasingly apparent to me is the extent to which this gathering of communities takes a laissez-faire attitude towards leadership, relying upon an emergent approach to destiny.

Problem is that however powerful the commonality of interest of a community, however wise the crowd or effective their collaboration, time and again just now there seems to be a private shareholder cashing in on the labor of all, coupled with a corrosion of the public good.

While pushing for an open, democratized approach to assets, a vaccuum seems to appear around leadership and in that vaccuum, value is privatized. Behind a rhetoric of sharing and common good lurks the selflessly selfish.

For the commodification of the idea of open-source, it's worth reading computer scientist Jaron Lanier's Who Own's the Future - or listen to Will Google and Facebook Destroy the Middle Class, his fascinating conversation on KCRW with Matt Miller of the Washington Post.

For the privatization of the 'social web', watch the recent lecture by blogger and technologist Anil Dash on The Web we Lost at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

For corrosion of the public good by 'market triumphalism' and its contribution to inequality in society, read Michael Sandel's brilliant book What Money Can't Buy.

And for the ultimate lack of accountability of curators to the curated, remind yourself of the role of internet hosts and platforms in the data economy in The NSA Files at The Guardian newspaper.

Take a look at our new website and you'll see that building communities is central to what we do in urban development - be it innovating new for-profit and social ventures, enabling effective investment by real estate companies in cities or delivering initiatives that make cities great places to live and work.

I am slowly but surely seeing everything through a lens of shared destiny – in part because the lack of it in Western popular culture appears to so subvert the power of good and its collapse in countries like Egypt, Syria and Turkey is proving so costly.

My fixation is also because, over the last year, in the fourth dimension of my creative life, I've been producing and directing a series of three documentary films for BBC Television on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte with the historian and Daily Beast columnist Andrew Roberts.

One of the reasons for Napoleon’s success was his exemplary skill as a leader to instil in the people of France and her armies a sense of common purpose, experience and faith.

When Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French on December 2, 1804 in the Cathedral of Notre- Dame de Paris, he said:

I swear to maintain the territory of the Republic in its integrity...to respect and enforce Equality before the Law, political and civil Liberty...to govern only in accordance with the interests, the happiness, and the glory of the French people. 

And when he abdicated on April 5, 1814, he said in his Army Orders:

A soldier shares the good and evil fortunes of his General, his honor and his religion … The Emperor’s honor will never be in contradiction to the happiness of France.

While no paragon of virtue, Napoleon appreciated that, in a world populated by humans and driven by competitive advantage, destiny could not be left to accident, luck or some kind of Mystic Meg osmosis.

Destiny needed to be cultivated and shaped through leadership - that's how Napoleon secured the values of the French Revolution forever more - and communities built for more than just inventory, or database management.

Images courtesy of 1. Ophelia Chong, 2. 5 Inch and Up, 3. Life in Travel, 4. Gary Pepper, 5. Back2Back Productions

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.

Pop-up and Pamper your city

Here are some gorgeous images from the very first stage of an evolving, long-term economic development initiative that we have been advising, as creative lead, in Tikhvin, Leningrad Oblast, Russia.

Working with a talented team from Streka Institute for Media, Architecture & Design, and consulting one of Russia's largest, privately-owned investment and industrial companies, I had a simple idea...

To develop investment in the local economy, and start to transform its retail offer, I thought that an effective, first 'play' might be to broadcast to the town, and wider investment community, the pleasure which local people take in certain categories of life.

Being practical: create a series of public events which enable people to indulge in the pleasure of hair, beauty and fashion and smoke out the town's silent army of bedroom beauticians and their white label chignons :) - then photograph it all, for future printing at a super-large, urban billboard scale.

Last month, Alla and Yaroslav Antoshchenko-Olenev from Delaruk, a creative company based in Saint Petersburg, developed the idea and turned it into their brilliant own, by running a first event in Tikhvin under the banner of Design Reforma - not sure how this translates, but my first thought became something like Summer House of Beauty.

Here is a small sample of a larger set of images taken at the event - and big congratulations to Delaruk!

In urban design, people might call this kind of activity 'condition making', 'tactical urbanism' or some kind of first stage consumerist Action, looking to 'pluralize' urban space (eek!).

But Caitria O'Neill, founder of social software start-up Recovers.org, is a truer sister-in-arms, when she wrote in a recent post at Code for America: "We don’t call it “social innovation” or “civic activism.” We call it “getting shit done,” and we do it every day." :)

Authorship of images not sourced, but courtesy of Alla and Yaroslav Antoshchenko-Olenev & Design Reforma/Delaruk. And big thanks also to globe-trotting hair stylist Peter Gray who showed me, years ago, the astonishing creativity of hairdressing.

A place is an experience, and not a brand

At a recent conference on The Art of Placemaking at NLA, London, the air was thick with talk of “branding” and “curating” real estate and "programming" opportunities in the built environment for people to socialise.

The event was timely, since the making of successful places is a key objective of recent reforms to the planning system in the UK and key feature in an high-profile review in to the future of the High Street, or Main Street.

The National Planning Policy Framework emphasises establishing a strong sense of place to create thriving local economies.

And the Portas Review promotes the imagining of new social places that give a sense of belonging and trust to a community.

Now no-one, not even a caveman, could contest the value of public gathering spaces to human experience, but there are issues that stand in the way of delivering the inclusive, life-changing experience and collective meaning that the idea of place implies:

• most landowners prefer to screen out undesirables from the property that they own or manage
• convention is that public spaces are designed by professionals who then offer it to the public for adoption, and
• corporate profit tends to favour behaviours that are predictable and disciplined

Problem is it is the very unplanned-ness of a space and its unintended uses that often generates delightful, memorable and meaningful pleasure.

What's more, the principle of exclusion is at odds with popular culture in an age of internet economy, which maximises opportunities for people to share, like and make their own spaces, relationships and experiences.

How to create places in towns and cities that overcome these issues and develop a real estate that engenders the culture of the virtual?

Several strategies just now seek to address the question.

In the urban designer’s toolbox, there's the animation of public spaces by creating community facilities, green spaces, places to grow food, market days, nights and work hubs.

Progressive urban planners suggest more diverse use of the built environment, including the decommissioning of Main Street as a retail centre and its re-commissioning as a social one - a return to the idea of an Agora which inspired the ancient Greeks and urban professionals in the U.S.A. in the 1970s in their revitalisation of downtown districts.

While experts in retail markets look to the recasting of the real and virtual through experience shopping or click and collect, a place in which “Shops will become glorified showrooms”, according to Jeremy Newsum of the Grosvenor Estate in a recent article in Property Week (£).

One strategy that we are committed to in our work - and is featured in the new book The Temporary City, a collection of thought-provoking new creativity in placemaking from around the world - is to apply to the built environment some of the techniques that make online spaces 'sticky' for millions of consumers, and approach the creation of place as interaction design.

Another is to borrow from the playbook of documentary media producers, who create a framework for a story, populate it with content and then edit and re-edit intended and unintended content to arrive at an experience for the public to enjoy - and then, if they want to, codify as a brand or franchise.

Both approaches feel appropriate to an age of ubiquitous content, of increasing consumption of increasingly customized personal services via smartphones, and technology that changes constantly our relationship with everyday products and services in ever complex, interactive ways.

What's telling is that if you apply a more interactive, content-led approach to the built environment, you quickly arrive at some pretty traditional, lo-fi ways to turn a hum-drum space in to a place.

Here are three random inspirations and ideas.

Take a look at Chicago's Waste to Profit Network, a virtual facility which helps businesses identify by-products and waste from one business that can be used as inputs by another. It establishes a public space as a network hub for production and consumption that takes place in diverse geographies.

What if we created an equivalent experience by networking activities, cultures and tastes across the dispersed geography of a city?

What if we took the public spaces of a major world city and turned them in to the venue for a *giant* Silent Disco, with different spaces in different neighbourhoods acting as different 'rooms' or 'servers' for different sounds?

Kind of a whole-city version of the Mobile Clubbing craze that popped up several years ago - here in London's Tate Modern back in 2007.

Then take a look at fashion designer Marc Jacob’s Facebook page.

Last year, Jacobs, a passionate owner of two Bull Terriers, invited subscribers to his page to upload pictures of their dogs, some of whom accessorised their pups with his products.

Not a big deal, but makes me think: what if we created public places which invited people to bring something to the space and leave it there?

Not exactly a new idea, I know: think notes left on devotional statues in places of worship or in the cracks of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Then take a look at U.K. broadcaster Channel Four's award-winning TV series Hugh’s Fish Fight.

This was an old skool story of investigative, campaigning journalism that exploited diverse media platforms to cultivate - and more importantly be able to project itself - as a successful movement for change.

The popularity of this, and other media causes, begs an obvious, naive question: how about creating places with the express purpose of enabling human expression, Urban Commoning and Occupation, spaces that support collective socialising, rather than deter it?

To create place, we need to provide opportunities for people to exchange goods, services and emotion.

Some of this is to do with built infrastructure and deregulation. Some of it is to do with central programming of things that we can enjoy communally.

But if we are to look to public space to generate bigger social returns of belonging and trust, we need to maximize opportunities by which people can call public space, even privatised public space, their own.

This is in part about nurturing and nudging informal uses of public space - about making them 'sticky', not controlling them, about finding ways in which users can generate and manage their own pleasure.

All of this could be a free-for-all, a mess.

It could start to look like the faeces-out-of-the-window existence of eighteenth century England - and note the pastiche design of the current vintage window displays of London department store Harvey Nichols.

There's an equivalence in the disorderly personality of the multi-coloured townscape of a place like Guanajuato, Mexico or Willemstad in Curacao.

And architecturally, there's inspiration in John Kormerling's Happy Street in the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai.

This is an idea of place that's not defined by hygenic, brand-directed, open plazas but the richness, complexity and excitement of the present - the experience of NOW.

This is a dimension to the Art of Placemaking - and you know what, it's (kind of) artless.

Images courtesy of:  1. Immo Klink, Disturbing Factors (2007) via Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art  2. Candy Chang 3. American Airlines via Trendwatching  4. Yvan Rodic (Paris, December 2010)  5. Jan Chipchase  6. Dean Ayres  7. ce matin, un lapin  8. unknown  9. Style Crusader

Survival technologies

There has never been a more important moment for action and not words in social business and social innovation.

Reductions in Government spending, rising unemployment and social inequality make the design and delivery of effective new services that benefit the public a priority.

In developing those services, it is worth tattooing to wrists the cautionary advice of Richard Rumelt,  professor of strategy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and published in his recent book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: the broadcast of intent does not make it happen.

And for guidance on roles and responsibilities, mine a Golden Nugget in the observation by US broadcaster David McKillop - repeated in a speech by TV executive Jane Root last year and relevant to other industries, not just the media - that networks find the winds like sailors, while producers build the ships.

Here are several projects that we have helped build over the last few months - and were characterised provocatively by designer Jakub Szczesny of Centrala at the Europe Culture Congress, Wrockław, as survival technologies.

We see each of these ventures as a Tiny Epic, a small local social 'widget' that enables people to associate with one another, share and exchange experiences, skills and commitments and so create new value. 

 The People's Supermarket

The co-operative supermarket in London that we co-founded in 2010 will soon celebrate its eighteen-month anniversary.

Since opening in May 2010, the business has created twenty new jobs, stimulated over 10,000 volunteer hours and and its innovation is now starting to mainstream, with a link to the NISA-Today product supply network.

In just a few weeks time, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts will publish a How to start your own Supermarket manual that we've written - with all of the pleasure, pain and secret ingredients that we have learned and used to deliver the new social venture.

Shiregreen Neighbourhood Challenge

This programme that we designed with Sanctuary Housing to develop community initiative and involvement on a large housing estate in the Shiregreen district of Sheffield, Yorkshire is now being delivered.

A massive number of events have taken place in the area since Spring 2011, events designed to support neighbourliness and encourage people to declare what they are good at, like, and might want to do for or share with others.

A new neighbourhood website - Shiregreen.net - is now up and running, edited by local people and designed to promote the talent of residents.

We are developing an estate catering service and food production hub with talented Mum & Dad cooks, staff working in school kitchens, food growers, micro-entrepreneurs and restauranteurs in Sheffield.

And we're working with local residents on Make Do & Mend, a possible new social enterprise in which people who live in the area and have practical skills can fix stuff for others.

The SKY 1 HD Great Tree House Challenge

This is architectural designer Charlie Luxton and engineer Alex Shirley-Smith, Treehouse Architect at The Greendream Company.

Next month, Sky Television in the UK will broadcast The Great Tree House Challenge, a series of three programmes featuring their involvement in an initiative in which three local communities have created an ultimate Tree House for the enjoyment and benefit of local people.

We supported the development of the initiative which forms part of the broadcaster's Sky Rainforest Rescue campaign and for us has been a great opportunity to help develop informal and unusual social spaces in neighborhoods.

You can see the treehouse at Lochcarron in the Highlands of Scotland here.

Portobello Giving Project

As journalist Tyler Brulé pointed out earlier this month in an article in the Financial Times, super-gentrification is an emerging issue in the development of urban neighbourhoods around the world.

In parts of London like Notting Hill Gate and Portobello Road, neighbourhood shops and services that have helped define the personality of the area for many years are slowly being replaced by global brand boutiques and luxury residential development.

The market can't be 'bucked' but we feel passionately that by leveraging local creative and financial assets, areas like Portobello Road can and will retain their differentiated personality and so competitive advantage.

With this in mind, we have been starting to work with local residents, business, public and private sector organisations in the area, such as the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, on the development of the Portobello Giving Project, a possible new 'citizen finance' service in which wealthy, talented people who live in the area act as business angels and advisors to existing or new entrepreneurs in the area.

To call these ventures survival technologies is both compliment and insult.

Yes, they're cute. Yes, pennies in a world of €440bn European Financial Stability Facilities; dust in an age of China Inc.'s acquisition of European industry.

However, these sorts of small-scale ventures are effective ways to promulgate confidence and value - and strangely, in certain lights, their practicality and localism reveals them to be, rather than comic book saviours, some kind of re-versioning or new age of Asian-syle community capitalism.

Images courtesy of 1. Annette Pehrsson 2. Haarala Hamilton Photography 3. Sanctuary Housing 4. Balnacra Arts 5. Author, with illustration by Yahnyinlondon (Amanda Wright).

 

A Coalition of the Bold

"Consultation", "participation", "co-design" and "community" is the growing mantra of responsible city development - and politically en vogue.

In recent years, the development sector in the UK has started to embrace this as 'community engagement': a process of talking to local people about the nature of a possible development.

Sometimes the process is practised as if it were "empowerment" but in practice, it is product marketing or the sampling of public opinion to support product development and the winning of regulatory approvals.

This business to business transaction, masquerading as consumer choice nicely chimes in with one of the earliest moments in the development cycle when investors can capitalise upon their asset.

But if the purpose of engaging people in development is to generate longer-term markets and capital receipts, a return to taxpayers, as well as institutional investors, and if the first port of call for a rioter is to torch property - as happened in the UK last month - the development sector evidently has a social contract to fulfill beyond talking to people, both as a protective measure and strategy to win a 'licence to operate'.

Understandably developers want to minimise their costs. By and large, 'the people' are not their clients, or prospective tenants. And in essence, they are entrepreneurs who need as few barriers as possible between them and the generation of profit.

Problem is that while the riots were about theft and opportunism, there is evidently a group of people out in the cold, untouched by conventional 'public consultation', 'grassroots enabling' or the benevolent custody of local government - the tools in place that are supposedly designed to make our cities more equitable.

How to bring these people in to the process?

Countless statutory initiatives in the UK just now seek to hardwire 'ordinary people' in to the process of urban development.

But just as one gets excited over a new spirit of shared value, tempers calm with short-termist engagement of the public in the name of 'place-making' and the reluctance of the real estate industry to commit to community investment in a hardcore way - for instance, accepting broader social allocation of finance raised by a new local tax like the Community Infrastructure Levy.

"Community" remains a subset of design and communications, rather than a front-line currency of economic growth.

How do other advanced economies deal with urban failure?

A progressive strategy in the United States has been to establish community coalitions - and it would be game-changing for a real estate developer or local authority here in the UK to seek to foster this approach in their involvement of the community in development. 

If this were a guiding policy, what would be the headline actions? 

• Foster an alliance of urban activist organisations that campaign for human rights & equity in the life of the town or city
• Support this alliance and create an organisation/Foundation that would be funded by a consortia of stakeholders who have an investment in the safety and security of urban life - and that would include the property sector
• Draw this coalition in to the formation of local plans by local government
• And on big schemes, promote direct negotiation between this coalition and real estate developers and the agreement of a series of local benefits, in return for a non-contested application for building approval

Think of this as a Coalition of the Bold, where the real estate developer/owner is a civic entrepreneur and part of the solution, rather than an organisation whose assets need to be defended by police when society implodes.

Where's the evidence that this approach works?

There isn't any - except that stable cosmopolitanism, open mindedness and a genuine sense of participation in public life consistently feature as key ingredients in 'smart', successful, innovative economies.

Images are sourced from the Net but no credits available

 

 

 

 

Tahrir, cities and a new enterprise of public place

The Limits of Cyber-Revolutions was an outstanding article in a recent edition of New York Magazine on how Public spaces, not virtual town squares, are still the places where uprisings are decided.

While writer Eric Goldwyn acknowledged that a robust Twitter following and widely followed Facebook group may have changed the way that insurrections like the Arab Spring are built,

It takes physical space to connect revolutionary passions with daily life and, more important, the broader population.

When citizens unite in a square, a park, or along a scenic beachfront to demand reform, it creates an impossible-to-ignore spectacle that draws the attention of anyone nearby, not to mention those watching at home.

Of course, spectacle is critical to the role of public spaces in making social change and social value - be it Tahrir Square, street protests in Athens or (dare I say it in the same breath) the Royal Wedding. :*

But Eric's point is that physical public spaces in cities remain the place where people often choose to make life-changing decisions.

We make history on the streets, while the content of our lives and political, social and creative concerns are created elsewhere.

So what? Here's what.

Over the last decade, massive slugs of public and private investment have been made in creating key attractors in cities, like new museums, plazas, parks and gigantic Super Size Me works by artists like Anish Kapoor.

In the light of events in Tahrir Square, the impact of austerity measures in Europe and the possibility of a big slowdown in China, these investments are starting to look less like the 'catalysts to change' that they were marketed as.

And they look more like what they were always were: objects in pursuit of competitive economic advantage, the confidence of a global arts/Hyatt Plaza investment elite and expressions of order that offer solid comfort (in the face of the disorder of change).

But now that we're reminded of the power of the streets and values other than house price inflation, is it time to start to mainstream a different offer and use for public space in our cities?

How about seeing public space as less of a function of the tourist or global cultural economy and more as opportunity spaces of our own, places that tap up personal and local political, social, creative and intellectual feelings, rather than the kind of me-too, read-it-once content of an in-flight magazine?

Curate public places as amusement arcades, 'museums without walls', outdoor class rooms or a place for forests of tree houses from which to see the surrounding cityscape.

Create places where people can give stuff away - at its most esoteric, books left on a wall or clothing left on a seat for others to pick up.

Conceive of an infrastructure for our cities that mimics all the diversity, multiplicity and energy of the online landscapes we inhabit and encourage public spaces to be used by multiple groups, for different types of relationships and experiences?

Of course urban economies need to continue to chase and serve global corporate tenants and capital who (it's assumed) tend to prefer manicured, clean and high culture views from their windows.

But cities in advanced and emerging markets also need to devise ways and means by which they define themselves - and not let competitors define them.

If cities want to foster new intellectual, property, knowledge, product and service innovation, they need to reach for a new playbook and review and sweat their own assets.

They need to cultivate public places that allow us to reach for adjectives like "useful", not just "beautiful", "personal", not just "professional", and nouns like "playground" and "enterprise", rather than expressions like "it looks nice but please get out of the way, I'm late for my meeting". :)

If savvy public or private investors aren't able to create spaces that offer more than neutral, minimalist 'platforms' for conventional entertainment, it's up to creative and social entrepreneurs to support new vitality in adjacent neighborhoods or districts - a vitality that's so attractive, sensitive, human and socially conscious that it spreads like a contagion through the city.

Some of this is already going on in cities like London, New York, Moscow and Barcelona, spilling from the back-packs of a global creative elite.

But how are we going to turn this urban entrepreneurship in to a strand of popular culture - especially in towns, cities and countries where people don't believe that they have an investment in the public realm?

There may be a clue buried in the closing sentence of an article by Raul Juste Lores of Folha de São Paulo in a recent edition of Monocle:

Innovation is mandatory if you don't want to be just a commodities exporter.

Images courtesy of 1. Rosemary Sabet 2. WBUR 3, 5 & 6. Yvan Rodic 4. jmenard48 7. Jan Chipchase 8. Deep in Vogue

Percent for Innovation

For all of the trauma of recession, when it comes to urban innovation, be it people forming a new collective enterprise or socially producing goods and services, we're living in exciting times.

In the UK, we've shifted from the boutique outreach of street-level projects like the National Gallery's Grand Tour of 2007 to the Cineroleum, the adaptive re-use of a derelict petrol station in London as a temporary cinema by a collective of artists and designers.

In the delivery of public services, we've gone from industrial age 'command and control' Government to a moment when the Whitehall Innovation Hub, a unit of the National School of Government, the blue-chip space for the training of civil servants in the UK, can say in a report that

Innovation in the public sector flows through a viral model...The enormous challenges society currently faces...demand systemic innovation, new narratives, new ways of working and, more importantly, more appreciative atttitudes to people and their potential.

In earlier miserabilist post-punk times, this view of human creativity would have been derided as happy-clappy niceness and the warm, well-meaning, collaborative politics of the wig-wam.

No more.

Look to the United States - and New York City in particular - and you can't help but notice an orgy of modish socialist-real collectivism.

Take just two examples.

First, the weekly Fixer's Collective at the Proteus Gowanus Gallery, a former box factory on Union Street, Brooklyn.

Billed as a social experiment in improvisational fixing and mending, the Collective is a group of local handy-people who are waiting to fix stuff for you, like textile artist Maya Valladares.

At the same venue, there's the Brooklyn Brainery, a programme of four-week collaborative courses in which participants all read up on a topic, then share their findings with the group, much like book clubs.

 

Recent classes include The Life of Che Guevara, How to Survive Winter, How to Make Irrational Decisions - and I am sorry to say that the forthcoming course on World Dumplings is full.

At a time of street riots and demonstrations across Europe, this kind of progressive, DIY, local self-help starts to feel like a relation of pacifist activism, a form of carnivalism I blogged on here and what English philosopher Simon Critchley has called tactical frivolity.

But it expresses other things too.

It supports the idea of the city as a creative place that maximises its citizens' potential and also feels like early adoption of a make-do mutualism that cities and communities will need to prioritise over the next two decades, as the number of economically active people - i.e. those paying taxes - decreases.

But how to make this kind of thing more common?

How to help collective enterprise become an integral feature of urban life, rather than a trendy exception to the rule?

One tactic worth looking at is to turn the culture industry in to the libertarian industry and take inspiration from an element in the recent transformation of our cities, a phenomenom that has triggered and mirrored shifting values of culture and self.

Today, whether you like it or not, art is an important feature of the public realm of towns and cities and it has played its part in turning soulless business districts or burnt out downtown districts in to more civic, animate places.

The ancient Egyptians were good at it. Ditto Napoleon III. But there's little doubt that the prevalance of public art across the world today is in no small way thanks to a programme that started in New York City over twenty-five years ago - and if there's a will to mainstream make-do mutualism, I think that it's worth looking to for model behaviour.

In 1982, as New York emerged from financial crisis, the City Council led by Mayor Ed Koch passed legislation called Percent for Art that insisted, in effect, that one percent of the budget of a new or reconstucted public building be devoted to art.

Since that time, almost in silence, the Percent for Art programme of The City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs has produced over 200 works of art for the City, for public spaces, parks, schools, hospitals, fire stations, juvenile detention centres, even sewage treatment plants.

This is an astonishing sculpture in the Queens Family Courthouse that was completed by Ursula von Rydingsvard in 2003.

Suspended five floors above the atrium of the building, the sculpture is called katul katul, derived from a Polish children's game that mimics the rhythmic kneading of dough.

Also in the borough of Queens, here's a large-scale sculpture on the roof of the 107th Police Precinct that was completed by Alice Aycock in 1992.

The work is a weird combination of military-industrial and Harry Potter, made up of various pieces of painted grey steel and a large disk, inspired by a medieval astrolabe.

Around the disk are fragments of doors, steps, wheels, and a vessel-like form from which light emanates at night - or did back then.

For over twenty-five years, the Percent for Art programme has made art accessible and visible to the public in New York. It has spawned copycat schemes throughout the USA and Europe and played an important role in rendering the city as a more civic place.

But does Percent for Art also offer up a model for stimulating other kinds of creativity in cities, beyond flickering lights and ribbons of polyster?

If one percent of the budget of new or reconstructed buildings in our cities were given over to promoting or seed-funding new social ventures, it could light the touchpaper for a new culture of civic enterpreneurship.

Call it Percent for Innovation.

Value for money?

Yes, if you attach value to the power of sharing and vibrant, local, independent, sociable enterprise.

No, if it's happy-clappy nonsense to think of the city and its development as a platform for social achievement.

Images courtesy of 1. Tristram Sparks. 2 & 3. The Cineroleum. 4. the hanner. 5. Proteus Gowanus Gallery. 6. The New York Daily News. 7. Brooklyn Brainery. 8. Jeremy Keith. 9. Yvan Rodic. 10. Wally Gobetz. 11. Ursula von Rydingsvard. 12. Newyorkology. 13 & 14. Alice Aycock.

And thanks to Ben Denton, Director of Investment at First Base Limited, an urban development and investment company, for making me think about this the other week, rather than zzzzz on the 06:37 train from London to the city of Sheffield. :)

Growing the people

 

A big challenge to development in the UK just now is how to empower entrepreneurship.

How to do this when economics and culture is fixed on either large congolomerates or niche players, enterprises often rooted in monopoly, acquisiton, cost-cutting and exclusivity?

Urban renewal has a role to play in answering that question - and not least because it is central to the structuring and re-structuring of local economies and offering people opportunities.

Problem is that in recent years, urban renewal has gone either Extra Large, concentrating on developing super-sized slugs of real estate with large anchor tenants, such as supermarkets, or canape scale, opting for the grassroots development of small opportunities, such as the improvement of a dead park, empty building or creation of kitchen gardens. With little in-between.

Where is the motherboard in urban renewal that acts as an intermediary between the raw materials and end product?

Can sites and their development unfold in a way that builds markets, communities and new networks of independent social, creative and community enterprise?

How might we plan and develop our cities so that they are pro-social, respond smartly to feedback and second, third and fourth order effects and are more than a framework, with services and people super-imposed?

Earlier this year, a group of real estate developers, designers, urbanists, business people and representatives from government came together in Glasgow, Scotland to workshop the progress of a large development site on the northern fringe of the city called Speirs Locks.

Commissioned by Architecture + Design Scotland and the Scottish Centre of Regeneration, the workshop brain-stormed a 'social action plan' for Speirs Locks and involved both its landowner - the Glasgw Canal Regeneration Partnership - and existing tenants, including Scottish Opera, National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

We produced a short documentary film of the event - part of a larger programme of work that included workshops and intensive interviews with the local community, local social enterprises, creative enterprises and organizations with a stake or share in the development of the site.

The audience for the film: local government workers and development managers in the public and private sectors looking to set in motion a more creative and sustainable approach to the making of towns and cities.

 

Key participants in the film (other than me with, er, a Simon Cowell twang):

John Thackara - design writer

Roy van Dalm - cities consultant

Diamaird Lawlor - Architecture + Design Scotland

Donna Brooks - Glasgow City Council

Steve Dunlop - Director Scotland, British Waterways

Gary Watt - Development Manager, ISIS Waterside Regeneration

Dougal Perman - Radio Magnetic (Alternative Music Internet Radio)

Tom Beardshaw - Native HQ (social and digital media consultant)

The event was joined by creative and social entrepreneurs from Europe, supported by the British Council Creative Cities programme.

Its progress was also 'scribed' by service designer Lauren Currie of wearesnook.com:

Architecture + Design Scotland have posted a copy of the film and a report on the initiative here.

You'll find an essay by me that summarizes some of the key creative conclusions and recommendations off the back of the project here.

Please show the film some link love.

It's devoid of futuristic rap-rave to make it easy to share. :-{}

Images courtesy of 1. Yvan Rodic. 2. Michelle Lord via Ballardian. 3. Tom Beardshaw. 4. Glasgow Canal Regeneration Partnership. 5 - 8. Architecture + Design Scotland/wearesnook.com.