David Barrie

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative

2009-11-14T13:35:33+00:00

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?

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
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
'Value' will be assessed on a broader basket of local currencies, over and above rental income
More time, attention and pride is about to be invested in local councillors and planning officers,
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
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

2009-11-02T11:00:06+00:00

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.

Links for 2009-10-30

2009-10-30T19:42:10+00:00

Kim Gordon Rodarte Exhibition Art [hypebeast]
Otis College-trained Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth's artwork on sale: Failing Lights, Noise Nomads, Dude War, and Pussy Galore.
Yes, Anastasia [Superqueen]
"The shape of Kristina is reminiscent of the infamous Yves Saint Laurent Cocoon wedding dress, and the scale-like gold satin, with those black appliques as decorations, bring the Fabergé Imperial eggs to my mind."

Access to News Wildly Unequal in U.S. [Washington Post]

Walter Isaacson, President of the Aspen Institute and a former Time managing editor: "Nations that will succeed in the 21st century are those in which citizenry has access to the free flow of information."
Promoting Food Security and reducing carbon emissions through the London Orchard Project [ERM]
"The particular vision of the London Orchard Project is to create mini-orchards across London, thereby developing communities’ access to local food now and in the future; contributing to carbon absorption; reducing the carbon footprint of fruit consumed in London and supporting biodiversity conservation."
And one of the first films I ever made (!):

The Late Show on 8vo Design [Cerysmatic Factory]

"BBC2's The Late Show, 1990; this was a ten minute manifesto/profile of 8vo Design. They were approached by the BBC to do a piece about English type-based graphics and it developed from there. It was organised around a series of statements/themes such as 'Simplify Design', 'Design Not Craft' and these were introduced by titles (designed by 8vo) and film of the 8vo designers themselves speaking the statements in a layered glass stage set. This was interspersed with shots of 8vo's work (such as Haçienda 4, and Haç 7) and footage of them talking about their work."

Declare Interdependence

2009-10-15T09:00:00+01:00

From Berlin-based creatives Lars Schmidt , Stefa Roth and their organization Arts-Ecology-Education comes a 'Declaration of Interdependence' - an 'open experiment' - call it a 'manifesto'.
The Declaration sets down a list of shared principals, of hyper-tolerant, anti-indulgent, eco-aware values that the authors suggest will or should frame our lives post-Crisis.
Is this visionary?
Yes.
(but be aware of the poverty and some of the woozy, manic, at times desperate atmosphere of some squats in London in the late 1970s/early 1980s that once shared some similar values.)
If you like the Declaration, spread it. You'll find it here, at culturalrevolutionaries.org, on Facebook and with images at Social Design. Arts-Ecology-Education can also be followed on Twitter - @aeeproject.

Links for 2009-10-12

2009-10-12T23:03:13+01:00

The Lady who Fell to Earth: Photoshoot by Tim Walker [Coȗte que Coȗte]
"The chances of a stylish intergalactic traveller landing in the British countryside are a million to one. But still she comes, dressed in a demure mix of tweed suits, traditional trenches and cocktail dresses..."
Living Together - A Modern Answer to the Commune [New York Times]
The rise of tiny "intentional communities" in the United States - or people house-sharing and living something approaching a communal, shared life - often "linked to outside interests like fixing bikes or, here in New York City, membership in the Park Slope food co-op."
Gareth Pugh Spring 2010 Ready to Wear [Hysteric Girl]
"This collection looks like a surreal gothic romance story. People with bird heads, pale gaunt faces with red eye liner, structured trench jackets, zippers, ripped and shredded garments, and stacked bead necklaces. LOOOOVE!"
Coney Island Sideshow has Guantánamo Theme [New York Times]
"Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!"
Douglas Rushkoff: An End to Movements [Arthur]
"The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out."

Venture urbanism

2009-10-04T17:18:07+01:00

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)?

Selfridges, Bergdorf Goodman and celebrating the social

2009-09-26T12:03:24+01:00

Selfridge & Co is the U.K.'s pre-eminent high-fashion retailer in the U.K.
For several years, it has sought to enrich cultural life by creating projects for its point-of-sale and direct marketing, commissioning or presenting work by visual artists, photographers, fashion designers and musicians.
Some of the most powerful, cutting-edge creativity today is linked to designing the social: creating places, experiences, services and technologies that celebrate, involve and empower people.

Think of microfinance, alternative local currencies like BerkShares, the recommender technologies of internet and mobile applications like Dopplr and Brightkite, the user-generation of video content sites like You Tube and Chictopia and the culture of sharing, not selling that drives online networking.
Then we live in an age when the President of the United States was once a community worker, rather than an oil baron; when celebrities like Jamie Oliver are admired for their social work, not just skill in the kitchen; when culture is created by a crowd swarming over a widget or a nation voting on X-Factor, not a loner locked in a room in West Hampstead or Manhattan or a late-might worker in the Academy of Fine Arts.
Are there ways in which Palaces of Miu Miu like Selfridges, Bergdorf Goodman or Barneys - emporia that help set the tone and beat of consumer life - might celebrate or reflect these new social values?

Take a look around and high fashion seems to be taking on some of the geist.
There's the direct populism of the likes of Star Wars-influenced, straight-to-Target designs of Kate and Laura Mulleavy at Rodarte.
There's the cult of the amateur teen fashion bloggers, their access to Fashion Weeks and the invitation of ordinary shoppers to meet stars like Christian Louboutin.
There are the High Priests of the industry like the Creative Director of Yves Saint Laurent and his new YSL Manifesto that appear to be not just positioning themselves but also seeing themselves as having a role in a more open - and open source - economy.
Take Stefano Pilati of YSL's comment in last week's London Financial Times:
If they take my manifesto, go to a vintage store somewhere and are inspired to make their own outfit, I think that's great. Then we've helped them dream a new idea of themselves. Isn't that the point?
And then there are stray eccentricities such as luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton commissioning artist Jeremy Deller to create a mobile vegetable garden for the opening of a new branch in the Westfield shopping mall in London.
You get the feeling that earlier debates on the role of luxury in an age of austerity - like the brilliant talk at the Hammer Museum back in February on Conscientious Consumption led by Sally Singer of Vogue - might be filtering through in to a new paradigm.
Let's not run away with ourselves since fashion and ethics remains a mix of oil and water when high street shops are filled with a confused mash of real and faux fur and cash-tills ring with sweatshop wages.
But how might these places - places that win vast attention and have an important influence - express the achievement and hope of a more social nation and inspire shoppers and Bobo-babes to express and enjoy a new, socially-minded form of luxe?

Innovating a London 2012 Olympic Park

2009-08-21T09:24:35+01:00

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.

Memories of doing time, courtesy of President Charles Taylor

2009-08-18T22:00:00+01:00

Over at Channel 4 News' website, foreign editor Tim Lambon writes about the time the two of us, reporter Sorious Samura and sound recordist Gugu Radebe were imprisoned in Liberia in August 2000 by former President Charles Taylor.
Taylor is now standing trial on 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law at The Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague - and you can follow proceedings at the outstanding Open Society Justice Initiative website.
This time of year is always slightly weird for me, as I remember the unbelievable goodness of my family, friends, fellow inmates, Channel 4, British Government ministers, Nelson Mandela and Jesse Jackson for personally interceding to free us from prison.
For sure, there are shocking memories of wailing prisoners in Monrovia Central Prison and fear of rape but then there are the inspirational, slightly surreal ones, like the Parliament of prisoners who would gather in the night to appoint imaginary Foreign Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in this corridor:
For someone who used to walk back home for hours from Adam and the Ants and Buzzcocks gigs late at night and write endless, awful poetry set to the music of Cabaret Voltaire, I am more than capable of writing maudlin meaningful (and dull) sonnets on this experience.
But fact is that there are too many fantastic, wonderful things going on to look back: from the innovation by companies who seek to spread and share prosperity, to the work of social and civic entrepreneurs who want to change the world, from the 1.5 trillion people who use the internet to discover and share knowledge, to the creatives who investigate, entertain and make something new - be it artists like Liam Gillick, farmer Wendell Berry or photographer Thomas Demand to the music of Goldmund and Ben Lukas Boysen, writers like Fiona Sampson, Murakami or Alexander McCall Smith to the design of Steven Holl, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, even YSL Tributes!
Images courtesy of Kathryn Cramer and the others unknown.

E-serendipity: Digital inclusion, social media and super-communicators

2009-08-11T10:00:00+01:00

In super jargon, doomsday for the internet comes as cyberbalkanization - or fragmentation of people in to like-minded groups.
Hellfire then rages in the idea that the net discourages serendipitous encounters - accidental, involuntary, on-the-fly, human interplays that allow for take-your-breath-away, progressive, life-changing moments.
In the words of Harvard Professor Cass R.Sunstein in Going to Extremes:

In countless domains, the Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.

In other words, welcome to cyberspace, a place full of spaces to populate but with lines tricky to cross, much like the Kosovo/Serbian border.

A passport to migration across digital territories is said to be collaboration between those online that tips in to large-scale community building: an activity flagged in a recent McKinsey paper as use of the internet that is neither mass content creation nor 'decision support'.
But a key barrier, as ever, is the fact that less than a quarter of the world's population are online. In the U.K., according to a presentation by Helen Milner, 23% of adults do not use the internet, 35% of households don't have access to the internet and 70% of people who live in supported housing aren't online.
But I'm confused.

Take Tiger Bay, or Butetown, an area in Wales that hosts the second poorest housing estate in the country.
36% of the area's 4500 residents live in council or assisted housing, 36% have no qualifications, a fifth of the population in 2001 were born outside of Europe and 62% of the children attending a local primary school receive extra support learning English.

We have just carried out a survey for a project called Digital Butetown in to internet use by 11-19 yr old students who attend the most prominent secondary school in the area: Fitzalan High School.
Over 1300 people completed a simple survey and results were analyzed by Dr Kelly Page at Cardiff Business School.
Here are the headlines:

92% of students said that they can access the Internet/Net at home

46% use the web on average for up to one hour a day from home

46% use community access points, e.g. internet cafes and libraries

88% of respondents said they owned a mobile telephone

49% said that they sent over 50 SMS messages a month

55% said that they had taken a photo with their phone

Favourite websites: YouTube, Friv and Google

Favourite social network sites: MSN, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace

The results suggest some obvious things.
There's a generation of users at the most local level who are web-literate super-communicators.
Access to the internet is a limited measure of the digital divide.
And if sowing the seeds of experimentation is important to increasing the uptake of participation technology and polarization of opinion is a risk in the new online economy, it may reap dividends to hyper-target the young.
But then the challenges pull sharply in to focus.
Opportunities need to be easy to find, forward and act upon.
And how to channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further an overall goal?
This stands to reason as one effective way forward for collectivized, non-polarized engagement - and was an important element in the success of the Obama campaign, according to a recent report by Edelman.
Some great first ideas on a forward process were raised at a workshop in Butetown last month. RSS-me to catch that update and join our Google Group for more.

Images courtesy of ornithes, cabiria8, photojennic and Paul Corcoran.

Crowdsourcing action against climate change

2009-08-04T09:50:15+01:00

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.

Liberating the lone blogger: some resources

2009-07-29T17:36:33+01:00

To quote the Canadian cyberspace maven Pierre Lévy in Collective Intelligence:
New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge.
Yeah, right. So?
Well, if we buy in to this, and accept that the challenge of the net is to find ways and means to create a fully transparent market for ideas, arguments, projects, initiatives, expertise, and resources, we need to set to work not just on enabling people to get online but also finding ways and means to liberate and connect the lone bloggers - or people locked in the pleasure or pain of this flaming tomb:

There's amazing work going on in the UK just now devoted to encouraging people to win access to the net and 'connect the connected'.
The work is led by some key individuals like Will Perrin of Talk About Local, Helen Milner of UK Online Centres, David Wilcox of Social Reporter, Dominic Campbell of Future Gov and the team behind the social media handbook Social by Social, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Initiative is fuelled by U.K. Government policy that's determined to broadband the nation, media organisations trying to realign themselves to "the people formerly known as the audience" and a bubble of evangelism for online social media.
But how to capture what Lévy called the potential of cyberspace to implement a form of computer-mediated civility?
How to connect the dots at the most local level - and for social good?

In the run-in to our online social media workshop in Butetown, Wales last week, a group of people shared examples of web-spaces that seek to liberate the lone blogger and aggregate content at the most local level.
Some were posted at the Digital Engagement website. Others at our Digital Butetown Google group. So I thought it useful to collect them in one place:
B13 - a site that aggregates information from blogs, feeds and other sources related to the suburb of Moseley in Birmingham, West Midlands.
Created in Birmingham - a site that links the city's creative communities online presence.
Digbeth is Good - a blog looked after by Nicky Getgood who uses subscriptions and searches in her Google Reader and then feeds them into the blog via postalicious.
Hylocal News Wire - created by Jon Bounds, "a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them".
Kings Cross Pageflakes - created by Will Perrin that takes feeds from local websites and scrapes sites without RSS
The Londonist - a journalist-written blog whose breadth of source material speaks to the idea of aggregating a diversity of grass-roots content.
Vetnorblog and Pitsnpots (Stoke on Trent) which both aggregate some content and look and feel like replacements for local newspapers.
Planet Balham - a site that 'takes' feeds from a district of South London and its surrounding area.
Everyblock - that combines photos, local government announcements, data and news items for 15 major U.S. cities.
Some of these sites speak to the idea of journalists as "community weavers" and the great American tradition of community media, digitally vitalized by initiatives such as the Knight Foundation's News Challenge.
But all establish and explore the value of aggregating content at the most local level and (potentially) look forward to a moment when, much like community partnerships in urban renewal, there may be an opportunity to network networks and create a local 'knowledge space'.
The link between this work and social and economic renewal is now starting to be captured in a group called Local Communities.
We've started to see what we can capture in Butetown with a search on Addictomatic and search on Netvibes.
They don't collect much intelligence though. There's insufficient supply of locally-generated content and the platforms are controlled by outsiders.
At our design workshop, we discussed a process by which Butetown might start to connect the dots and look to develop a 'hyperlocal' knowledge economy - something that I'll report back on soon but that also, critically, local net users need to decide to advance.
But in the meantime, power to the force that Lévy described as new proletarians, auxiliary workers devoted to effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts.
Sources of first two images lost. Network mapping courtesy of netmaptoolbox. Digital Butetown is an initative supported by British Council Wales, igloo Regeneration and the British Telecom Group.