David Barrie

Real estate and community investment: why bother?

2012-01-12T12:58:50+00:00

In a recent interview in Fortune, the chairman and CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz shared key advice on corporate investment in social causes:

Companies should not have a singular view of profitability. There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility...The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money.

In real estate in the UK, social responsibility is particularly important just now, as the Government introduces the Localism Bill which gives local people more influence over what gets built in their neighbourhood and intensifies the duty of developers to consult with them.

But prior to the legislation coming in to force, for every real estate professional who is quoted in the media as committed to a new and authentic form of social contract, there's at least one other for whom social stuff appears to remain red tape, a barrier to profit that requires a process of de-risking.

Now it may always be difficult for the trader/developer to justify investment in social infrastructure when the ultimate benefit may accrue to their successors in title.

Also, the real estate sector retains some of the most charitable individuals in the business world - like Gerald Ronson of Heron International, said in this week's Sunday Times to have donated more than £30m ($46m/ €36m) and raised £100m ($153m/€121m) for good causes.

But if the bearings of the industry are to change towards a more progressive form of social responsibility, one step beyond charity or the risk register, it is only going to be because of a judgement around value - so we thought it might be useful to share some positive facts that we hope will act as a cheatsheet.

First, there's the business environment.

Corporate social responsibility is en vogue just now, as regulation obliges companies to meet more social targets as part of their licence to operate, the state looks to the private sector to fill gaps in public expenditure and some companies start to conclude that it's cheaper and more effective to pay for solutions to social problems that challenge profitability.

Second, there is a scattered collection of useful evidence that we gathered recently for a real estate developer in the Netherlands who hired us to advise them on the practical, effective delivery of investment in the social welfare of people living and working on their estate.

Returns may not match putting money in to rare earth metals :) but this random collection of indicators does start to picture total value.

Social Impact Bonds: 7.5-13% p.a. return to social investors on reduction of reconviction rate [2011, Social Finance, Overview of the Peterborough Social Impact Bond]

In a £2.5m housing development, £473k was saved in costs due to community engagement [2010, Sustainable Development Commission, The Future is Local]

£1 invested in community development by local authorities generates £3 of social value [2010, New Economics Foundation, Catalysts for Community Action and Investment]

Sustainable urbanism’ delivers higher densities and “developer value” uplift [2007, Princes Foundation/Savills, Valuing Sustainable Urbanism]

Local estate agents in South Glamorgan attribute house price rise from £11k (1990) - £95k (2006) to community asset ownership & proximate development [2006, DCLG, Community Assets]

Value to City Council of transfer of leasehold management of community centre to local community association = £43k [2009, Birmingham City Council Community Asset Transfer in Birmingham]

Value of community participation in public space management in UK = £16m-33m p.a. [2003, Green Space report]

Engagement of young people leads to reduction in complaints, damage/vandalism and higher levels of community satisfaction on housing estates [1998, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Working with Young People on Estates]

Now there's a great old American expression that "if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."

Perhaps with more facts like this, we can start to marginalise the corporate social responsibility that looks, moves and talks like responsible business but has all of the authenticity of, er, a duck in a shooting gallery at the fairground.

Images courtesy of illustrator Eva-Lotta Lamm on Instagram. #crappycoffeeart

Survival technologies

2011-11-24T20:03:30+00:00

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

2011-09-07T10:35:57+01:00

"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

2011-06-18T11:46:52+01:00

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

Facilitating altruism

2011-04-04T11:38:42+01:00

A priority for all organizations just now is to help people to help others - and backfill holes in the provision of public and private services, not simply earn a Fast-track ticket to Heaven.

Around the world, governments are encouraging people to give their time and skill, not just cash to others - in the UK, the recent Giving Green Paper presented four devices for doing this: the National Citizen Service, Community First, Community Organizers and Volunteering Infrastructure Programme.

And technology is helping to extend the repertoire of giving from donations of cash to the collection and distribution of a broader basket of currencies - be it services like Twitter that give people the opportunity to share knowledge, Kickstarter that links philanthropists to projects and causes, or Ecomodo, a website that enables people to swap and share objects and skills.

What's emerging is a more distributed Gift Economy, one that is reliant less upon the billion pound drop of a Mark Zuckerberg or Warren Buffett and more on the creation of a local social network and market.

We are helping clients design and deliver several projects just now that seek to facilitate this kind of altruism, or microphilanthropy.

The projects are often business solutions to a social problem. Their personality and proftability is linked to the 'collective-creative drive' of cities and their communities. And often, they seek to trigger an up-tick in the development and performance of the local economy.

Here are some of the principles we are working to just now, mindful of a time of rationed debt and the need for advanced economies to push at developing community capitalism:

1. Give donors something back

Members of The People's Supermarket - a new social venture in London founded by entrepreneurs Arthur Potts-Dawson, Kate Wickes-Bull and David Barrie (that's me!) - earn savings at the checkout and a right to direct the venture in return for their donation of a membership fee (£25/€28/$40) and four hours labor each month.

2. Give donors choices

Participants in the Shiregreen Neighbourhood Challenge - a new initiative supported by NESTA and designed by us with Sanctuary Group to support the development of a large housing estate in Shiregreen, City of Sheffield - will be able to earn reward points for participating in civic life and convert them in to goods or services, via a new 'community bank'. Depending on how generous they feel, people will be able to choose to donate their reward to a local cause.

3. Give donors opportunities to yield value from dormant assets that they hold

Currently, we are advising somewhereto_, one of four national programmes of the Cultural Olympiad and a legacy initiative of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games that seeks to help young people find the spaces thay need to do the things that they love.

In effect, somewhereto_ is a service that seeks to encourage owner/managers of empty offices, industrial workshops, parks, gardens, community centres and other kinds of real estate to donate their assets for occupancy on an interim basis to young people with enterprise and ambition.

Benefits to the donor include eligibility for tax breaks and an increase in the rentable/rateable value of their asset.

4. Give donors opportunities to see their 'gifts' as part of a longer-term investment strategy

For two years, we have been supporting the start-up of a new media enterprise in Cardiff, Wales called Digital Butetown - part of a larger role creating and managing a programme of community involvement and investment on behalf of real estate investors igloo Regeneration.

Digital Butetown is a new social business led by local arts organization Community Helps Itself which will train local people in digital media production and computer programming.

For igloo, to support the start-up of Digital Butetown is in part to invest in local media culture and the supply of services to prospective tenants of Porth Teigr, a new creative industries neighbourhood that igloo is developing in joint venture with the Welsh Assembly Government.

Some of the lessons that we're learning from assisting the progress of microphilanthropy:

In an age of disposable time not money, we need to invent ways in which people can not just help others but also win a hard return on their investment.

It makes sense to recruit momentum at the grassroots, since it's hard to see how the generosity of the new immigrant rich from Russia, India and the Arab world - as (bizarrely) described in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper - will reach down in to neighborhoods.

And helping people to help each other is less about relying upon Good Samaritans and more about creating virtuous circles of supply and demand.

It suggests that corporations and states who want to trigger altruism need to foster progressive local economies - not just enlist armies of people to rattle tins - and this will require new ways and means to capture public attention: a new 'storyworld' for a new Gift Economy.

Images courtesy of 1. Tartolom 2.hiserhott 3. Haarala Hamilton Photography 4. Sanctuary Group 5. Livity 6. Author 7. Unknown.

Rewarding Localism

2011-01-18T21:08:57+00:00

Taking a collaborative, community-based approach to real estate development is about to become a requirement - and not just a nicety - of city planning and placemaking in the UK.

The UK Government has published legislation that it describes as a new era of people power, a Localism Bill that will change the way that development is permitted in towns, cities and neighbourhoods and create new opportunities for communities to exercise their rights - and there's a useful cheat-sheet by Colin Buchanan here.

Once the broader programme of reform of the new Administration takes effect, it will become clear whether this is a part of a redistribution of power or a form of devolution of dependency.

In the meantime, the new legislation is a call to creativity and innovation to address certain questions and there are two in particular that we're working with a client to get ahead of just now:

How best to reach people?

And how to sweeten the deal and make them an offer that they can't refuse?

As ever, part of the answer rests in incentive and reward: and there are two ways in which we're proposing to engage with this in a programme of community participation that we've just designed.

First, by using online social media.

There are hundreds of tools available just now that seek to foster online involvement in offline civic or local affairs - and there are some resources and precedents in an earlier post, presentation and the work of an outstanding UK initiative called Social by Social.

Yes, you can reach people through exhibitions, leaflets, surveys and public events but to ignore online media - and online social media in particular - is a bit hoop and stick when 82% of people in the UK use the Internet and almost a quarter of their time is spent exchanging knowledge and experience in online communities, social networks and blogging sites - a virtual real estate brilliantly captured here by Brian Solis of Future Works:

A key challenge is to create a service that both invites curiosity and facilitates altrusim.

And it seems common sense also to root that service in some basic human motives that we have learned from successful community organizing but that Beth Kanter and other inspirational experts point up consistently as a key reason why millions of people across the world use services like Facebook and Twitter - and as a routine, not just as a product:

Making new friends
Keeping up friendships
Succumbling to social pressure from existing friends
'Paying it forward'

A second strategy that we've also just recommended is the introduction of a system of rewards.

Considering that the last thing that people tend to like on their doorstep is new urban development, are there new ways in which we can enable YIMBY ("Yes in my backyard") movements - like People Plan Toronto, Great City in Seattle or Liveable Places in Los Angeles?

Also as much as we might like to think that people rise up spontaneously in support of a local cause, is there a way in which participation can be rewarded and that reward match the interests, schedules and lives of people, rather than simply call upon the scare resource of goodwill?

The rewards system that we have just designed seeks to address the fact that people want recognition, achievement, personal benefit and early evidence of outcomes in return for getting involved in local affairs - and there is no reason why you couldn't launch a local 'rewards card' for community participation.

Places to start on this...

Dr Peter North's book Local Money. The ideas of dunhmumby, creators of the Tesco Clubcard. And some of the incentives at work in Ruby's Bequest, an alternate reality game developed by the Institute For The Future in California.

Images courtesy of 1. Allie Brock 2. Maffashion 3. Brian Solis 4. Jennifer Snyder.

Four years on...

2010-12-30T13:31:18+00:00

Tomorrow will be the fourth anniversary of this blog. 229 posts! :-o

Spinning back through 2010, I can see that I've been blinkered, obsessing over how city development and real estate can benefit from the participation of citizens and how unused property assets, new media, optimism and service innovation can be useful instruments of change.

None of this is developed in splendid isolation but by supporting the live projects and programmes of clients and their end users and helping them realise their investment and creative ambitions.

One thing seems to unite these people, an understanding of the advantage of addressing the space at the centre of this diagram:

So for 2010, a big thanks from me to clients and end-users of my work.

In the real estate sector, to investor/developers igloo Regeneration, Cathedral Group, Sir Robert McAlpine, ISIS Waterside Regeneration and Sanctuary Group.

In the public/charitable sectors to Livity, Legacy Trust UK, Glasgow City Council, Plymouth City Council, Architecture + Design Scotland, Groundwork UK, CABE and British Council Greece, Poland and Russia.

And in the non-profit, media and educational sectors to The People's Supermarket, HAN University, Fresh One Productions/Tonic Media, Wall to Wall and Channel 4 Television.

Thank you! With donuts all round...

But before hitting the final end-credit for 2010, I just wanted to return to the blinkered-ness of this blog.

229 posts on, it remains *impossible* for me to work the design of the Typepad platform and so signpost properly to content here beyond urban development and innovation.

And because one or two people have asked for a steer, here are some links to posts that might open the box (as well as certify me as slightly insane):

Please follow these links, share them and poke about in other places.

Thanks so much for subscribing - and have a great and

Images courtesy of 1. Not known. 2. Yvan Rodic. 3. Buffalo Records. 4. Square America.

Percent for Innovation

2010-12-14T10:23:37+00:00

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

2010-11-09T23:07:41+00:00

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.

'Open source' place-making

2010-11-04T15:21:01+00:00

How to deliver a Big Society - a place that acts as a catalyst to and inspires grassroots local activism - in the most bureaucratic, statist and controlled public space of them all: the built environment?

Here's one answer: 'open source' place-making.

This is an approach to urban development that centres on the making of an implementable 'social action plan' first - not a master plan - is inspired by the autonomy that many people want from their lives and seeks to create places through an unfolding process of interaction design first, architecture second.

You can download an essay by me on the idea, its roots and implications, with case-studies here.

Strapline: 'a collective approach to the development of cities in an age of Big Society, digital media and social enterprise'.

In its most naked form, 'open source' place-making is about taking a development site, establishing a very basic planning framework for it, triggering population of the site and then through its unfolding occupation form a forward plan for its development.

In effect, run an alternative to the standard planning and development process, enable occupation of spaces and places that's a physical equivalent of what's known as digital swarming and free real estate developers from having to be generalissimos of a war-game to theatrical managers.

A second dimension to open source place-making is to innovate the management of a neighbourhood, prioritise opportunities for tenants to benefit from short leases, self-build and self-management of the way in which they relate to buildings; also support different terms of trade and promote internal markets in goods and services on a barter basis - perhaps even follow a model by which tenants provide services-in-kind to external grant funders of a site, in lieu of rent.

A third ingredient in 'open source' place-making is to prioritise commercial occupancies of sites that service residents and other tenants on a collaborative, shared-risk basis.

No problem reserving a place for a branch of Zara or Jamie Oliver's Leatest Eating Experience but why not actively support the formation of co-operatives, mutuals and social enterprises on site, entities that tenants can direct, benefit from and that help build community?

There's no need to fight shy of enabling this to happen at the centre of the consumer economy - see the new co-operative corner shop a group of us have recently founded in London, The People's Supermarket.

What's more, there's no need to be narrow-minded on the terms and conditions of business responses to social problems. All of us have problems that need attention - but not all of them are dire.

For those who suffer from a lack of thrills: do a deal with Ferrari or local Scraphead Challenge types, turn an empty warehouse in to a showroom/playground and you could incubate a cluster of engineers.

For those who want autonomy: cluster their talents and provide an opportunity for them to excel. Say if they are good cooks, offer them vacant space on site and encourage them to form a new micro-food enterprise.

In other words, be a talent scout, recruit and capitalise upon its momentum.

On one level, 'open source' place-making is asking the development sector to open its mind up to a different way of thinking about design and site assembly: what tech people call interaction design.

Start to see physical space as a form of sovereign real estate - much like a web page - who's personality unfolds through the involvement of users - and see activity on site as a sequence of what geeks call transient interrupts that develop, die or mutate in to profitable enterprises over time.

Create a development framework that is less command-and-control zoning and more a theme that enables an early idiomatic understanding of the space that over time, through public engagement and interaction, acquires a personality and resolute business case.

On another level, 'open source' place-making is a plea: to slim down bureaucracy, open up development to taking an equity stake in the customer and reflect the fact that in an internet economy, people are loyal to data and experience and 'modal switch' between platforms; what's more, maximise opportunities to win a return on investment in certain markets or market-makers: such as social enterprise, independent retail, consumers who live in online, as well as offline spaces, and those who want autonomy.

Where's the capital receipt?

The pragmatic answer is that there's nothing stopping landowners from holding on to the most lucrative bits of real estate that will generate the highest short-term return.

The better answer is that to outsource development sites as enablers of change is to create and capture new (and higher) values.

Why bother with this advanced potion making? :)

Earlier this year, the Social Investment Task Force reported that investment by Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Funds in the UK was running at an estimated £764bn.

At a similar time, the BBC reported that one in every four and a half minutes spent by people online is on social networks and blog sites.

Meanwhile, urban development has wound right down, with producers and consumers of land either deleveraging or starved of bank credit.

You don't need to be Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve to realise that in this climate, it might be profitable - as well as more effective - for the real estate and renewal sectors to follow people and their money more resolutely in to online and social markets, and start to behave like those markets.

You don't need to be a nu-folk hipster to realise that stimulus investment in green infrastructure in the USA and UK is starting to confirm our age as a decade of sustainability as offensive strategy, to quote Gardiner Morse in the Harvard Business Review.

And you don't need to be Che Guevara to recognise that if grassroots citizen action is going to have an impact upon the design and delivery of public services - and become a key player in a new value chain - there's no better place to start than in a key market place for those services, the public realm.

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The paper on 'open source' place-making is part of a larger programme of work - "Growing the People", a social action plan for the development of Speirs Locks, Glasgow, Forth & Clyde Canal - commissioned by Architecture + Design Scotland, the Scottish Centre for Regeneration and part of the Scottish Government's Sustainable Communities Initiative.

An army of outstanding creative thinkers working in real estate, economic development, design, the creative industries and architecture have fed in to this work - including Diarmaid Lawlor of Architecture + Design Scotland, Chris Brown of igloo Regeneration, Stuart Gulliver (former Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise Glasgow), Steve Dunlop (Head of Regeneration, British Waterways), Gary Watt (ISIS Waterside Regeneration), design writer John Thackara, city development consultant Roy van Dalm (former associate of Richard Florida) and social innovator Rohan Gunatillake.

Please subscribe to this blog if you want to know more. I'll be posting a video and links to other stuff here in the coming days.

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Images courtesy of: 1. Not known (lost). 2. Mauricio Guillen. 3. Yvan Rodic. 4. James Joyce. 5. Haarala Hamilton Photography. 6 & 7. wearesnook.com (Lauren Currie). 8. Jan Chipchase, Frog Design. 9. Via my veil of stars.