April 11, 2012

It's Not Just The Bags

Adelia Borges' new book Design + Craft: The Brazilian Path contains a glorious array of artefacts collected in every Brazilian region: pottery with rock painting motifs in Piauí; recycled cardboard pulp and banana tree fiber bowls from Minas Gerais; annatto seeds used as fabric dyes in Amazonas; knotted rugs from Rio de Janeiro; fish leather flowers from Mato Grosso do Sul; golden grass bags and baskets from Tocantins....

But this important book is not just about desirable souvenirs. On the contrary, Borges' commentary breathes new life into discussions about the relationship between designers, and artisans in the south. in particular, she is worried about "how many persons want to help us in the Southern hemisphere, but with lack of respect for local knowledge".

Exchanges between designers from the north and craft communities in Brazil have been intensifying since the 1990s, but there are far too many occasions when designers or design students "arrive with or maintain a superior attitude to to the artisans".

There are many ways in which interactions with designers can benefit artisans. Designers can improve the quality of objects being made, and sometimes reduce the use of raw materials. They can be effective communicators to consumers back home, and explain intangible qualities of an object such as its historical context.

But a bigger and more important story hardly ever figures in these exchanges: this is the extent to which modernisation sand 'development' threaten many of the unique agricultural and artisanal heritage systems, including the biodiversity on which they are based, as well as their societies.

Agricultural systems and landscapes have been created, shaped and maintained by generations of farmers and herders. Building on local knowledge and experience, many indigenous agricultural systems, and their related artisan traditions, are the result of a profound relationship with nature that is missing from modern industrial agriculture. A proper respect for and understanding of these knowledge systems and cultures is too often missing when designers come calling.

A particular challenge, Borges writes, is "to ensure the work is meaningful to the community so that it can be continued after the exotic design visitors have left". One-­off visits, or short consulting trips of a few days, can bring great media coverage for the designers who travel to the communities but leave no positive results in these communities "besides enormous expectations which are almost always frustrated".

Borges further counsels that "the potential dangers of a badly carried out intervention are many, and their effects can be damaging. The older a tradition is, and the more “away from civilization” the community it belongs to, the greater the dangers and the greater the necessary care".

The basis for these north-south interactions, for Borges, must be respect - "respect for the work rhythm of the artisan, respect for the signs that have resisted over the years, respect for the whole system of symbols that culminates in an object".

"One way to enrich the connection is to focus on ways designers and makers in the north can learn from sustainable techniques that Brazilian artisans have used even before the word ecology was spread.

Borges does do not believe in magical formulae or recipes, nor does she believe in "external saviours". The process must involve whenever possible professionals from that specific region. External consultants can start up a dialogue, and set things in motion, but there must be continuity based on local links.

"We must urgently reflect upon the ethical parameters to be observed in this encounter, as well as share methodologies which will allow a true dialogue to take place".

Posted by John Thackara at 05:41 PM

February 27, 2012

Zurich Eco Lab

As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with its natural ecosystems and grassroots social innovators.”

The idea was to demonstrate, in practice, and at a city-wide scale, how to combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture, with the metabolic energy of social innovation.

URBAN FARMS

A first delightful discovery: there are no fewer than twelve working farms within Zurich city limits - and one of them has a thriving herd of buffaloes (from which comes Swiss mozzarella). Several of the farms also provide educational experiences for school groups; indeed, demand for such courses is more than than the farms can cope with.

The city, which owns the land, requires all these farms to produce organically; (ten percent of all Swiss farms, 5,700 of them, are certified organic). The challenge faced by urban farmers, we were told, is a lack of certainly about the future. Switzerland has escaped the worst ravages of the global property crash; one negative consequence is that and pressure for land from developers remains intense. The community garden below, for example, is due to be built over by the end of this year.

Zurich's farms distribute their produce through their own shops and a variety of Community Supported Agriculture schemes. Twenty new projects have been launched in western Switzerland alone in recent times. One of these newcomers, Ortoloco, Ortoloco (below) is a self-managed cooperative farm with 200 active members.

Ortoloco, which describes itself as 'a laboratory for economic experiment', enables citizens to be involved actively in food growing as well as in the development of new distribution models. The cooperative works with 'socially and ecologically oriented settlements', commercial kitchens, catering colleges and schools.

The bread culture in Zurich, which dates back many hundreds of years, is especially healthy. The loaf shown above is made of wheat grown entirely within city limits. The latest arrival is a new bread co-operative, Brotoloco, whose members make these especially elegant ovens by hand:

SEED CITY

Swiss farmers have played a leading role in the development of organic farming ever since Dr. Rudolf Steiner founded biodynamic agriculture in 1924. In the 1940s, Dr. Hans Müller developed the organic-biological method. And in 1974, far-sighted researchers formed the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), with the mission to underpin scientifically the observations made by Switzerland's organic farming pioneers.

This institutional eco-innovation persists. To complement the del;endless expansion of its science campus ETH, a kind of Swiss MIT, has starte3d to create what it calls a Seed City

Seed City (a view of the gardens is above) is a community garden initiative for local waste recycling, food production and biodiversity conservation. The plan is to create a closed-loop system of local vegetable gardens of rare and endangered crop varieties fed with composted waste from the campus, and maintained by a volunteer association of students and staff. It also aims to establish a vegetable delivery scheme with organic producers in the region.

SOUP BY BIKE

Our next discovery was a four year old enterprise called Suppen und Pedalen (Soup & Pedals).

One of the green gems in the Zurichs ecology scene, Suppen und Pedale have grown their soup delivery business 10 litres to a 1000 litres a day. The two-man enterprise supplies 23 organic shops and bars in the city with 40 different delicious soups with bikes. All green, all local, no additives, no premade in use!

WILD ZURICH

In many industrialised countries there is now more biodiversity inside cities than there is in the countryside where the monocultures of agribusiness reign, with a dead hand, supreme.

It was a special delight,therefore, to learn of the Rucksack School. Its founder, Alexandra Tiefbacher, told our team that there are more than 1,200 edible plants in the city of Zurich. Our team determined that it would be a great idea, at the festival, to combine guided foraging expeditions with on-site workshops.

WATER FOUNTAINS

Zurich's citizens and visitors get through one billion unnecessarily bottled containers of expensive water a year. These plastic containers, many of which are chucked away in public space, take a thousand years to decompose. The madness of bottled water is especially acute in Zurich because the city is blessed with a wondrous infrastructure of 1,224 water fountains. They are well-maintained and the city publishes a variety of guides to their location.

E-WASTE: RE-MAKE

Our workshop in Zurich contained a fairly strong "Please, no more trees!" tendency. Happily, we soon discovered a lively e-waste project in which young offenders learn how to make artefacts that are then sold online in in city shops. Zurich runs a well-organised e-waste pick-up service so there are good volumes of raw material for the e-waste re-makers to work with.

In discussion, our group felt that a city-wide festival could add two kinds of activity to the existing e-watse ecology. The first would be to extend discussion of re-making to wider constituencies. The best way to do this, we all agreed, would be to stage Maker Faire type events during the festival as an entry point.

AND NEXT?

The map below plots the projects we were able to discover in-and-around Zurich, in a couple of days, from a standing start.

This talent-scouting for social innovation was a pilot for Part One of the festival process. Part Two would be to figure out, during collaborative project clinics at the festival itself, how these projects might improve and develop - with the skills of designers to help them along.

The idea of last week's workshop, as explaIned at the top, was to explore how in practice, and at a city-wide scale, one might combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture, with the metabolic energy of social innovation. The ingredients - in the form of natural assets, emerging social experiments, and institutional open-mindedness - are present in abundance. A has been planted.

The ZHDK masters students on the Zurich Eco Lab team were: Johannes Aeschlimann; Madlaina Capatt; Eugen Danzinger; Luke Franzke; Eva Geiser; Barbara Hoffmann; Fabienne Homberger; Martina Kessler; Livia Lukacs; Daniel Menichini; Christoph Miler; Noa Stemmer-Holtz; Tina Stieger; Andrés Villa Torres; Claudia Walz; Sonja Zagermann.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:48 AM

August 02, 2011

From Powerpoint to Permaculture

When I arrived at Angsbacka, the site in Sweden of last weekend's first Future Perfect festival, an alarming array of leaflets was on offer in the foyer : 'Shamanic De-Armouring'; 'How To UpGreat Your Life' or 'Reach The Temple of your Inner Beauty'; 'The Journey to Bliss'; 'A Cellular Dance of Oneness'.

My first reaction was: Beam me the hell back up, Scotty.

My second reaction was: to give the place a chance. There are many reasons to be sceptical about the alternative culture movement. It can reinforce the myth that we can consume our way out of environmental collapse. It implies that personal lifestyle choices can be an antidote to an industrial growth economy that destroys the basis of life on earth - including our own. For Lierre Keith, a founder of Deep Green Resistance, Angsbacka-style alternative culture encourages 'a continuum that runs from the narcissistic to the sociopathic' - and she poses a stark question: "Do we want to manage our emotional state, or save the planet? Are we sentimentalists, or are we warriors?'.

FuturePerfect was not a training camp for a new eco-warrior caste; too much hugging for that. But neither was it an infantile self-love fest. The atmosphere was adult, and more intentional than introspective. What emerged was an intriguing synthesis of mindfulness, and designfulness.

Mindfulness, for the FP crowd, meant facing up honestly to how serious the challenges have become. Peak energy, climate weirdness and global food insecurity, someone said, are potential ingredients of a 'global Somalia'. Hardly a happy-clappy sentiment. There was acceptance, too, that these challenges will not magically be 'solved' by technology - nor designed away - within the economy we have now.

Designfulness, at Future Perfect, meant a sober commitment to take practical actions that can be the seeds of the alternative economy we have to grow. Several discussions about money exemplified this commitment to reflective action. For most people 'the economy' is an abstract concept that is hard to grasp, and seems impossible to influence. A local money system, on the other hand, is a tool, and a service, that enables co-operation among people and groups. Local money is also a service design challenge that many people at FP could relate to.

The process by which we design a new economy is as important as its components. Future Perfect's creator, John Manoochehri, banned powerpoint presentations, for example. This sounds like a detail, but it meant that our conversations were face-to-face, not face-to-screen. Direct, embodied communication between people - rather than the abstract, mediated kind that dominates the sustainability discourse - helps dispel the illusion that we humans are separate from the rest  of the natural world. 

That re-connection with the biosphere came literally to life in the stunning permaculture garden at the centre of the Angsbacka site. A six person cooperative called Flow Food provides a lot of the amazingly good food eaten at Angsbacka's festivals. For the Flow Food group, no chemicals, no machines, no transport are practical and highly effective collaborative arrangements, not a utopian ideology.

Can a permaculture garden in rural Sweden, and a ban on powerpoint, be more than a pleasing distraction? For Lierre Keith, at Deep Green Resistance, the 'open-hearted state of wonder' cultivated at sites such as Angsbacka is a pathetic response when a planet is being murdered. 'Are we so ethically dumb that we need to be told that this is wrong?', she asks.

It's a harsh but necessary question. For me righteous rage, and direct action, will be no more effective than green consumerism in effecting the changes we need to see. Perhaps my mind was turned to mush by the Angsbacka vibe, but the lesson I draw from Future Perfect is that, yes, the ecocidal industrial economy needs to be stopped - but we are more likely to achieve that by replacing it, than by kicking it. And as a growing medium, Angsbacka was the right place for FuturePerfect to be.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:59 AM

April 26, 2011

From Eds & Meds, to Farms and Watersheds

The skyline of Pittsburgh, once America's Steel City, is now dominated by towers belonging to two local giants of 'Eds & Meds' - education, and healthcare. Does this mean the city has successfully grown itself a resilient new economy?

If architectural bravura was an indicator, the answer would be yes. The older tower [above] which looks like something out of Batman, is the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. The brutal black one [below] is the HQ of UPMC, an $8 billion healthcare colossus. The black tower, says its main tenant, is 'tangible evidence of Pittsburgh's transformation into an international center of medicine, technology and education'.

UPMC, which runs 20 hospitals in the Pittsburgh area, and has 48,000 workers, is by far the city's largest employer. Across the US, only Boston has a higher proportion of health workers.

Their sheer size makes some people in the city nervous that Eds &Meds might be economic bubbles, and that their dizzy rates of growth - in prices, as much as in jobs - might be unsustainable.

The escalating costs of US healthcare are well-enough known. At 16 per cent of GDP, it is now the largest sector of the US economy - almost double the average for developed nations.

One reason US healthcare is so expensive, as Aldous Huxley wrote in 1946 in The Doors of Perception, is that "medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left."

But it's the sprawl and complexity of US healthcare as a system that gives most cause for concern.

The bubbles in that chart ["patients" are the small star-shaped blob at bottom right] describe the $400 000 000 000 that's spent annually on administration, marketing and advertising, lobbying, incomes and bonuses for CEOs, and profits for shareholders in private parts of the system.

Many medical professionals will tell you that "yes the system is expensive, but we save lives". This argument would be persuasive if there were no competiton. But medical tourism is eating away at the heart of this vast market. A heart bypass that costs $140,000 in the US can be had for $10,000 in India.

The "we save lives" proposition is also losing traction as evidence emerges, as described by Science in April 2010, that "Cubans achieve the same levels of health with only five per cent of the expenditure levels of Americans'.

If the Meds edifice is built on sand, does the same go for Eds?

Over at Carnegie Mellon University, life seemed to be bustling and self-assured. True, the costs of education are rising even faster than healthcare in the US. True, aggregate student loan debt in the US is now higher than credit card debt. And true, even for well-off families, college education now takes up an enormous and growing percentage of family income.

But CMU's global prestige as a home to 18 Nobel Laureates would seem to be protection even against the fragile state of the US economy. One might quibble that nine of CMU's Nobels were for the 'economic sciences' - professions that helped create the global crisis in the first place. But CMU is also strong in subjects such as science and engineering. Even if a CMU degree becomes steadily less affordable for the average American family, there is enough demand for its other degrees, from rich families around the world, to keep the wolf from the door for the time being.

What most exercises Pittsburgh's Eds is not economic survival so much as the danger of a growing disconnect from the city. Eds & Meds contribute very little to the city's hard-pressed finances. The city's hospitals and universities pay no corporation tax; and many of their well-paid staff - all those SUV-driving doctors and professors - live outside the city limits in wealthy suburbs where they don’t pay city taxes, either.

With a population that's declined from 800,000 to 300,000 in just twenty years, the city is financially hard-pressed - but it still feels obliged to bust a gut to make sure that its Eds & Meds feel well looked after.

] Design for resilience

As always, there is a positive side. CMU's design school, and its new head Terry Irwin in particular, seems determined to avoid being stranded in an ivory tower. Although my visit to the city and CMU was a short one, I learned about a impressive variety of projects and activities in the city that contribute more to the resilience of Pittsburgh than high-end Eds & Meds.

[My hosts were Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant two British designers who are in Pittsburgh for two years as co-holders of the School of Design’s Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design].

Design professors professors Kristin Hughes and Eric Anderson, for example, worked with Grow Pittsburgh and a local public school on the development of a Learning Lab that would help schools engage students in the seed to table process of food consumption.

Then CMU graduate Christina Worsing told me about the NIne Mile Run Watershed Association.

The watershed once consisted of nine miles of streams that ran throughout the east end of the city. As the city industrialized [and highway-ized] seven miles were bricked, paved, and generally covered over.
This paving-over resulted in enormous damage when rains whipped over the city surfaces, clogged sewer systems, and then got dumped into Frick Park along with trash and debris. The result was the charmingly nicknamed "Shit Crick", massive erosion, trash, and an almost cancerous ecosystem.

Then the NMR Watershed Association was born as the brainchild of two artist/designers at CMU's Studio for Creative Inquiry; it addressed the need for urban residents to reconnect with and positively impact the natural world.

One of NMRW's first major projects was to redesign open streams within the park. Using a pool and whipple system, in addition to tree and shrub planting, they created the foundation for a restored ecosystem that now enhances the park ecologically, aesthetically and socially.

Over ten years, NMR has evolved from a research project into a busy non-profit that's involved in stewardship, urban forestry, rain barrel projects, education and advocacy. NMR now has a staff of 15 who support countless volunteers and work/share programs.

CMU's design school is also involved in a project called Fitwits that is developing health communications and services for schools, doctors’ offices, and family centered community centres. Their 'two fingers' portion-control cards [below] are especially neat...

Then from Will Snook, a local web designer, I learned that Transition Pittsburgh is up-and-running. With a commitment to build 'Community Resilience in the Steel City', the group is already running workshops on such topics and permaculture and Shiitake Mushroom Logs; they are also sponsoring a an independent documentary film that investigates the question, 'what does it mean to embody sustainability?

Will Snook, I learned, has also been involved with Small Farm Central, a group of web professionals who provide affordable websites and ecommerce platforms to direct-marketing farmers and Community Supported Agriculture schemes. Small Farm Central provides services to more than 400 farmers across the U.S. and Canada.

Many Pittsburgh neighbourhoods are scattered with vacant lots and unused land that are sitting dormant and in need of development. A programme called Engage Pittsburghencouraged citizens to reclaim these lots for productive community-use green space. By partnering with existing community garden organizations, sustainability advocates, youth groups, schools, and CDCs, the idea is to develop an organization supporting a network of green sites, community gardens, and urban farms.

There is also the Pittsburgh Garden Experiment - a forum for urban farmers in the city. PGE supports a lively collection of discussion threads, and its members also run classes on such topics as Vacant Lot Remediation. Their work is gaining momentum: the week I was there, Pittsburgh's City Council approved < a href="http://www.cityfarmer.info/?s=pittsburgh">guidelines designed to make sure people and animals peacefully co-exist in city neighborhoods.

I did not get to visit Pittsburgh's most famous locality, Braddock

nor its 'coolest mayor in America', John Fetterman:

But what I did see was persuasive evidence that the Eds & Meds behemoths that bestride Pittsburgh's skyline are not the only game in town. Even a small meadow contains a lot of plants.

It's by no means clear how best design can assist the re-establishment of living systems in post-industrial Pittsburgh - but there's clearly an awful lot of meaningful work to be done.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:17 PM

April 18, 2011

Rotterdam: where time is no longer money

Twelve-year-old childen in Rotterdam have never known a time when their city was not being rebuilt around them. And because they know no better, or at least no different, they are not much daunted by the huge scale of the projects underway - still less, by the consequences those projects are likely to have for the nature of their city.

I pondered these thoughts when fighting my way through the vast building site that was once Rotterdam Central Station -but will be, when finished, one day, a multi-modal, six-layered hub for high speed trains, buses, cars -and lots and lots of shoppers.

[I know my photo looks over-exposed - but I couldn't help comparing the massive floodlights in the artist's impression of the station-to-be, with the massive amount of free light available from the sun on that same spot].

When planning started, many moons ago, it was envisaged that the new hub would boast [and in part be paid for by] vast office towers plonked on top; but those have been cancelled. What *is* getting built is a "new heart for Rotterdam" that will contain...shops and casinos. Whether any human beings will enter them, when finished, remains to be seen.

These reflections were all good preparation for my talk about 'The True Costs of Big' at a conference in the city organized by de Architect.

The speaker from Arup said that cities needed to go vertical - and showed us slides of proposals for vertical green buildings through the ages - all with green stuff on them. I was compelled to say that a vertical farm costing 2,000 euros a square metre upards to construct might not be economically optimal - especially when the average lettuce costs one euro [or three lettuces for two euros in our local and decidedly horizontal market].

At the conference, most of the architects and developers agreed that Mindless Big was over, but that some large projects would still need to happen.

Well, we shall see. If Big is like Fast, its prospects are not great. On my way back from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, I got into a new Fyra intercity train.

The Fyra was curiously - as in, only me in the carriage - empty. It turned out that you have to pay a 12.50 euro [$18] surcharge to go in it. My Fyra was leaving seven minutes before a normal intercity train from the opposite platform and does the journey 20 minutes faster. But the conductor on my Fyra told me "everyone is taking the normal train" because no Dutch person will pay 12.50 euros to save half an hour travel time on a one hour journey.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:31 PM

April 12, 2011

Why does Laura Bush's friend want to poison our water?

Dr Martin Schuepbach from Dallas, Texas, has the following plan, concerning natural gas, for the Cevennes region of France, where I live [below]:

First, he will take millions of gallons of our clean mountain water. To this he will add a cocktail of up to up to 600 toxic chemicals including highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene, and radioactive elements like radium.

He will then pump the noxious mixture deep into our ground.

When this hydro-fracking process as it's called, has done its work, and natural gas has been extracted, Martin's people will dump some of this poisoned water into open pits on the site - similar, one imagines, to the one shown below:

The rest will be left underground where some of it is highly likely to poison our ground water.

He hopes to repeat this Halliburton-designed process dozens of times, all over our region.

Dr Schuepbach's plan is not illegal. Although hydro-fracking at one well uses as much water in three days as a Cevenol village with 1,000 inhabitants consumes in four years, he has a permit. The Permit of Nant as it's called, was granted last year to Schuepbach Energy LLC by the French government. The area granted is shown on the map below.

This decision was not, to put it mildly, widely publicized - but word has got out and we are all now cross.

We're also pretty amazed to discover who is behind this plan. Dr Schuepbach is its front man, but a good deal of the money to pay for it comes from a venture fund, CIC Partners, whose Managing Partner is a confidant of George and Laura Bush. [Marshall Payne is the guy in the blazer on the right in the photo below. He is co-chair of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. Laura Bush is in the middle]

Now I like Texas a lot, so it's distressing to me personally that Texans could be behind this ecocidal plan. I'm sure a misunderstanding occurred when Martin and Marshall were discussing the Nant project at the Dallas Country Club [I'm guessing the location]. The Cevennes must have looked, on a map, like a largely empty area containing only rocks, trees, and a few poor people in small communities who would cause little trouble.

The mischevious French government, when granting the Texans their permit, may well have emphasized this tranquil image.

What the Texan contingent may not have realized is that the Cévennes has been famous for its resistance to centralized tyranny since the early seventeenth century and before.

The Camisards, for example, were effective rebels against both Crown and Catholic Church. They pretty much invented guerilla warfare whilst opposing the armies of Louis XIV, the absolutist 'Sun King', over many years. In the long run they lost...

...but, ever since, there's been a tacit agreement between the French state and the Cevennes to leave each other alone.

Foreign invaders have not been so wise. During the Nazi occupation of France, for example, the Cévenols [as inhabitants here are called] hid and protected large numbers of Jewish children and German deserters. Fugitives especially at risk were guided over old sheep tracks high in the mountains and hidden in wood-cutters huts or sheep stalls. Many of these are still used. The Cévennes landscape and culture proved to be ideal for armed partisan operations against the occupiers and their collaborators.

Mistrust of all things from Paris and beyond has not diminished in recent times. Au contraire. In 1999 a famous son of the region, José Bové, leader of the farm-workers' union, trashed a McDonald's restaurant with a mechanical digger. He was given a three-month jail sentence, but 40,000 supporters turned out in his support at his trial.

Today, a decade on, Bové has been elected to the European Parliament as a member of Europe Écologie, a coalition of French environmentalist political parties. He is vehemently opposed to Gaz de Schiste.

So what happens next? In March, 80 French parliamentarians signed a motion against the exploitation of shale gas. Shortly afterwards, the government extended a moratorium on shale gas exploration until June when two official reports are due to be published on the environmental impacts of 'unconventional resource development'.

Although natural gas has acquired a reputation for cleanliness, this is largely based on its lower carbon dioxide emissions when burned. It emits roughly half the amount of carbon dioxide as coal and about 30 percent less than oil. Less publicised, and much uglier, are the emissions over its production life cycle from the moment a well is plumbed to the point at which the gas is used.

The dangers posed to our water supplies by the hydrofracking process, and the effects to both health and the environment, are much more severe that was previously assumed. The toxic chemicals used in fracking can leach into the water supplies that, as the Oscar nominated film Gaslandshowed, it has been possible actually to light water as it comes out of the tap.

The Texans' plans for the Cevennes are being shaped by a bigger energy politics picture. A global rush is on to tap the Earth’s deep gas-bearing shales miles beneath the surface. The fracking process is being sold as being less damaging to the environment than coal and oil - and anxious policy makers, as they wise up to the electorally-terrifying implications of peak oil, have been ready to go along with with the idea.

Now, as the carefully cultivated 'clean' image of shale gas melts away under scrutiny, plans in places like France may progress slowly, if at all.

There's a danger, though, that the ghastly human and environmental damage of hydrofracking will weigh heaviest on poor countries with less capacity to resist.

Sorry, Dr Schuepbach, but this process should not happen in anyone's back yard.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:12 PM

March 27, 2011

Does Bilbao need another Guggenheim?

The Basque city of Bilbao was a pioneer in Europe in the use of showcase cultural buildings as a trigger for urban regeneration. Just a generation ago the city's waterfront was an industrial port. Today, in addition to the Guggenheim itself, its architectural landmarks include bridges by Santiago Calatrava and Daniel Buren, and an apartment block by Arata Isozaki.

But as with Japan, where the technique was invented [landmark structures were called 'antenna buildings' during their bubble economy of the 1980s] the global crisis finds Bilbao asking: now what do we do?

As things stand, the region is still committed to a new "thrust for modernization." Bilbao's strategy, shaped with input from Global Business Network, is to become a "city for innovation and knowledge". There is talk of re-branding Bilbao as Euskal Hiria, a 'poly-centered global city' that would encompass the Donostia-San Sebastian, Bilbao, Vitoria-Gasteiz as single geographical-economic entity.

Positioned as a hub linking the north of Europe to the South, the idea is that Euskal Hiria would attract an army of highly-paid lawyers, financial and marketing consultants, and iPad-toting creative professionals of all kinds. These knowledge workers, the strategy implies, would snap up the expensive apartments that now lie empty along Bilbao's waterfront.

For all this to happen, Euskal Hiria would need a symbolic edifice to represent this Basque Global City to the world in the way that the Guggenheim does for Bilbao.

The scenario confronts two obstacles.

The first is that buildings conceived as icons, spectacles, or tourism destinations have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Bilbao's Guggenheim is now one among hundreds of me-too cultural buildings around the world. As their number has grown, their capacity to attract attention, or differentiate their host city, has declined. Spoiled consumer-travelers are liable to lunch in the café, buy the t-shirt, and move on. That's not a great return on all the time, work and money needed to bring these totemic edifices about.

The second objection to the Euskal Hiria strategy, and Guggenheim 2 as its emblem, is that they would stand for the high entropy economic model that caused the global crisis in the first place - and that is now dying.

If the iconic cultural building as a catalyst of development has run its course, and the Real Estate Industrial Complex is gone forever, is there an alternative?

A conference in Bilbao last week, oganized by Fernando Golvano and Xabier Laka, challenged speakers to propose new models of development based on more artful and sustainable uses of the region's social, landscape and natural assets

My contribution was to say that a bioregion - more than a high-entropy 'knowledge hub' preoccupied with abstraction - could be the ideal basis on which to re-imagine the future development of the Basque Country. At the scale of the city-region, a bioregional approach re-imagines the man-made world as being one element among a complex of interacting, co-dependent ecologies: energy, water, food, production, and information.

The beauty of this approach is that it engages with the next economy, not the dying one we have now. Its core value is stewardship, not perpetual growth. It focuses on service and social innovation, not on the outputs of extractive industries. Being unique to its place, it fosters infinite diversity.

The idea of a bioregion also changes the ways we think about the cities we have now. It triggers people to seek practical ways to re-connect with the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water, and energy sources on which all life depends. It re-imagines the urban landscape itself an ecology with the potential to support us.

A bioregion is literally and etymologically a "life-place" - a unique region, in the words of American writer Robert Thayer, that is "definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries with a geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and nonhuman living communities".

A growing worldwide movement is looking at the idea of development through this fresh lens. Sensible to the value of natural and social ecologies, groups and communities are searching for ways to preserve, steward and restore assets that already exist - so-called net present assets - rather than thinking first about extracting raw materials to make new iconic buildings from scratch.

One idea already floated in the Basque region is to locate a Guggenheim-type facility in the Biosphere Reserve of Urdaibai.

This spectacular salt marsh and coastal landscape on the Bay of Biscay coast covers an area of 220 km2 and contains only 45.000 inhabitants.

My response, at the conference, was that a 'pure' piece of nature, such as Urdaibai, is not the ideal starting point for a new regional narrative. It would reinforce a myth that sustainable development involves returning to pure and unsullied nature. A better priority, I proposed, is to focus on ways to restore and enhance the flows and ecologies of city and countryside.

A number of artists in the Basque region, it turns out, are already exploring this approach. In a variety of ways, they are engaging citizens in new kinds of conversations and encounters whose outcome is transform the territory - but indirectly.

Maider Lopez for example, invited citizens to create a traffic jam on the sides of mount aralar where normally traffic is light. More than 400 people in 160 cars responded to the invitation. For five hours of a mid-September day participants clogged up the winding roads of the the Aralar Mountains in a variety of artful ways.

Lopez, who describes her work as 'a poetic approach to community engagement in daily life', told us her traffic jam was to get people thinking about the automobile’s impact on the landscape - only to do so without telling what to think or do about it.

Another artist, Ricardo Anton, presented a project about trash. His approach was to use subtle signs and signals - such as framing dumping site blackspots with CSI-like striped tape.

Anton explained that these kinds of projects 'create new spaces for encounters in an ever changing territory of relationships'. They are a variety of what he called 'micro-politics' that in his experience are more effective than telling citizens what to do, or how to behave.

Saioa Olmo Alonso described an enchanting project in the abandoned Bizkaia Theme Park that closed in 1990.

Seventeen years after closing its doors, the original Ghost Train, Octopus and Crazy Worm were gradually being overgrown. Alonso invited groups of citizens to imagine new possibilities for an area once dedicated to fun and entertainment. These light-touch encounters create what Alonso calls 'micro-utopias'...whose positive energy complements the formal planned features of a town's development.

In Bilbao I also caught up with Asier Perez, from Funky Projects. Asier had wowed a Doors of Perception event in 2004 with his presentation about cactus ice cream as a communication tool - so I was keen to get an update.

Combining artful interventions and service innovation, Funky Projects' portfolio now includes service design for Telefonica and Pepsico, as well as many projects for government and third sector on social innovation and the development of new kinds of tourism services. Funky projects are developing strategies for the Gorbeialdea region - Euskadi's 'green heart' - where local authorities developed the idea of being a shepherd for a day or listening to animals sounds by night.

The work of these artists and designers anticipates a new approach to regional development. With the bioregion as their canvas, they are helping different kinds of groups and communities imagine new uses for the places and contexts that surround them.

They are not alone. A new kind of economy - a restorative economy - is emerging in a million grassroots projects and experiments all over the world. The better-known examples have names like Post-Carbon Cities, or Transition Towns. The movement includes people who are restoring ecosystems and watersheds. Their number includes dam removers, wetland restorers and rainwater rescuers. The movement is visible wherever people are growing food in cities, or turning school backyards into edible gardens. Many people in this movement are recycling buildings in downtowns and suburbs, favelas and slums.

Thousands of groups, tens of thousands of experiments. For every daily life-support system that is unsustainable now — food, health, shelter and clothing - alternatives are being innovated. What they have in common is that they are creating value without destroying natural and human assets. The keyword here is social innovation - and the creation of social goods - because this movement is about groups of people innovating together, not lone inventors.

Listening to the artists' stories in Bilbao, however, I reflected that it would be hard work to sell these kinds of project to policymakers and development professionals. In their world, ideas are the easy part. What's hard is getting disparate actors to collaborate.

In that respect, iconic building projects can be an effective way to focus and galvanise the energies of disparate stakeholders.

But if shiny new cultural buildings are a thing of the past, could a new kind of icon take their place?

Someone suggested that perhaps Urdaibai should be host to something like the Eden Project:

The drawback with this idea is that Cornwall already has the original Eden Project - so why copy the same, only 10 years later?

At this point, as if by fate, Xabier Laka, one of the organizers, mentioned the Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant.

Construction of this huge facility was nearly complete when, 28 years ago, Spain's nuclear power expansion program was abruptly cancelled following a change of government. The Lemoniz plant was never commissioned. Since then, several propositions have been made to reconvert the place for other uses - but none has taken off.

Bingo! I thought. This could be the perfect next icon for the Basque Country. I could see the headline: "Lemoniz: from Nuclear Energy to Social Energy".

It could become a year-round showcase and hub for the multitude of projects that are out there in the territory, only invisibly so: productive urban gardens; low energy food storage; communal composting solutions; re-discovery of hidden rivers; neighbourhood energy dashboards; de-motorised courier services; software tools to help people share resources.

Now all I need is to persuade the nice Mr Galán, who owns the Lemoniz site that, now his Iberdrola Tower is more-or-less complete, this should be his next sustainable innovation project.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:38 PM

January 22, 2011

Spaced out in a flat world

Tom Friedman's book 'The World is Flat' [2005] is filled with anecdotes about change in different parts of the world that threaten our fatcat lifestyles in the North. “One cannot stress enough: Young Chinese, Indians and Poles are not racing us to the bottom, they are racing us to the top” wrote Friedman at the time; he added that “in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

I've been preoccupied, since reading Friedman's book, by what 'flat' and 'equal' might mean in terms of urban living space. When I started collecting data on the average space per person, I came up with these startling numbers for square metres per person [add a zero to turn them into square feet]:

USA 60
Britain 38
Germany 38
France 37
Japan 31
China 25
Russia 5.0
Laos 6.5
Egypt 6.2 [Manshiet Nasser]
Nigeria 1 [Kiberia]

The trend in rich countries, until the crisis, was for bigger homes with fewer occupants: between 1950 and 2000, in the US, living space per person increased by 183%. and home size increased by 120%

For decades, shrinking household size, growing incomes and local zoning regulations fuelled demand for more and larger homes on larger lots. Land prices increased in large part due to the total overall demand for residential property.

What will the consequences be if that trend is reversed, and space per person starts to converge on a global average?

During the Great Depression, after all, the number of people living in a US home often doubled. By all accounts, that pattern is repeating itself today. The reason more people are not living in tent cities or on the streets is that large numbers of children are moving back in with their parents, or vice versa. Until the crisis, the US had a density of about 2.4 or so people per housing unit. If this were to increase 30 per cent it would mean about 30 million excess housing units.

In the UK, too, there seems to be a remarkable growth of space that people don’t need. George Monbiot discovered the remarkable fact that between 2003 and 2008 (the latest available figures), there was a 45 per cent increase in the number of under-occupied homes.

Meanwhile, by the end of last year, the floor space per household in China averaged 20.4 square meters, just at the level of medium-income countries. If global trends converge demand for more housing will continue to drive growth - but only until average floor space reaches 30 to 35 square meters/per capita.

Yes, I'm playing fast-and-loose with numbers here. Multiple factors are at play in different parts of the world. But if the trend towards a levelling of space per person is even is broadly true, prospects for the mighty Real Estate Industrial Complex look less rosy than they've been for generations.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:34 AM

January 15, 2011

The service ecology of a city

Milan has approved a new Territorial Government Plan (Piano di Governo del Territorio] in which public services, and the way they are planned, are at the centre of the whole project.

Since 2008, Id-lab has worked alongside the City Administration to change the way Milan thinks about urban development. Each of the city's 88 existing quarters, with its own characteristics and identity, is treated as a core element in the new approach. An ongoing conversation with citizens has elicited an understanding of which services are considered important for daily life - such as schools, kindergartens, libraries, health and social services.

From these 88 Environmental Atlase an understanding emerges of where service provision is failing. The new Plan does not fix which services will be activated in the future, nor where they will be placed. On the contrary, the idea is to enable a cyclical decision making process in which the identification of needs and action priorities is continuous. Unlike in traditional planning, the city never arrives at the moment in which its plan is finished. On the contrary: every six months a new process of reconnaissance, of “listening”, begins which updates the collective understanding of new needs and wants.

IdLab's vision is that these dynamic service ecology maps will act as a trigger that encourages entrepreneurs to develop new services when these emerging needs, at an ultra-local level, become evident. The map below, for example, identifies areas within each neighbourhood that lack close connection to a public transport route; one idea is that these gaps are spotted by minivan operators who move in to close the connection and remove the necessity for people to use private cars.

The same goes for maps which plot areas of the city where planting and food growing might be reintroduced. The role of the city here is not t grow food, but to highlight spatial opporunities and, down the line, to remove planning and regulatory blockages.

A related project, Nutrire Milano [Feeding Milan] is also exploring the relationships between food systems, service innovation, and sustainable urban development. A project of the Slow Food Movement with Milan Polytechnic, Nutrire Milano also uses maps to highlight where there are gaps or blockages in the ways food is produced and distributed.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:35 AM

November 02, 2010

Unplugged, but not alone

I was snooty in suggesting, in my comment on Doug Rushkoff's new book, that he should get out of the city more.

But if I'm an armchair tree-hugger, Stephanie Smith is the real thing.

Two months ago, this former architect abandoned her Los Angeles life for a new one in her shack in Joshua Tree, Southern California. The story of what happened next is reported in her Unplugged diary.

Smith's homesteader cabin sits on a five acre parcel "across the road from the house she just gave back to the bank".

One reason I'm gripped by Unplugged Diary is that my daughter Kate and I visited the area a couple of years back. It was a three hour drive from downtown LA - and we made the whole trip using these directions, made for us by Stephanie, which I keep proudly on my office wall here in France:

That trip was also memorable because I was fined $350 by a huge and terrifying local cop for overtaking a school bus on this otherwise empty road to Stephanie's shack:

Posted by John Thackara at 11:05 AM

August 21, 2010

My plan to save the city of Nice $250 million

(Summer re-run: First published 13 April 2009)

This blog first proposed the replacement of trophy buildings with street art back in 2002.

In a piece called "Trophy buildings are over" we argued that because they are conceived as spectacles, so-called signature architecture would be subject to the law of diminishing returns: the novelty would wear off, and buildings conceived as tourist destinations would be hard to sustain.

The modest size of the adoring horde outside LA's $270 million Gehry (photographed above in February) would seem to confirm this prognosis.

The decline of architectural trophyism coincides with an interesting debate about the use of existing, but abandoned, industrial buildings. Until the bust, most large empty buildings would have been jumped on by developers and turned into egregious lofts. These days, the pressure is off and cities are considering more interesting uses.

Last weekend in Nice, for example, I learned that the city is contemplating what do do with 40,000 square metres (400,000 square feet) of disused abattoirs (below).

Sophie Duez, a celebrated actor, and municipal councillor, has been appointed president of a "Committee of Reflection" to stage a series of "debattoirs" during the year. A wide variety of cultural, social and community groups will participate.

Duez argued, in our conference at the weekend, that cultural spaces need to be "less sacred" if they are to "nourish the city", and that, for her, a priority in this "cultural eco neighbourhood" should be socially creative activity rather than the "cultivation of the self".

The conference, which was organised by Norbert Hillaire, had as its title "La côte d’azur: du bétonnage du littoral à l’urbanisme écologique" - "The côte d’azur: from concreting over the coast, to an ecological urbanism".

(It's probably a coincidence, but I choose to perceive the Nice project as evidence of a trend in France to transform disused abattoirs into arts centres. Chalon has already turned its ex-abattoir into one of nine national centres of street arts that have been established across France since 2005).

The Nice abattoirs, being closer to the northern edge of the city, than to the coast, are well-located to help rebalance the relationship between "city" and "nature" that a sustainable future will entail.

The question of grand architectural statements is raised by an even larger project along the coast: the transformation of the Var Valley into an Eco Valley

The valley (above), which spans over 25,000 acres from the Mediterranean coast to the Alpine foothills, is a vast project that will evolve over decades. The project's leader, Thierry Bahougne, wondered, in our discussion in Nice, whether the commission of a signifcant architectural...something...would attract potential stakeholders and give coherence to the enterprise through time.

I'd be in favour of involving architects in Eco Valley - but not to make grand architectural statements. Given that Bahougne's priorities are to promote "best practices in sustainable governance" and to set "a global example for regional planning that responds totally to the challenges of sustainable development" - a large shiny building would not denote those qualities.

Rather than splash out $250 million on a signature building, a more exciting design challenge would be would be communicate the success of Eco Valley as a narrative about the restoration and nurture of its existing watersheds and biodiversity. The biologist E O Wilson writes about the need for an "land ethic" in development - and an idea like that is so powerful that no physical embodiment of it would be need to be built. The great national parks don't have signature buildings in them, so why Eco Valley?

My own contribution to the meeting involved dropping a heavy hint that the city's abattoirs looked like the perfect venue for an event like City Eco Lab (below) that we organised last year in St Etienne. I'm convinced that every city needs a market place in which people can present grassroots projects, exchange experiences, and involve fellow citizens in ever larger numbers as participants in these experiments. The ideal scenario, for me, would be to *combine* hands-on project stalls with the emergent art practices that the city seems to have in mind.

My plan to save the city of Nice $250 million

Posted by John Thackara at 04:33 PM

August 15, 2010

From mega, to micro: What You Can Do With the City

[Summer re-run; first published last year]

The atmosphere at last week's Megacities conference in Delft was subdued. I don't suppose my own talk, which ploughed a similar path to the Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung narrative I mentioned yesterday, helped lighten the mood very much.

Spirits were low because it is becoming clear that mega solutions of any kind - whether or not they are desirable - will be extremely hard to sell, let alone launch, for the forseeable future. Given that our host venue, TU Delft, is Europe's degree zero for mega-solutions, glum faces were to be expected.

So it was especially cheering when, the next day, Martien de Vletter (its Dutch co-publisher) gave me the brand new catalogue of an inspiring exhibition has just opened at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Actions: What You Can Do With the City.

The show features 99 actions that have the potential to trigger positive change in contemporary cities. The seemingly common activities, that feature walking, playing, recycling, and gardening, show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city - and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The project website includes projects by a diverse group of "human motors of change". They include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees.

The 99 actions touch on the production of food, and possibilities of urban agriculture; the creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the use of the urban fabric as a terrain for play such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; alternate uses of roads for walking, or of rail lines as park space.

Actions is curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, with Lev Bratishenko, Meredith Carruthers, Daria Der Kaloustian, and Peter Sealy. The catalogue, which I warmly commend, contains case studies and short texts on most of the featured interventions.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:41 PM

November 09, 2009

Spacing in

As you may have read in this month's newsletter, I'm a new fan of Spacing. This excellent new-paradigm magazine and multi-city blog (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Atlantic, including Halifax) features daily dispatches from the streets of these places on "just about anything that involves the public realm of our cities" Under that heading, they just posted an interview with your correspondent, about 4 Days Halifax, on Spacing Radio. Listen closely and you may be able to hear the sound of Halifax rain pattering onto the microphone. (You have to click the button just below the signature of Andrew Emond; my bit is about 18 minutes in).

Posted by John Thackara at 12:19 PM

October 05, 2009

Cities of Design

At a conference in St Etienne next month 'Cities of Design' including Minneapolis, Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Seoul, Portland, Eindhoven and Dortmund will all be represented. Personally I think either that all cities should be design cities - or perhaps that none should if the word denotes, as is too often the case, narcissistic urbanism. But you be the judge: 30 November and 01 December, St Etienne. Info: camille.vilain@citedudesign.com

Posted by John Thackara at 08:20 PM

April 20, 2009

New York: bat hunting

Conditions for my talk on Monday were sub-optimal: there was a typhoon *and* a high-energy dispute between students and The New School, parts of which were occupied recently. [Fond memories: I, too, was a revolting student once; during one sit-in I became a dab hand at coooking chicken and rice in a dustbin for 200 people. Luckily, Monday's typhoon meant there was no picket line - and in the event we had a great turnout].
On Thursday I hope to go bat-hunting in Central Park

Posted by John Thackara at 03:08 PM | Comments (1)

April 13, 2009

My plan to save the city of Nice $250 million

This blog first proposed the replacement of trophy buildings with street art back in 2002. In a piece called "Trophy buildings are over" we argued that because they are conceived as spectacles, so-called signature architecture would be subject to the law of diminishing returns: the novelty would wear off, and buildings conceived as tourist destinations would be hard to sustain.

The modest size of the adoring horde outside LA's $270 million Gehry (photographed above in February) would seem to confirm this prognosis.

The decline of architectural trophyism coincides with an interesting debate about the use of existing, but abandoned, industrial buildings. Until the bust, most large empty buildings would have been jumped on by developers and turned into egregious lofts. These days, the pressure is off and cities are considering more interesting uses.

Last weekend in Nice, for example, I learned that the city is contemplating what do do with 40,000 square metres (400,000 square feet) of disused abattoirs (below). Sophie Duez, a celebrated actor, and municipal councillor, has been appointed president of a "Committee of Reflection" to stage a series of "debattoirs" during the year. A wide variety of cultural, social and community groups will participate.

Duez argued, in our conference at the weekend, that cultural spaces need to be "less sacred" if they are to "nourish the city", and that, for her, a priority in this "cultural eco neighbourhood" should be socially creative activity rather than the "cultivation of the self".

The conference, which was organised by Norbert Hillaire, had as its title "La côte d’azur: du bétonnage du littoral à l’urbanisme écologique" - "The côte d’azur: from concreting over the coast, to an ecological urbanism".

(It's probably a coincidence, but I choose to perceive the Nice project as evidence of a trend in France to transform disused abattoirs into arts centres. Chalon has already turned its ex-abattoir into one of nine national centres of street arts that have been established across France since 2005).

The Nice abattoirs, being closer to the northern edge of the city, than to the coast, are well-located to help rebalance the relationship between "city" and "nature" that a sustainable future will entail.

The question of grand architectural statements is raised by an even larger project along the coast: the transformation of the Var Valley into an Eco Valley

The valley (above), which spans over 25,000 acres from the Mediterranean coast to the Alpine foothills, is a vast project that will evolve over decades. The project's leader, Thierry Bahougne, wondered, in our discussion in Nice, whether the commission of a signifcant architectural...something...would attract potential stakeholders and give coherence to the enterprise through time.

I'd be in favour of involving architects in Eco Valley - but not to make grand architectural statements. Given that Bahougne's priorities are to promote "best practices in sustainable governance" and to set "a global example for regional planning that responds totally to the challenges of sustainable development" - a large shiny building would not denote those qualities.

Rather than splash out $250 million on a signature building, a more exciting design challenge would be would be communicate the success of Eco Valley as a narrative about the restoration and nurture of its existing watersheds and biodiversity. The biologist E O Wilson writes about the need for an "land ethic" in development - and an idea like that is so powerful that no physical embodiment of it would be need to be built. The great national parks don't have signature buildings in them, so why Eco Valley?

My own contribution to the meeting involved dropping a heavy hint that the city's abattoirs looked like the perfect venue for an event like City Eco Lab (below) that we organised last year in St Etienne. I'm convinced that every city needs a market place in which people can present grassroots projects, exchange experiences, and involve fellow citizens in ever larger numbers as participants in these experiments. The ideal scenario, for me, would be to *combine* hands-on project stalls with the emergent art practices that the city seems to have in mind.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:03 AM

March 18, 2009

Dreaming of a Paris as a sponge

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, asked 10 architects to project 20 years into the future and dream up "the world's most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis".

[Project for a bigger and greener Paris by French architect Roland Castro]

Architects are usually only too happy to "dream". The problems start when you ask them to get their their hands dirty and feet wet in the context where their dreams would be built.

But a good outcome of competitions like this one can be a unifying concept that, while not buildable as such, has the effect of delineating a shared space in which citizens and experts to explore further.

Antoine Grumbach, for example (above) proposes to extend the city all the way to the Channel port of Le Havre via Rouen along the Seine, maximising the green possibilities of the river. This idea comes closest to answering a key aspect of the brief: to end the isolation of central Paris, with its two million inhabitants, which is currently cut off from the six million living in suburbs just outside its ring road, "le périphérique".

Christophe de Portzamparc proposes to build four economic "buds" in an "archipelago" around the capital and to transfer a huge European train station to Aubervilliers, north of Paris, modelled on London's St Pancras.

Yves Liot imagines 20 sustainable towns of 500,000 within the Paris area; he would also double the number of forests and bring fields to Paris' outskirts so that urban dwellers could cultivate their own fruit and vegetables.

Richard Rogers, working with the London School of Economics "and French sociologists" (the mind boggles) proposes to unite communities isolated by transport routes by covering up railway lines that dissect the city and placing huge green spaces and networks above them.

For me, a better approach would be to turn the peripherique itself into a garden, and thereby avoid the implausible and costly scenario of building "green spaces and networks above them". Such an approach has already started in New York where citizen groups are preserving and reusing the High Line - a 1.5 mile, elevated railway that runs along the West Side of Manhattan.

But back to Paris. The Italian architects Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigano, working with LIN, propose to enlarge the city and laying it out as a "porous sponge", where waterways are given pride of place.

As a metaphor, "sponge" strikes me as the strongest one to emerge from the whole competition. But to be candid, I would not allow give architects - even landscape ones - the job of implementation. There's a gigantic difference between a city that looks green, and one that is green.

MVRDV, declining to go down the "let's photoshop some greneery onto an aerial photo of Paris" route, has done a lot of hard-nosed number crunching to determine the volumes of space needed for different activities in a future Paris.

One applauds their lack of sentimentality - but I can't help thinking that the Dutch team's visual metaphor of a massive mainframe computer landing on Paris is unlikley to win them the popular vote.

MVRDV

An exhibition of all the plans opens in Paris on April 29. If someone will send me the link to the exhibition I'll put it here.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:34 AM | Comments (1)

March 04, 2009

Re-imagining Metropolis

An interesting event for our London readers: "No understanding between the brain and the hands" is a collaboration between Pocko photographers and illustrators. Inspired by Metropolis, the 1927 silent science fiction film, created by the famed director Fritz Lang, five photographers have collaborated with nine different designers to create interpretations of the film. From strange creatures taking over the concrete jungle, to our understanding of the city as a living organism, the images reinterpret Lang’s urban dystopia and create new versions of the city as we know it today. This Thursday, 5 March, 6 till 9 pm. Kemistry Gallery, 43 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London EC2.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:19 PM

November 11, 2008

Land and re-localisation

With allotment waiting lists in the UK massively over-subscribed, and people right across the country keen to grow their own fruit and vegetables, a new project called Landshare aims to make British land more productive and fresh local produce more accessible to all.

Within days of registration being opened, thousands of landowners and would-be gardeners have signed up. A website, hosted by a television network, Channel 4, enables people to find land where they can grow their own; offer land in return for produce; identify land suitable for planting; and build a growing community.

"The sort of land could be a garden share, a yard behind a company, a slice of a farmer's field, or a flat roof capable of taking the weight of a few pots" say the producers. "We don’t limit the variety or size of plot, nor who should get involved. The scheme is for individuals, families, businesses and organisations".

Landshare is not just about private gardens. Many organisations have large and under-used banks of land - utility companies, property developers, supermarkets, government bodies, charities - and churches.

Among 140 different religious groups in the UK, say Landshare, the Church of England on its own is one of the country's biggest landowners. Extraordinarily no-one, including the Church itself, knows exactly how much land it owns. "It is likely to be over 250,000 acres but could be considerably more" say the Landshare team.

It seems as if Landshare has been inspired in part by a project called Garden Share in Totnes, home of the Transition Towns movement. The Totnes service, too, matches enthusiastic growers with local garden owners who want to see their gardens used more productively.

The Totnes project was always conceived as a long-term community initiative with people gardening the land year after year if possible. "Every person who grows more of their own food is taking an important step towards greater local food resilience" say the Totnes team.

How well and how fast might the Landshare project scale up nationwide?

One of the key lessons we learned in the Move Me project, in Dott 07, was the importance of building trust between participants. Move Me was a ride-share service, and no parent would countenance sending a child to school in a car driven by a stranger.

Websites that match people wanting to go cheaply from A-F, with drivers of vehicles with empty seats, appeal to a limited demographic of, for the most part, sturdy able-bodied students. For everyone else, a precondition for being 'matched' is learning to trust people during face to face encounters.

Parents and staff in a school community (where Move Me was based) already know each other. How different is sharing a garden, or the field behind a church? We shall see.

Meanwhile, back in the global economy, re-localisation proceeds at an impressive pace. The Baltic Dry Index (below) provides an assessment of the price of moving raw materials by sea - such as 1.000,000 metric tons of rice from Bangkok to Tokyo. Demand in the market right now is heading vertically towards zero.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:50 AM | Comments (1)

October 20, 2008

Megacities after the meltdown

The received wisdom for a decade has been that the world will continue to urbanise, and that power and money will continue to congregate in a handful of megacity regions. The Megacities Congress in November begins to question these once-comfortable certainties. Well I will, anyway: I'm speaking on Friday 28th. The evening before (Thursday 27th) there's a lecture by Adriaan Geuze on the Randstad, followed by a discussion that includes Ed Soja (et moi).

Posted by John Thackara at 10:27 AM

October 02, 2008

Beyond the building: behind the website

This is what it looked like when three of the best critics in the Netherlands set out to write an online book in five days at the Venice Architecture Biennial (which was two weeks ago),

Did I say concentrated?

Inspired by the recent burning-down of the Faculty of Architecture in Delft, the Dutch Pavilion (commissioned from Stealth by Ole Bouman) was turned into a project called ARCHIPHOENIX - a week long debate on "the capacities and capabilities of architecture - beyond building". My own contribution, a talk on the theme
"What would radical ecology imply for architecture? is online: click on "keynote speaker marathon: Beyond the sustainable".

Posted by John Thackara at 09:29 AM

September 15, 2008

Beyond the building

I would like to think that the theme of this year’s Architecture Biennial in Venice - “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” - was inspired by my book Beyond The Object. But as it was published back in 1987, I'm not going to demand a credit - except here.

Exhibitors responded to the "beyond building" theme in two divergent ways. The big-name star architects (or "i Big", as they're called in Italian), who clustered in the 300-metre long Corderie dell'Arsenale, appear to have been assimilated into an abstract world of money and pure form. Among huge shiny objects, curiously dated images of all things "network" were projected onto vast screens. There were "Do Not Touch The Exhibit" notices, too - but one didn't really want to. On balance,i Big served a joyless meal.

A much higher-energy spread was presented by Emiliano Gandolfi in his survey of experimental architecture in the big Italia building. The 40-plus groups present were 'street' in all senses of the word. Installations by IDLab and Aether actually made me smile - and how often does that happen at an architecure show?

For me, the project that best captured what's happening was the Polish "Hotel Polonia: The Afterlife of Buildings" (see pic above). Six shiny new buildings were first photographed by Nicolas Grospierre, and then Kobas Laksa worked on them visually to answer the question, "What will the future hold for these buildings once a dramatic reversal of social and economic relations occurs?". If you ask me - or look at the blogs - "a dramatic reversal of social and economic relations" is happening right now - so I'd love to see Laksa visualize, say, the Lloyds of London (insurance) building in 2020...

Speaking of which, The Stern Review, released two years ago, stated that failure to tackle climate change could cost the world - and by implication, its insurance companies - up to 7 trillion dollars.. Today, "fears are growing over the financial health of American International Group (AIG), the world’s biggest insurance firm".

http://www.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek06/0203/0203globalwarming.cfm

COMMENT FROM JOHN MANOOCHEHRI

John, I love what you write. Not piffle, obviously. I love your focussed catholicity, and your real concern that things are not in a good way. I really feel for your attempt to situate a radical critique in the mainstream of operations, and to couch it in digestible, manageable concepts and language.

I don't agree with the way you understand entropy in relation to sustainability, however! At least not by the following para:

"What would architects design, if they did not design buildings?" My question is
not a rhetorical one. The inputs and outputs of industrial society are wildy out
of balance - and that includes its buildings and infrastructure. We have reached
the end of a brief era in which we could burn cheap fossil fuel, and despoil
ecosystems, mindless of the consequences. We need to re-imagine the built world
not as a landscape of frozen objects, but as a complex of interacting ecologies:
energy, water, mobility, food. Our life-sustaining ecologies, especially, need
to be nurtured, not swept away, built over, or diverted. The need for new
buildings will be rare. Sometimes the design choice will be to do nothing"

Assume we have nothing on the planet, no fossil fuels, nothing. All toys taken away. This is your implication. What have we got? We have one and a half energy sources: solar, and tide (moon gravity). We have knowledge. The most efficient energy system every devised, all things considered, is the leaf: and we can create lots of those. And the mind, well it just keeps on trucking. I just don't believe that even with that uber-minimalist eco-design set - sun and the mind - we cannot create and sustain magnificent societies.

What's worrying to me in what you write is uncertainty over whether you think that, post-oil-toys, we will have to be farmers and craftspeople (à la Kunstler), or you think we need to just need to find ways to stay innovative and 'modern' in the post-oil-toy age. My scientific view is that entropy is not merely a function of the universe winding down, such that post oil we have less 'low entropy' to burn - i.e. just the sun - and this means we will need to live 'simpler' lives, because all the oil-based stuff we have now will be kaput.

Entropy is, in fact, it is a complex function of energy AND knowledge. We have energy BUT we also have the mind. This is the point Georgescu-Roegen makes in 'The Entropy Law and The Economic Process': entropy is an instrumental-anthropomorphic concept, and theories of it, including statistical, have not been able to rid it of its anthropic ghost. If this were not so, we would not be able to find 'new' uses for what we previously considered waste or otherwise functionless/valueless. Who would have thought that so much power and value would be carried in a vehicle as simple as a glass rod (i.e. fibre optics fibre)? Who would have thought that something as simple as reflection would power the intformation revolution (i.e. internal reflections down fibre optics)? Okay, so to deliver information down glass, we had to discover lasers: but who would have thought pulsing light into a ruby crystal would have it come out all straight and neat? The point is: the richness of the world that leads to value and welfare is not inherently reliant on high-energy-intensity. It's also reliant on intelligence and information intensity. So I think it's crude and misleading to imply that when oil runs out, climate and resource snafus kick in, etc, we won't have anything to do as designers.

You of all people will know why nature has evolved fractal forms. It's not because they're nice. Self-repeating forms bla bla is just language and bandied about. Fractal - which stands for fractional dimension - is a phenomenon nature evolved to break as far as possible the link between volume (of biomass) and surface area (for light absorption): and thus to optimise radically the prospects of survival. Trees (and lungs) are elegant (inside-out, in the case of trees) Menger sponges, which have freaky ratios of volume to surface area: within given volume, leaf surface area (2D) reaches for infinity, while biomass volume (3D) hunkers down low. Trees look 3D, but they are really desperate to be resource-conserving 2D objects - they just take advantage of a 3D world to get more 2D action going. Their dimensionality is thus 'fractal' between 2 and 3.

In short, strict entropy constraints gave us nature as we know it: and I don't see nature tending towards blobby, cautious sloths trying to conserve their energy, which is how I read the implication of your "sometimes the design choice will be to do nothing". Fractional dimensionality is just one of many lessons for human design in the future, we haven't even begun to implement it. And this, of course, is an architectural strategy (surface area to volume, being one of their concerns). Architects will be very very busy in the low entropy world you allude to.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:11 AM | Comments (1)

September 11, 2008

From facades to flows: book launch in Venice

A short final reminder that the Italian edition of In The Bubble will be launched at the Architecture Biennale in Venice this coming Saturday (13 September). The book moment on Saturday follows my lecture at the Dutch Pavilion in the Gardini which is scheduled for 15h-16h. My talk is part of week long exploration and debate on the capacities and capabilities of architecture - beyond building. My brief is to discuss "what would radical ecology imply for architecture?" The Netherlands contribution is organised by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in collaboration with STEALTH.unlimited

Posted by John Thackara at 07:19 PM

August 12, 2008

Liminal space

Next week the team at St Etienne City of Design returns from its vacation ready for a massive final push towards 15 November. That's the date when when their biennial opens, and Doors of Perception has to fill its 5,000 square metre shed with a heaving throng of eco projects. Our event, City Eco Lab, is going to be amazing, and fab - but one is nonetheless envious of the artist Richard Serra who has filled his much bigger space in Paris with a few large objects.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:08 AM

July 02, 2008

London Lido

My new mates at Exyzt have built and opened the new Southwark Lido as part of the London Architecture Festival. Exyzt and Gaelle Gabillet are the scenographer-builders of City Eco Lab with me in St Etienne in November. Do go and say hello to them in Southwark.

And whilst you're at it, do also check out Saturday's Continuous Picnic. This day-long event celebrates local food and the city and is organised by Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, who, with David Barrie got us all started on urban agriculture three years ago as we started to plan Dott 07. It's nice to see these young folk doing so well up in the big city.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:06 AM

June 09, 2008

Can dynamic cities be democratic?

The following is an interview with me and Sunil Abraham for this month's Cluster magazine in a special issue published for the World Congress of Architecture which opens later this month in Torino.

Cluster: What role does design play when it comes to creating democratic cities?

JT. All cities are part of a larger ecology of resource extraction, energy use, environmental impact, waste flows, and social networks. The rules that govern how this larger ecology works - or not - are political rules shaped by an era in which we could burn cheap fossil fuel while ignoring the ecological consequences. That era is now over, and its eco-cidal politics (and economic development) have become obstacles to our survival. The only meaningful task of design, now, is to help people transform the ways they obtain food, energy, materials, and water - in cities, or outside them. This kind of design is of course “political” in that it opposes the demands of industrial society for limitless resources in a world whose carrying capacity is finite. But ecodesign - and hence, eco politics - is about new ways of inhabiting places; it is not about new ways of organising representative government.

SA. The state and the judiciary can either build or destroy democratic cities through policy formulation and implementation. For example, planners of public works, such as transportation systems, determine the mobility of the poor which then determines the extent of their financial and political engagement within the city. There is a new dimension today as governments turn digital; participation in the market and in governance will now depend on the design of the “information city”. Where the state or city governments base infrastructures on proprietary software, proprietary standards, surveillance and censorship technologies, the result is less democracy. On the contrast, public Wi-Fi, telecentres, cyber-cafes, municipal broadband and other forms of shared access have a democratizing effect on cities.

Cluster: What actions are needed to create a city which is tolerant and open to all citizens?

JT. The drive towards enclosure and privatisation - of knowledge and ecosystem resources, as much as public space - goes back a long way; but attacks on the commons are particularly intense right now. The answer is not to have a leisurely debate about tolerance and city governance. The answer is to demonstrate, in practice, that openness and collaboration deliver a better chance of survival. A city food system is an obvious place to start: growing food in public spaces, sharing knowledge about how to prepare and store it, and organising communal meals to eat it, are easy and practical steps that produce quick benefits at many levels.

SA. Tolerance of everything and openness to everybody are not universally accepted principles. This is one reason why globalization and migration have introduced new complications. Most religions advocate tolerance in theory, but organised religion can be oppressive in practice. In Malaysia, Muslim lovers, like their Chinese and Indian counterparts, arrange for a romantic rendezvous in a hotel - only to be arrested and publicly humiliated by the morality police (or, in India, by Hindu fundamentalists). I'm struck that in the digital world there seems to be greater acceptance of diversity. The anonymity and privacy afforded by the Internet and the emergence of safe spaces for different online and off-line communities has contributed to this. The question is: how then can a physical city also provide for such safe spaces and systems?

Cluster: To what extent do the city, its pace of life and distribution of facilities condition the behaviour of its inhabitants?

JT. Speed or slowth are not lifestyle choices. Our ways of life will not become sustainable just because we decide, as individuals, to “slow down”. Slowth will, to some extent, be imposed by events: escalating energy costs will drive re-localisation more powerfully than attitudinal change. But sustainability does not mean that fast is bad, and slow is good. Some forms of speed, such as feedback, or the implementation of lighter solutions, are desirable. Think of the polio vaccine; it was disseminated around the world in a few years: we need to innovate our life support systems just as quickly. In the language of sustainability, this means changing the word “faster” to “closer” in our design briefs for cities. Moving bodies and products fast is bad; moving information fast is good. Wireless communications have an important role to play here. They make it possible to reduce the distance between people who have needs, and people who can meet those needs.

SA. Speed alone does not guarantee efficiency. Sometimes - it is better to do less. Remember that the pace of a city is often determined by economic relationships between those who own and those who do not own resources. This applies to rents charged for intellectual property and intangible resources, as much as it does to rents paid on physical property: the pattern is that the poor are forced into high-pace lives while the elite can afford to purchase idleness. In a Vietnamese village, the International Fund for Agriculture Development [IFAD] tried to introduce a package of loans and proprietary cash crops. This required additional farm labour during the afternoons. The villagers rejected the project saying that they prefer to play volleyball in the afternoons. More equal distribution of resources allows a city to find its own unique pace.

JT. Exactly: and in a light and sustainable economy we will share resources - including time, skill, software, or food - using networked communications. Wireless networks have the potential to help existing systems of sharing scale up - such as Local Economy Trading Schemes (LETS) in Europe.

SA. Local systems of barter and non-monetary exchange, such as Jogjami, have existed in India for at least 500 years. A cooperative distribution system called Angadia, or “many little fingers”, enables people to send goods over vast distances without paying...

Cluster: Many cities invest in the quality of their architecture to show the world an attractive, dynamic face. The big names and big projects are given the task of conveying the centrality and ability of cities to attract high-class players. But the dynamic image of a city does not always correspond to its ability to make room for the creative energies of its inhabitants.

JT. Show me a city with a “dynamic image” and I will show you an unsustainable city. “Dynamic” usually means high entropy buildings, financial speculation on a massive scale, and a low degree of social participation. From now on, the most interesting cities will be those whose citizens are able to invest their energy and creativity on “re-inhabitation” within the unique ecosystems of their place. This approach will often involve adaptive or more intense uses of existing infrastructure rather than the construction of signature buildings - and sometimes this approach will mean building nothing, nothing at all. To live sustainably we need to place more value on the here and now: a lot of destruction is caused when design is obsessed with the there, and the next - and the “dynamic”.

SA. First, the dynamism of a city can be found in the informal sector which in most developing countries accounts for 70% of employment. It is also where legal, technical and market limits and norms are challenged and redefined as everyday practice. The informal economy also has a much lighter infastructure. Traditional systems of trust such as Havala have a smaller carbon footprint because there is no paper work, no management information systems, no audit trails and so on. There's pressure from the state to monitor and tax all transactions based on the assumption that complex systems of accounting, monitoring and evaluation can and should replace real-life trusted relationships. The so-called global war against terrorism has undermined these traditional systems. But in most cases the informal system is better, faster and cheaper than the formal alternative. For example - money transfers on the global Havala network are instantaneous which is near impossible across the legal banking system. In terms of scale, the Havala network is responsible for handling a large proportion of remittances from illegal and legal migrants across the world. Which IFAD estimates is approximately 400 billion annually. Third, non-market micro-economies such as gifting, barter, collectives and commons in developing countries are more effective than classical development interventions in addressing problems of social development. For example, home-based care is cheaper and more effective than hospice-based care for people living with HIV/AIDS. I would like to see more celebration of the informal sector, informal practices and non-market micro-economies.

Cluster: What level do we need to work on to enable European cities to effectively express their innate creative potential?

JT. Survival. Seriously! We'll need to be creative to eat before too long. The World Bank reckons 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. In the North we fondly imagine that we won’t be affected, but I can't get it out of my mind that supermarkets only have three days supply of food in stock at any one time...or so they think. Their supply chains are so inefficient and erroneous that they don't really know.

SA. In my opinion, attitudinal transformation will lead to more creativity in European cities. Western-style individualism needs to be re-imagined because we have run out of planet to exploit. Sharing intangible property such as software, films, music and books is not sufficient. To reduce our collective carbon foot-print we need to intensify sharing of tangible property.

Thanks to the Internet and mobile technologies - it is now possible to share tangible property in a much more granular fashion across space and time. But technologies are insufficient, because individualism has to make way for traditional systems of trust and creativity.

JT. We have to escape from this absurd idea that “creativity” is a specialised profession limited to people like architects and public relations consultants. For true creativity, go to shanty towns in Asian cities: these are sites of intense social and business creativity. Formal (and therefore expensive) networks of technical support and maintenance simply don't exist as they do in the North, so people turn to the temporary fixes, or “jugaads”, carried out by street technicians and pavement-based engineers who keep engines, television tubes, compressors and other devices working. The irony is that bureaucrats in Asia want to get rid of these so-called suitcase entrepreneurs - whereas I'm certain we'll need systems like this ourselves in the not-too-distant future.

Sunil: In European cities culture is often viewed as basically a public function, insofar as it is free from market logic, but this preconception risks devaluing all spontaneous forms of expression, or actively discouraging them with regulations and bureaucracy, or even preventing them altogether.

JT. I'm not sure that formal culture is free from market logic, even in Europe. Nearly half the people who visit the British Museum in London go to its cafe and shop without even looking at the art exhibitions. In many cultural venues, shops and restaurants are important revenue streams - and an important part of the visitor’s experience. Is this a crime against culture? I don't think so: people eat and trade things at pagan festivals too. The bigger challenge is that cities as a whole - not just their cultural quarters - have become spaces for spectacle and consumption rather than work or exchange.

SA. I am not sure I understand the question. The act of producing culture and its distribution by ordinary citizens are tightly controlled by legal and technical systems - for example - digital rights management on computers and restrictions on community radio. The state usually uses arguments of cultural protectionism to interfere with citizen rights.

Recent years have seen the implementation of many participation-based initiatives to foster people’s involvement in and contribution to urban transformations. Often these are attempts to construct public consensus around decisions taken prior to the initiative in question. Regardless of the efficacy of such initiatives, in any case they reveal the increasing distance between the public and decision-making processes. Do you agree with this view? How is it possible to foster more spontaneous forms of participation?

JT. You are right: a lot of the “consultation” that takes place during the evolution of major projects is a shame, and everyone knows it. I would add that many of the least democratically-decided - and most eco-cidal - developments are driven by design “visions”. This takes us to the heart of the political dimension.

SA. Yes, this is often true. In New Delhi the high court is attempting to ban the sale of street food, and the government has shifted many slums to the outskirts as part of the preparation for the Commonwealth Games. We need to redesign classical multi-stakeholder public-private-partnerships in ways that differentiate between the votes cast by organisations representing the elite minority and poor majority. Crowdsourcing of urban design projects might provide an environment for more spontaneous forms of participation. Crowdsourcing is based on the principle that many hands make light work. Usually, a large and complicated job is broken down into small tasks then completed by a large number of volunteers.

Cluster: The various examples of sustainable cities, such as BedZED and Dongtan Eco-City, focus mainly on influencing the behaviour of the inhabitants, reducing movement, and fostering processes of emulation and social control that encourage responsible behaviour. The types of buildings and aesthetic models rationally designed for these initiatives prefigure highly standardized, if not uniform, cities. This scenario, possibly inevitable, is a little scary: how can we reconcile individual expressive space with the need to adopt stricter environmentally-friendly practices?

JT. What makes these models “eco” is not their aesthetics, it's the ways they organise space and time, and material and energy flows. For me, the problem is not the danger of uniformity, it's that they are not models that can be scaled up on a global scale. Foster's Masdar project in Abu Dhabi is an extreme example of the problem: yes, it will be a new eco-city - but it will also be a gated community for rich people; the 50,000 people who will live in Masdar are theoretically worth about $17m each, and their fellow citizens are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than any other people in the world (apart from David Beckham and John Travolta). Masdars and BedZeds are useful testbeds - but it's not feasible to build them in multiples for six billion people. A better place to look for future models is in marginal communities where people look after and live with ecosystem services in a practised and creative way. That's a sample group of half the world's population, by the way. Living on the edge is about survival, not about personal expression - but it is nonetheless socially rich in many other ways.

SA. This reminds me of a visit to the Singapore Management University during the celebration of a “Bohemian Week”. Each student was given a 1 foot x 1 foot tile on a graffiti wall. This type of tokenism toward individual expression is meaningless. At the same time environment-friendly practices cooked up by centralized policy-makers may only be a sophisticated excuse to displace and marginalize the poor. For example, most wildlife conservation efforts transform indigenous forest populations into slum dwellers. The key to sustainability is in-situ design expertise and this by definition is incompatible with large-scale standardization and uniformity. Standardization and uniformity like the hygiene fetish in western civilization extracts a heavy price from the environment. The by-product of super cleanliness is super dirt.

Cluster: The new world order seems to have generated an unstoppable acceleration in the race towards cities. What can be done to stop the growth of megacities? Can the things that migrants seek be transferred out of the city, extending the effect of the urban area? Is it possible to reduce the negative externalities of megacities?

JT. I don't agree that cities will keep on growing. The race towards cities will come to an abrupt halt when the high entropy systems that keep them going start to degrade. At the moment it's better, just, to be poor in a big city than outside it; but that balance will change - and fast - as it becomes harder to survive in them. Would you leave the countryside and go to a city filled with empty supermarkets and hordes of desperate people? Also, don't forget that mobile communications are transforming the dynamics of subsistence economics in many developing regions.

SA. I agree with John. Though I am not sure it will come to an abrupt halt. It is indeed true that location used to determine the degree and extent of participation - both in governance and in the market-place. But the rise of Internet and mobile technologies will reduce the appeal of cities. But still, as human beings - face-to-face interactions will continue to be important. The solution, however, is not to move migrants to the periphery. Stopping the growth of mega-cities requires addressing the myopia of city-based policy-makers and planners. Hopefully Internet and mobile technologies will amplify the demands of the rural poor for a greater share of state resources and attention.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:42 AM

June 06, 2008

The Endless Optimists

I know it's like standing in front of a large orange oncoming train, but may I please say something about this huge book? It's wrong in its basic assumption. The assumption (as it says in huge letters there on the cover) is that 75% of us will live in cities by 2050. But that number, along with the book's 500 pages of similar projections, takes no account of some rather likely discontinuities - the most plausible being what John Michael Greer describes as the catabolic collapse of the industrial civilization that keeps these global cities lit. Global energy, money, food and water systems are in crisis now, for goodness sake - never mind in 2050. Do the distinguished editors of The Endless City seriously imagine that billions more people will want to be in cities when the average supermarket contains three days supply of food - and that's when things are running smoothly?

Posted by John Thackara at 07:50 AM

April 27, 2007

Mapping the beauty of cows

Roam, meet, share, map. There's only a week to go before a gorgeous array of teams assemble in Durham for Mapping The Necklace (5-7 May). One group is interested in mapping the most beautiful cows in the park. Other teams will do Audio Mapping (using ambient and verbal cues as waymarkers along the riverside); Busking (a map of performance spaces in the Park); Chaos Mapping (mapping of "chaos vs tranquillity" by award-winning Venezuelan multi-media artist Cipriano Martinez); Dog Tracks (to help you understand what your dog is thinking about on the journeys you take together); GeoScrooting (share your experience and memories of hidden gems in the Park through photos, art, sound, music, story, poetry... ); Gimme Shelter! (What is a shelter? something physical or psychological, natural or man-made?); Honey I ate the map! (investigating and eating the foods of the Necklace Park); Orimapping (a map of temporary origami sculptures); Tree Testimonials (the Durham Necklace Park has some beautiful and distinctive trees); Park-Parkour (Is it a sport? Is it dangerous? Do you need a special place to do it?); Vennel mapping (an architecturally-trained theatre producer is creating a sensory map of Durham’s vennels); Wild about food (mapping the edible Park bounty– whether it be garlic, elderflower or fungi). You can't afford to miss this! Join us at Old Durham Gardens, Sunday 6 May. Details from: beckie.darlington@dott07.com

Posted by John Thackara at 11:41 AM

April 25, 2007

Water garden

This was the most interesting exhibit for me at the Milan Furniture Fair. Hidden away in a small courtyard, “Aqva Garden” functions as a distributed rain collector and water storage system. Unlike conventional recycling systems, which tend to be hidden away in clunky boxes, Aqva Garden's unique branching system, which exploits the ways that water evaporates, is visibly present. And that - I cannot lie - is pretty much all I know about it; (the website is a Flash nightmare). But don't you agree it looks amazing? The project is by ecoLogicStudio whose principals, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, work in Milan and London. They collaborated for this project with Francesco Brenta and Laura Micalizzi. They also have a blog, Tropical London.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:56 AM | Comments (1)

June 18, 2006

Talking Cities

Too much media coverage of architecture focuses on the banal excesses of Shanghai and Dubai. The more interesting story these days concerns marginal, residual and abandoned spaces left behind when industry disappears. A new publication, Talking Cities is all about “Guerilla Architecture”, “An-Aesthetics”, and “Architecture on the Edge’. Later in the year, a spectacular series of exhibitions called Entry is planned at a vast coal washing plant at the Zeche Zollverein – a Bauhaus masterpiece now designated as a world heritage site. The Entry project is an example of how a cultural action can, by focusing attention on a disregarded site, stimulate regeneration. Curator Francesca Ferguson, of the Berlin-based organisation Urban Drift says her project is about “re-activating existing structures” in ways that can inspire business and urban agencies. “Urban waste land, empty buildings, dusused products, and forgotten brands, are valuable resources that can be awakened to new life and fresh use” she says. Fresh, and in unusual combinations: The maps in Talking Cities portray vast landscapes in which "town" and "country" are no longer clearly separated from each other. There’s a seminar about it all on 29 September at Zollverein School of Management and Design. (Talking Cities will be launched in London on 22 June, on the occasion of the London Architecture Biennale, at ®edux Unit 303, Third Floor, Lana House, 116 Commercial Street, London E1 6NF)

Posted by John Thackara at 08:00 AM

June 16, 2006

Learning from steel cities

“Steel City awakens a longing for for authenticity in of a world where networks and technologies are no longer palpable. Steel City is a place of physical presence, the presence of body, of the haptic, of patina and aging. Steel City can be touched and felt”. Thus, poetically, Professor Wolfgang Christ, in his preview of next week's conference on Steel Cities in Sheffield, UK. As China and India race to modernise their economies with imported steel, the focus of the conference is the ways in which lives, landscapes and relationships continue to be, transformed by steel. A sad-sounding post-conference excursion takes you to a former steel works that has been turned into a "science experience" where the arc furnace building is animated by a "rock and roll sound and light show". Respectful silence as a trigger to the imagination would have been a better design strategy.

Posted by John Thackara at 06:20 AM

April 01, 2006

Homeless urban designers

Cluster is running a series of pieces on the spontaneous cities, favelas, bidonvilles and squatter cities that grow independently "creating their own networks without the help of traditional planning or design". In the new issue Frederica Verona describes her visits to numerous dormitories, day centres, and soup kitchens in Milan. She discovered that a number of homeless sleep in hidden corners where they will not easily be found by social workers and volunteers. One result is that dormitories, showers and food kitchens - which sound grim anyway - are not located near the people who use them. Mobile units deliver care to street people, but Verona was "amazed at how a mobile service could interrupt the stability of a setting".

Posted by John Thackara at 01:48 PM

March 30, 2006

Biomedical downtowns

An intriguing story in next month’s Cluster magazine describes plans in China for the world’s first urban biomedical hub. Sascha Haselmayer, one of its advisors, writes that Fenglin Biomedical Centre will concentrate life science, medical care services, medical education, business incubation, and medical exhibitions, in the Xuhui district of Shanghai. Haselmayer says Fenglin is about “building a healthcare system that has to almost instantly provide for more than one billion currently unprotected people”. Fenglin can become a global biomedical hub, he says, that will “increase productivity, and speed up the process from scientific discovery to bedside product". Emerging trends such as lifestyle diseases, preventive medicine, and bio-informatics, have further stimulated interest from international partners. And there, for me, is where FMC is misconceived. It’s an urban development project, not a health service one. As I discovered in Korea a while back, biomedical clusters (here's a map of them) like Fenglin are popular with investors and multinationals. Large inflows of capital are attracted by tax breaks and what Haselmayer describes as “an inclusive yet visionary governance” that, in Fenglin's case, includes a Patenting Center to assist in interrnationalisation/localisation of patents. But the latest thinking on health favours the radical decentralisation of care - not its concentration, and not its technological intensification. A business model based on the privatisation of medical knowledge is also unlikely to benefit China’s population. Investors will probably get sick, too, when the wildly over-egged promises being made for biomedicine turn out to be chimeras.

Posted by John Thackara at 02:31 PM | Comments (1)

February 28, 2006

Some enhanc-ed evening

AV Festival 06 is the UK’s newest, and largest international festival of digital arts, music, games, film & new media. With the theme of Life, it explores what happens as expectations rise that we might be able modify and improve our bodies and/or minds. More than 90 events will take place in NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, between 2-12 March. I am moderating a symposium, on Friday 10 March in Middlesbrough, which analyses the artistic, ethical and social aspects of robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology as they aspire to modify humankind. Dr Tom Shakespeare is a keynote speaker in our session; it also includes discussion panels on the social and ethical critique of enhancement technologies, and the geopolitics of food production. For more information see the website (click through a couple of screens to find the programme) or ring the information line on +44 191 260 3875 or email info@avfest.co.uk to request a guide.

Posted by John Thackara at 11:52 AM

February 24, 2006

Is sprawl good, after all?

I have always assumed that sprawl is a Bad Thing. For Jane Jacobs, in ‘Dark Age Ahead’, urban sprawl is something that "murders communities, and wastes land, time, and energy". Sprawl is frequently blamed for environmentally-damaging transport intensity, the collapse of communities, even obesity. But James Woudhuysen, for one, thinks density has been over-sold, and that land in many countries is under- not over-used. The author of "Why is Construction So Backward" is a speaker at an intriguing seminar in London on 3 March. He appears with Ken Yeang (international architect and author "The Green Skyscraper") and Tristram Hunt, historian, broadcaster and author of the excellent Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. The seminar is organised by Austin Williams, Director of the Future Cities Project.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:01 PM | Comments (2)

February 20, 2006

Corrupted by cool?

Have cultural producers and designers become the stooges of property development? Guy Julier has invited me to stir things up in a talk at the inauguration on 2 March of DesignLeeds, a new research and consulting centre at Leeds School of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Invitations are available from Jean Horne: Telephone +44 113 283 3216. Email j.horne@leedsmet.ac.uk

Posted by John Thackara at 09:45 AM

January 27, 2006

Automatic eco architecture?

SOM, the global architecture firm, believes that we are entering an age of comprehensive, pervasive, simulation of the physical world. It has appointed a Digital Design Director, Paul Seletsky, to develop its expertise in Building Information Modeling (BIM). With BIM, models of all a building's physical components are stored in a report-generating database that produces what Seletsky calls "smart geometry". Other simulations are being developed for lighting, energy, wind, pedestrian circulation, construction processes, fabrication, code, material, and security conditions. For Seletsky, these trends amount to a “complete cultural and procedural shift…architects will now have to think in terms of producing and assembling building components, as opposed to sheets of drawings or seductive renderings". I'm not sure the trend is all that new. Archigram speculated about machine design in the 1960s, and Dutch architects such as UN Studio and Winy Maas have been engaged in real-time design for quite a while. What's still missing from automatic architecture is what might be called Green BIMs - the compulsory integration of environmental requirements into the information models of all development. According to Seletsky, Singapore is well on the way to such a condition with a country-wide system called CORE that integrates building regulations into construction, development and real estate systems. This level of integration is helped by the fact that Singapore is small and not overly democratic. Green ratings in the US such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) remain voluntary. The principal barrier to the integration of environmental standards into building development is less an IT one than organisational. As James Woudhuysen has written in Why-is-construction-so-backward?, the main barrier to innovation lies in the fragmented nature of the construction sector.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:06 AM

December 29, 2005

The diminishing spaces of childhood

A fascinating essay by Henry Jenkins explores the changing spaces of childhood. In the nineteenth century, children living on America’s farms enjoyed free range over a space which was ten square miles or more; boys of nine or 10 would go camping alone for days on end, returning when they were needed to do chores around the house. Henry did spend childhood time in wild woods, but these are now occupied by concrete, bricks, or asphalt. His son has grown up in apartment complexes and video games constitute his main playing spaces. (Thanks to Brenda Laurel for the lead).

Posted by John Thackara at 01:24 PM | Comments (2)

December 01, 2005

U and Non-U cities

(Seoul). In my car from the airport I am disconcerted by what sounds like someone drowning a dog in a bucket of water. It turns out to be the ringtone on my driver's mobile phone. The traffic here is worse than ever so he probably has time in jams to source the weirdest downloads. More startling still are plans for Korea's new administrative capital. The government is considering modeling the city on a doughnut. Two of eight finalists have proposed de-centered design concepts: Spanish architect Andres Perea Ortega; and Swiss architect Jean-Pierre Durig. The latter suggests a doughnut-shaped urban area with central areas dedicated to public parks and other green areas, and residential and commercial areas circling the center. I hope these radical concepts are taken seriously. Critics here and in the US had earlier lambastedthe government for emphasizing the city's technology over its sustainability. New Songdo has been described as the world's first "U City" where the U stands for ubiquitous computing. (A ubiquitous city "is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings").

Posted by John Thackara at 01:44 AM

November 21, 2005

Doors of Perception get-together in Seoul

I'll be in Seoul next week (to speak at Design Korea 05) and would be delighted to meet any friends (or friends-of-friends) of Doors, who are also going to that event, or who are in town, the evening of Wednesday 30 November. Go to the Grand InterContinental Seoul, 159-8 Samseong-Dong, Gangnam-Gu, Seoul 135-732, South Korea Tel: +82 2 555 5656, Fax: +82 2 559 7990. This will be an informal self-paid drink along the lines of the get-togthers we've had recently in London and Helsinki. Let's say between 20h and 22h at one of the hotel bars: ask at Reception and I'll leave a message. Feel free to bring or send someone who might be interested in Doors' work.

Posted by John Thackara at 12:46 PM

September 15, 2005

Young words happening in Turin

I generally hate the Olympics but it does sometimes generate curious and interesting side events. Turin, which is hosting the winer Olympics, is hosting the the first electronic Town-Meeting in Italy. In "Young words happening” (great title by the way) young (under 35) people from all over the world will engage in three days of dialogue on key issues of access to information, economic development, and cultural integration. The programme contains some highly questionable definitions of 'development' which alone are worth taking part in order to argue with. The technical platform for this elaborate exercise includes a 200 computer wi-fi net and participatory tools used in the debate about the reconstruction of Ground Zero in New York. It is organised by which is organised by Avventura Urbana (Urban Adventure) If you are interested in taking part you can sign up until Friday the 18th (it starts on the 22nd).

Posted by John Thackara at 06:21 AM | Comments (1)

September 01, 2005

2-D cities

A quck reminder about the conference Urban Screens being organised by Mirjam Struppek in Amsterdam in three weeks from now. Presentations address the growing acreage of large digital moving displays that increasingly pervade our public spaces. Can the mainly commercial use of these screens be broadened to include cultural agendas? A question I hope will also be discussed: Do culture people have any more right than commercial types to fill up the visual landscape with push media? Struppek has collected an interesting array of images and project profiles at the website; if we all add to the collection, it will become a very useful resource.

Posted by John Thackara at 10:17 AM

August 29, 2005

Urban planners in Fused Space

Can new technology improve the quality of public space? We know that technology changes the ways we use public space, but the most important ways tend not to have been consciously designed - they just happened. The widespread use of text-2-meet, for example, was not anticipated by the people who invented text messaging; and many of the egregious phone services dreamed up by marketing agencies disappeared without trace - in most cases deservedly. In this context, it was a lot of fun to be a juror on last year's Fused Space design competition. Fused Space was inspired by the question: can artists and designers do a better job than the marketing industry in creating new application for ITC in public space? The 300+ entries satisfied this juror, at least, that the answer is yes. Fused Space has now become an exhibition - confusingly re-named Fused Space Database - at the Stroom arts centre in The Hague. Using a barcode scanner or a database, visitors can follow several trails through the many ideas raised by the competition’s proposals. On 21 September, a meeting will be held for city and regional policymakers to discuss whether the ideas raised in Fused Space might be used in real-world planning and development.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:15 AM

August 02, 2005

Creative communities in view

For the past year a network of six design schools in different parts of Europe has been collecting real-life examples of social innovation for a project called Emude, in which Doors of Perception is a partner. A lot of work has still to be done analysing these stories to figure out what lessons they might yield for policy makers, infrastructure providers, and other social innovators. But the raw material photographs of the first 70 cases have been put online at the website of the Sustainable Everyday project, and we thought you'd like to see this early material as pictorial evidence of what a post-hypertechnological (Ezio Manzini's word) Europe might be like.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:29 PM | Comments (1)

July 27, 2005

Urban burble

This podcast thing is a boon for bloggers. My interview with Carol Coletta, host and producer of the nationally-syndicated (in the US) public radio show Smart City Radio is now available online. I've said it once to Carol so I don't need to say it again here: Apparently one in five of you will benefit.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:54 PM

July 09, 2005

Street art pro and am

If you prefer interacting with people to gazing raptly at perspex building facades, you'll enjoy the amazing street art festival in Chalon-sur-Saône, 21-24 July. Later on (23-25 September) Label Rue is a B2B street art festival in Ganges, South of France. Label Rue, a smaller and more intimate event, brings together interesting artists and groups, with commissioners from cities where festivals and events are planned. In addition to a parade and performances in the old town on the Friday evening, there's a debate among the pros on the Saturday morning. You need to speak basic French to participate and/or to communicate with the organiser: lecalm@wanadoo.fr. (The reasons I bring these events to your attention are explained in this piece I wrote for Icon magazine about Arts De La Rue).

Posted by John Thackara at 11:15 AM

June 16, 2005

Brabant bound

Another day, another new European city-region. Yesterday I was in Breda, one of five cities in the south of the Netherlands that are joining forces (and 1.2 million citizens) to form a new entity, Brabantstad. The format of the day was interesting. Delegates were grouped into three blocks – investors/property developers; policy makers and city government people; and members of the “creative class”. The idea was to stimulate interaction among the three groups and thereby to foster a “Creative Revolution”in Brabantstad. Some policymakers were irked that the creatives seemed more interested in Brabant’s pigs, than in nanotech; we then debated whether pigs are a knowledge-based industry. Mind you, I don’t think my own first proposal – that Brabantstad should create large design-free zones filled only with free WiFi – was well-received by the developers. We did agree, though, that ‘creativity’ in abstract is a hard thing to implement. Rather than simply assert that it is creative, I proposed that Brabantstad should select an interesting aspect of daily life (such as food systems); commission collaborative, real-world innovation projects; and thereby create new domain knowledge that could be branded “innovated in Brabantstad”. This food-related proposal seemed to go down better. The lavish (and therefore most un-Dutch) lunch served at the conference confirmed my prejudice that the farmers and Catholics in the south of the country are more hospitable than their Calvinist neighbours to the north.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:53 PM

June 09, 2005

Palace of everyday life, anybody?

The Argentine government has launched a competition to find a new use for its spectacular Palace of Mail and Telecommunications in Buenos Aires. One dearly hopes it will not become another bloated and tedious Gugghenheim - so maybe we should join the competition? Doors of Perception will provide an embryonic programme and business plan, but we need a design partner to add the look-and-feel (this is an ideas competition) of a Palace of Daily Life - a social innovation hub for the continent. Suggestions to editor@doorsofperceptionj.com

Posted by John Thackara at 03:48 PM

May 20, 2005

My chances of survival

Is there something in the air in this town? Seattle’s W Hotel has more features than I need and they don’t all work. A 64-page catalogue in my room lists an extraordinary array of services ”masterfully orchestrated to surround you with style, service and comfort”. A menu for pets is available 24 hours. So too are newspapers from Algeria, Croatia and Iceland. A tall vase next to my bed contains artesian water from Norway. A basket under the tv contains a teddy bear, a hat, and an “intimacy kit”. I am nonethelesss bothered, at 3am, by the sound of running water.The taps in my bathroom are turned off, but it transpires that earlier, whilst searching the room for light switches, I had inadvertently turned on the electric water sculpture fountain artwork thing on my table. The thing was probably meant to sooth me. By now I am fully awake, so I decide to make a cup of coffee. Bad move. I can't open the plasticated coffee sachet because my scissors were confiscated at JFK. Then, to set up the KitchenAid coffee machine, I have to follow pictorial instructions that are printed on its back - and the machine sits inside a gloomy unlit hole in the wall. Twenty minutes after I press “on”, the machine sounds exactly like the Tardis in Doctor Who when it’s taking off. But no coffee emerges. I return with a sinking heart to the W's services catalogue to search for “cup-of-coffee”. I am distracted by a 400-word essay, on page 34, entitled “fire”. The text, which is printed in small grey type, instructs me:“Your chances of survival increase with your level or preparedness and ability to act with a clear head. Count the number of doors to the exit and any corners or obstacles along the path so that you can find your way in thick smoke. Feel the door before opening it to see if it is hot. If it is cool, leave. But be sure to take your room key. If you stay in your room, fill the bath and wastebaskets with water. If you are in an upper floor, wait. People who jump from the third floor could be injured”. I contemplate calling the front desk to complain that I can’t jump from my window because it won’t open. But the memory of a divine Copper River salmon at dinner the evening before stays my hand.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:51 PM | Comments (3)

May 06, 2005

Creative class on the run

A trouble-maker sent me a copy of Richard Florida's new book, The Flight of the Creative Class - hoping, no doubt, that I would be rude about it. Perish the thought. Florida's new book has two virtues. First, Florida argues for "a broadening of the definition of creativity that will ennoble and encourage the everyday efforts of 'ordinary occupations'...from housekeeper to fieldworker". Now a class, by definiton, is a subset of a population, not its entirety; extending the concept of "creative class" to cover the entire US population destroys the (hated by me) notion that there is such a thing as a creative class at all. Which is a welcome outcome. Second, the book argues powerfully that diversity and immigration are the lifeblood of (America's) economy - a progressive policy aim that we should all support. Citing many examples of foreign-born entrepreneurs who have played central roles in the US economy - from Google's Sergey Brin, to Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems - Florida argues that "the real foreign threat to the American economy is not terrorism; it's that we may make creative and talented people stop wanting to come here". The book ends with a ghastly sounding proposal for a "Global Creativity Commission" - but, with luck, that will not prevent the book dampening the enthusiasm of urban planners for creativity ghettos.

Posted by John Thackara at 01:11 PM

April 21, 2005

Are cosmopolitan cities creative?

Do mixed societies innovate more than homogeneous ones? How do new ideas and innovations emerge when people of diverse cultures interact? Comedia has launched an eighteen month project across cities in several countries called The Intercultural City to find out how interractions between cultures might be formed into new products, services, and styles - and how these then spread. The idea is to provide policy makers in city development, business, and innovation management with evidence and a toolkit of techniques with which to encourage greater intercultural innovation. Comedia have a hunch that "there are certain people who make things happen and provide opportunities in cities, and more so for immigrant and minority groups. Such networkers, intermediaries, catalysts have a greater facility to move within and particularly between communities. They have a higher degree of intercultural networking capacity". That hunch will be tested and results published in a final report, with a conference to discuss it, scheduled for March 2006.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:09 PM

March 19, 2005

Jugaad and its limits

Indian users of technology-based devices cannot rely on formal networks of distribution, support and maintenance: these are often incomplete, unimaginative or unrealistically priced. They therefore turn to the temporary fixes or ‘jugaads’ carried out by Indian street technicians. An army of pavement-based engineers and fixers keeps engines, television tubes, compressors - and a thousand other devices – working long after their prime. Right outside the Doors 8 office here in Delhi, for example, hundreds of tiny workshops, plus sole traders sitting on on the street, sell (and fix) the countless hardware peripherals that keep office life running. Everything from toner cartridges to USB sticks is available, and gloomy but bustling basements contain amazing arrays of ancient monitors, terminals and motherboards awaiting repair. Mind you, a jugaad for my rapidly diminishing connectivity has stymied even this army: my webmail has now gone on strike in solidarity with my cable connection at home - so I now believe myself to be orchestrating this global event using sms. Seems to work fine.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:34 AM | Comments (3)

February 22, 2005

Architecture as old media

Architecture used to focus mainly on the design of buildings. Nowadays, the spaces between them are also important. Applications such as geocaching make even small real-world spaces easy to locate and access; this transforms once marginal spaces into viable assets. A new variant of this theme, called urban agriculture, converts other kinds of idle and underused resources - manpower, space and land, solid and liquid waste - into cheap, fresh and nutritious food for local populations. Aditya Dev Sood (who trained as an architect) leads a panel on these issues at Doors 8 together with ex-architect Marco Susani, who leads the team developing new service concepts for Motorola, and Usman Haque, who designs haunted spaces which he describes as 'conversant'.

Posted by John Thackara at 07:28 AM

February 11, 2005

Open Source Architecture

Usman Haque has posted an enticing description of his pre-Doors8 workshop on Open Source Architecture. Please remember that that you need to register first in order to take part in Usman's workshop.

Posted by John Thackara at 08:49 AM

February 08, 2005

The shadow city

One of the North-South links we will explore at Doors 8 concerns the importance of un-designed urban areas as sites of social innovation. Half or more of the inhabitants of major South Asian cities like Delhi are 'illegal', but they are economically active, too. In Europe interest is growing in so-called 'free zones' as breeding grounds for creativity. An excellent report from Urban Unlimited called 'The Shadow City' compares freezones in Rotterdam and Brussels with other examples in Berlin, Helsinki, Vienna and Naples. The report promotes the idea that some areas be left deliberately unplanned - protected, even, from the predations of politicians, social reformers, and developers. Now there's a thought: Saving cities from design in the name of creativity. The text of 'The Shadow City' may be donwloaded from this page (look at the bottom left for "Shadow City in english").There's a thoughtful article on the complex issues raised by slums and development here.. I also just discovered that Robert Neuwirth has written a book called Shadow City and has a blog on squatters and squatter cities around the world.

Posted by John Thackara at 04:56 PM

January 14, 2005

Spatial slop

Tristram Hunt's terrific book about the rise and fall of the Victorian city in Britain is full of insights about about infrastructure. One reason for the decline of cities, for Hunt, was the failure to control housing densities. By 1897 the quaker inspired Cadbury Bounville estate was built at 20 dwellings per hectare, and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City was built at a density of thirty dwellings per hectare - the latter being about one eighth the density of a traditonal nineteenth city street. The twentieth century carried on in this spatially sloppy way: Four million houses were built during the inter-war years in low-density suburbs; the greedy waste of land lasted into the 1990s when average density for new dwellings remained at 23 dwellings per hectare. The 1999 Urban Task Force chaired by (Lord) Richard Rogers proposed new build density of 50 dwellings per hectare, but this modest benchamark did not appear in the 2000 Urban White Paper. The developers and despoilers proved too strong. Tristram Hunt. Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004

Posted by John Thackara at 06:49 AM

December 13, 2004

Clogging up the City: Flows of Fat in Bodies and Sewers

I'm repeating a plug here (published before in our newsletter) for this memorable paper, by Simon Marvin and Will Medd, about the circulation, deposition and removal of fat in bodies, sewers and cities. "Our emphasis is on the metabolisms of fat across the different levels of bodies, infrastructures and cities" say the authors; "We explore three sites of fat (im)mobility: first, the excessive deposition of fat in obese bodies and the rising urban fat count; second, the sewer-fat crisis generated by the blockages of coagulated fat in urban sewers; and, finally the league tables used to rank the Fatness and Fitness of US cities. The paper examines the shifting configurations of flows between bodies, infrastructure and cities. It was published in April, but if it's an April Fool's number it's a truly elaborate one. [Simon Marvin and Will Medd University of Salford, Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures Clogging up the City: Flows of Fat in Bodies and Sewers].

Posted by John Thackara at 05:27 PM

November 22, 2004

Museum mania in China

The Chinese government intends to build 1,000 new museums across the country by 2015.A scary piece by Elizabeth Casale in The Platform, an e-zine on cultural policy, says that with approximately 100 urban areas with a population of 1 million or more, China's place-based cultural strategy favours buildings as a symbol of cultural sophistication over the other components necessary for a vibrant cultural life: cultural producers, products and consumers. Stories have been circulating about the Shanghai Grand Theatre often half-empty for lack of interesting programming, Casale writes, or of state-of-the-art equipment that few employees know how to use.

Elizabeth Casale: China's New Cultural Revolution

Posted by John Thackara at 08:32 AM | Comments (1)

October 04, 2004

Human scale architecture

Architects frequently complain to me that the architectural models they make for competitions cost them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. That's curious, because one-tenth scale model of a person standing can be purchased for 75 cents - far less than the $5 it costs to buy a model car at the same scale.
www.howardmodels.com

Posted by John Thackara at 11:18 PM | Comments (1)

September 12, 2003

The post-spectacular city

(This is my lecture to a conference at Westergasfabriek, in Amsterdam, called Creativity and the City, on 25 September 2003)

In Rajhastan, travelling storytellers go from village to village, unannounced, and simply start a performance when they arrive. Although each story has a familiar plot - the story telling tradition dates back thousands of years - each event is unique. Prompted by the storytellers, who hold up pictorial symbols on sticks, the villagers interact with the story. They joke, interject, and sometimes argue with the storyteller. They are part of the performance.

Hearing about these storytellers reminded how much we have lost, in the 'developed' world, of the un-mediated, impromptu interactions that once made cities vital.

We now design messages, not interactions. The world is awash in print, and ads, and billboards, and packaging, and spam. Semiotic pollution. Brand intrusion at every turn.

Our buildings are now about one-way-communication, too. Sports stadia, museums, theatres, science and convention centres. Such buildings do an accomplished technical job: they deliver pre-cooked experiences to passive crowds.

And whom do we have to thank for this semiotic pollution, for the catatonic spaces that despoil our physical and perceptual landscapes?

The "creative class". That's who's responsible. In the same way that mill owners optimised mass production, the creative class has optimised the society of the spectacle.

At least mill owners bequeathed us well-made industrial cities. The creative class will be less fondly remembered. Their legacy is meaningless, narcissistic cities.

Luckily, the era of the creative class is over. Point-to-mass advertising, onanistic art, and big-ticket spectacles, are over.

We are in a transition to a post-spectacular, post-massified culture. Our cities, from now on, will be judged by their capacity to foster collaboration, encounter, intimacy, and work. Much like cities used to be judged, before they fell into the hands of the creative class.

I'll explain more about these design criteria for cities in the second half of my talk. In the first half, I explain just why it would be foolish to dedicate our cities to 'creatives' and the impoverished, sender-receiver model that informs their activities.

SPECTACLES MAKE US BLIND

There are three reasons why it would be foolish to entrust the future of our cities to the creative class.

The first is its autism. Autism is defined in Webster as "absorption in self-centred subjective mental activity, especially when accompanied by a marked withdrawal from reality".

An example. A week ago I attended a meeting here in Amsterdam on the subject of "Hosting" The invitation posed an interesting question: ”What is the relationship between art biennales, and their host cities?" Many international art powerbrokers turned up for this meeting, which was hosted by an organisation called Manifesta. Ten or 12 of them sat round a table.

In the event, the meeting was a waste of time and space. All the curators and critics and producers discussed were 'viewers' and 'audiences' and 'publics'. They banged on endlessly about the business of biennales, but lacked any insight into the changing nature of business.

It dawned on me, as I struggled to stay awake, that Art has become most attractive to the interests it once ridiculed.

The tourism industry loves art because its events and museums are 'attractions'. Property developers love art because a bijou gallery lends allure to egregious projects. For city marketers, an art biennale bestows glamour, and an aura of intelligence, on a city.

"Our events are not summer camps", pleaded Franco Bonami, director of the Venice Biennale. (Mr Bonami invited more than 500 artists to this year's event). But he did not mention one single word about what, if anything, these 500 people had to say - or why the rest of us should care.

After two hours I had to leave. "Hosting" felt like a sales meeting for Saga Holidays.

So then I went to Japan where Prada, which is said to be 1.5 billion euros in debt, has lavished $87 million on a new Herzog and de Meuron-designed store, in Tokyo. Now for Aaron Betsky, (a previous speaker, Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute) the Prada building would be a right and proper thing to do. Shopping, he just told us, is the fundamental purpose of cities today.

For me, the whole Prada project smells like the last days of Rome. The Plexiglas exterior, which is like bubble-wrap, certainly stands out. The new shop is on the Tokyo equivalent of P C Hooftstraat. (Amsterdam's fashion street). I popped in for a look.

Ten minutes. Quite nice. Been there, done that.

Prada spent 87 million bucks on a clothes shop that contained nothing I wanted to buy, but that's their right. A creative consultant called Christopher Everard told The Economist that, "by using iconic architects, the label is building brand equity". Mr Everard's firm is called "InterLife Consultancy". I emailed him the suggestion that he change its name to "Get A Life Consultancy" - but he has not replied.

Besides, Pravda’s investment is chickenfeed, a mere grain of corn, compared to Tokyo's Roppongi Hills tower. This 800,000 square metre monster had just opened when I was there. No expense has been spared by Yoshiko Mori, its developer, to compensate local people for the sacrifice of their old neighbourhood to progress and creativity. Several traditional features have been retained, I was told, including a Japanese garden, a Buddhist temple, and a children's park.

When I visited Roppongi Hills, these human-scale traces of old Tokyo proved hard to find. They were hidden among the 200 shops, 75 restaurants, and a zillion square feet of office space and apartments that fill the building.

The Zen garden may be lost, but compensation and enlightenment await you at the top of the tower: the Mori Museum of Art.

A Who's Who of the global art establishment - including Nicholas Serota from the Tate, and David Elliot, its British Director - have joined this lavishly funded enterprise. Glenn Lowry from the New York MoMA is also on board, apparently unperturbed by his client's appropriation of the Moma name.

The museum opens next month with a biting and critical look at the modern society which begat it. The show is called, ”Happiness: a survival guide for art and life".

Only people with a 'community passport' are admitted to this Xanadu of art-as-happiness. The passport, curiously, closely resembles a credit card. But still: it gains you access to all those shops and restaurants and - piece de resistance - an orange bar designed by Conran Associates.

The art museum itself was not yet open when I visited, but six museum shops were. They were doing a roaring trade.

"Art, design and happiness" says the brochure, "the kind of place that we want to become".

Not of all of us, Mori-san. "Tourism - human circulation considered as consumption - is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal". Guy Debord wrote that more than 40 years ago, in The Society Of the Spectacle. He would not have warmed to Roppongi Hills.

In much the same way that that tourism kills the toured, 'cultural industries' like museums-and-shopping destroy diversity and desolate their host environment. CIs are like GM crops: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem.

I do not deny that the economic case for the creative class is strong. After all, designing all those spectacles is big business.

A new trade fair and exhibition in Philadelphia, which calls itself "Exp", announces itself as "The Event That Defines The Experience Industry". I didn't go to Exp, but I did go to the website. The middle-aged, white male speakers boasted a remarkable collection of jowls and bad haircuts. They promised to tell me, "how to gain a greater share of your guest's discretionary time and disposable income"; how to "destroy the myth that great experience need huge budgets" (sic); and, "how to surf the generational shift".

The website did not mention a session on how to speak English, but this omission did not deter the creative classes. They flocked to Exp - enthralled. no doubt, by its convenient clustering of four key themes: Corporate Visitor Centres, Retail, Casinos, and Museums.

The other big spectacle business is sport. Sophisticated Paris, in its bid for the Olympics, says that sport is replacing culture as an attractor in urban regeneration. "The role that investment plays in the Games of the 21st century will be comparable to that played by industrialisation at the end of the 19th century", burbles their bid.

Claude Bebear, chairman of the Paris Olympic Committee, does not think of sport as kicking a ball around a field. He thinks about twenty million dollar sponsorships, and the well-being of the people who provide the spectacle. Claude's plan for a sporty Paris features private road lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and officials. A travel time of 12 minutes, from bed to track, is promised to the muscle-bound sportspersons and their crypto-fascist paymasters. If the bed-t-track journey proves too taxing, an internet and electronic games centre will be provided to "help athletes relax and get in touch with the outside world". Le Moniteur, eds, 2001, Paris olympiques: twelve architectute and urban planning projects for the 2008 games, Paris, Editions du Moniteur

ACTION MAN

But I digress. I've made the point that pre-programmed cultural 'attractions' and 'experiences' are on the wane. The nightmare of "art and design as happiness" is nearly over.

And I should also stress that the "creatives" who make them are not personally to blame. They - we - are the symptom, not the cause, of a cultural affliction that touches us all.

So what are alternatives? This brings me to the second part of my talk.

Tor Norretranders, in his book The user illusion, explains beautifully what's missing from the mediated, specacular, dis-located, and disembodied experiences that blight our lives. Once we know what's missing, we can put it back.

"Most of what we experience we can never tell each other about" writes Tor. "During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information that our senses pass on to our brains".
In other words, the unconscious part of us receives much less information than the conscious part of us. We experience millions of bits a second but can tell each other about only a few dozen.

Humans, concludes Norretranders, are designed for a much richer existence than processing a dribble of data from computer screen, or a wide-screen display in Times Square.There is far too little information in the Information Age. Spectacles may be spectacular, but they are low bandwidth.

"I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action, over a life of consumption. Rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to produce and consume, the future depends upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action".

That was Ivan Illich, in 1973. Thirty years ahead of the rest of us, Illich argued for the creation of convivial and productive situations - including our cities. A sustainable city, Illich understood, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction - not a city for the passive participation in entertainment. www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm

What matters most in a post-spectacular city is activity, not architecture. As the director Peter Brook has said, "It is not a question of good building, and bad. A beautiful place may never bring about an explosion of life, while a haphazard hall may be a tremendous meeting place. This is the mystery of the theatre, but in the understanding of this mystery lies the one science. It is not a matter of saying analytically, what are the requirements, how best they could be organized — this will usually bring into existence a tame, conventional, often cold hall. The science of theatre building must come from studying what it is that brings about the more vivid relationships between people."

Tame, conventional, cold. How many buildings do those words recall? Torsten Hagerstrand has studied dysfunctional spaces - and good ones - and how people use space and time for thirty years. He says it is the ability to make contact with people that determines the success of a transport system or location. Hagerstand [q in Whitelegg) Hagerstrand T, Space time and the human condition, in Karlquist A, Lundquist L, and Snickars F (eds) Dynamic allocation of urban space, Saxon House, Lexington MA 1975

Peter Brook, too, as I said, asked us to focus on what it is that what it is that brings about "the more vivid relationships between people."

One of those things is the mobile phone. It's impacting remarkably on our interactions with space and community. Mobile phones stimulate connections between people who already know each other, or have something in common. They can also help crowds assemble, as we saw in Seattle, in 1999.

That's not major news. The more interesting change is the way wireless communications connect people, resources, and places to each other on a real-time basis, and in new combinations. Demand responsive services, as they call them in the (service design) trade.

Traditional city planning designates different zones for different activities: industrial, residential and commercial. Telecommunications are changing the nature and inter-action of activities that "take place" in these three types of location.

Think of the taxi systems you have encountered. They are demand responsive services, to a degree. The old model was that you would ring a dispatcher; the dispatcher offers your trip all the drivers on a radio circuit;
One driver would accept the job; and the dispatcher would send that taxi to you.

A better way, now being introduced in many cities, is that you ring the system; the system recognises who you are, and where you are; it identifies where the nearest available taxi is; and it sends that taxi to you. Dynamic, real-time, resource allocation.

Now: replace the world "taxi" with the word sandwich. Or with the words, "someone to show me round the back streets of the old town". Or the words, "a nerd to come and fix my laptop" Or the words, "someone to play ping pong with". Or suppose you feel like helping out in a school, and hanging out with kids for a day.

In every case, networked communications, and dynamic resource allocation, have the potential to connect you, with what you want. It just needs to be organised.

You could be a supplier, too. Perhaps you have time on your hands. Make good sandwiches. Know the old town like the back of your hand. Have a nerdy daughter who's looking for work. Know there's a ping-pong table in Mrs Graham's garage, which they never use. Or perhaps you don't feel like dealing with Form 5 on your own this week.

What do you do? You call the system. Or the system calls you.

The reason I've jumped from the creative class, to mobile phones and networks, is this. If the post-spectacular city is about person-to-person encounter, technology can help us achieve that. The consequence can be a profound change in the ways that we operate, and live, in cities.

With networked communications we will be able to access and use everything from a car, to a portable drill, only when we need it. We won't have to own them, just know how and where to find them.

Did you know that the average power drill is used for ten minutes in its entire life? Or that most cars stand idle 90 per cent of the time? The same principle - of use, not own - can apply to the buildings, roads, squares and spaces that fill our cities.

But the killer app is access to other people. People is what makes cities different from other places. The creative city will be the city that finds ways to strip out all the transaction and infrastructure costs that make it expensive to hire people to help us do stuff.

In retrospect, we got the information age completely wrong. We thought it would be smart to remove people from services: we called it 'disintermediation'. It reads as it was: a pain in the nexk.

We also thought we couild do without place.Nicholas Negroponte stated in Being Digital, the dotcommer's bible, that "the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place,at a specific time". Lars Lerup,dean of the architecture school at Rice University - and a dotcommer manque - proclaimed in a book approriately named Pandemonium that "bandwidth has replaced the boulevard. Five blocks west has given way to the mouseclick. After thousands of years of bricks held together by mortar, the new metropolis is toggled together by attention spans." Brandon Hookway, 1999, PANDEMONIUM Princeton Architectural Press New York.

All that stuff was, in retrospect, piffle. But we all did it, including this speaker. He apologises, and pleads only that he is a tiny bit wiser after the event.

The point is that the information age has been added to the industrial age. Telematic space has been added to Cartesian space. The one did not supplant the other.

And mobile phones and networks do not make the city disappear. On the contrary, they render the city itself more powerful as an interface.

Sometimes this is at the level of tools. Experiments are under way in which mobile phone act like a remote control to activate technology in our surroundings. You stand at a bus stop, and summon up your personal web page on one of the panels. J C Decaux, or Viacom Outdoors, control millions of such urban surfaces which could be used for such an application.

Researchers at Interaction-Ivrea, in Italy, had another good idea: connect these displays to the printers in ATM machines. You could print out SMS messages, or a local map, on the ATM printer.

Other projects treat the whole city, not just its furniture, as an interface. A project called New York Wireless, for example, has identified more than 12,000 wireless access hot points throughout Manhattan alone, and put their location on a website."The result is a new layer of infrastructure", says co-founder Anthony Townsend."But no streets were torn up. No laws were passed. This network has been made possible by the proliferation of ever more affordable wireless routers and networking devices. Mobile devices re-assert geography on the internet".

Marko Ahtisaari, a future gazer at Nokia, says that enabling proximity - getting people together, in real space - has become a stratgic focus, the killer application of wirelsss communications."Mobile telephony might seem very much to do with being apart, but a lot of telecommunications behaviour is aimed at getting together physically in the same place", he says.

Proximity and locality are natural features of the economy. Worldwide, the vast majority of small and medium-sized companies - that's most of all companies - operate within a radius of 50km. Most of the world’s GDP is highly localised. Local conditions, local trading patterns, local networks, local skills, and local culture, are critical success factors for the majority of organizations.

Mobile phone and wireless-enabled gadgets enable us to access people, or resources, or services - just-in-time, and just-in-place.

By doping that, they also design away the need for mobility, or much of it. Demand-responsive services, combined with location-awareness, combined with dynamic resource allocation, have the capacity dramatically to reduce the mobility-supporting hardware of a city: its roads, vehicles, malls and car parks.

Imagine there's a kind of slider on your phone. You set it to "sandwich" and "within five minutes walk" or "within a five dollar cab ride" - and use those parameters to search for whatever it is you need.

You don’t need to own it. You don't even need to go far to get it. You just need to know how to access it.

MONDAY MORNING TO-DOS

Talks like this one are supposed end with a list of things you might do on Monday morning. But I just criticised creatives for over-designing our cities, so it would be hypocritical of me to give you a list of things to do.

So let me summarise. I have said that we are in a transition to a post-spectacular, post-massified culture. It's for this reason that it would be foolish to hand over our cities to the "creative class".

They just don't get it. More to the point, their business model drives them on. Our cities are over-designed because the creative classes get paid for designing things.

'Creatives' don't get paid for leaving well alone.That's a conundrum we'll need to resolve.

The second part of my talk touched on some of the ways wireless communication, and networks, enable people, places, and things, to be connected in new and often unexpected ways - and times. I also explained that the information age has not replaced the real-word age - but it is certainly transforming the ways we use and live in it.

I do have one suggestion for what you can do on Monday morning. Go out and buy Italo Calvino's wonderful book, Invisible Cities - of which the following is an extract:

“The Great Kahn contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierachies, swollen, tense, ponderous. "The empire is being crushed by its own weight” Kublai thinks, and in his dreams,cities as light as kites appear, pierced like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness”

Posted by John Thackara at 08:47 PM

July 22, 2003

Chain gangs: reinventing the Hanseatic League

In which I talk to Winy Maas about the design of webs, networks and archipelagos of cities and regions. This story was published in July 2003 In Domus magazine.

Sustainable cities, working cities, are necessarily complex, heavily linked, and diverse. As the English writer Will Hutton has commented, just as local knowledge and information was key 150 years ago, when there were 80 different steps in the button-making industry, so, too, complex local knowledge and linkages are also key today if you are a software, media, care, or educational enterprise.The ideal city needs to contain a rich mixture of craft-based workshops, consultants, law firms, accountants, distribution and logistics companies, advertising agencies, universities, research labs, database publishers, and local or regional government offices. Unique skills, clusters of specialised suppliers, local roots, and a variety of human skills that are unique to a region - all these are a powerful advantage for local cities and regions on today's economic stage.

This picture confronts smaller cities with a dilemma: they cannot realistically offer the same density and complexity of knowledge skills that a large metropolis can. The metropolitan centers have their own problems, it is true, but they will always win on diversity, which is a key to evolutionary success. So how are the smaller ones to compete?

According to Winy Maas, a principal of the Dutch bureau MVRDV, the answer lies in webs, chains, networks, and ‘archipelagos’ of cities and smaller regions. By aggregating their hard and soft assets, collective cities - or multi-centered cities - can match the array of functions and resources of bigger centres, while also delivering superior social quality. The ability of small cities to offer a context that supports intimacy and encounter - what the French call ‘la vie associative’ - is where small-city webs will win out over the big centres.

City alliances are not a completely new idea. City networks date back to the thirteenth century when, in the Hansa League, an alliance of more than seventy merchant cities collaborated effectively for their common good in order to control exports and imports over a wide swathe of Europe. A powerful network of trading partners, with its own accounting system and shared vocabulary - the Hansa League became one of the major economic forces of the Middle Ages. At one stage it controlled much of Scandinavia, the Baltic states, northern Germany and Poland - and outposts can be found even today as far apart as Scotland and the Basque country.

TERRITORIAL CAPITAL

Today's urban and regional networks can be traced back to the formation of the International Union of Cities in 1913. The Treaty of Rome, in 1957, accelerated the emergence of networks of cities and regions as supra-nation state actors in Europe. Increased globalization has put considerable pressure on cities to network among themselves - sharing, partnering and learning. Globalisation has also driven smaller cities to re-discover Hansa-style alliances, and to market them using new business techniques. According to Philip Kotler, a marketing professor in the United States, some ten per cent of business-to-business advertising - a vast amount - is now spent on marketing places, regions and nations. Kotler has identified 80,000 communities within the EU which, in one way or another, need to differentiate themselves from each other. Place marketing - or, more properly, place and regional design - aggregates and networks complementary functions and core competiencies of a region. In Europe the concept of ‘territorial capital’ is used increasingly to describe the synthesis of these hard and soft assets of a region.The hard assets include natural beauty and features; shopping facilities; cultural attractions; buildings, museums, monuments, and so on. Soft assets are all about people and culture: skills, traditions, festivals, events and occasions, situations, settings, social ties, civic loyalty, memories, and capacity to learn.

For networked, multi-centered cities to succeed, these different kinds of territorial and social and intellectual capital need to be linked together by a combination of physical and informational networks. The hubs, links, and physical and informational flows of a region need to be proactively designed in ways that help a working culture flourish.

The biggest pressure of all on cities to collaborate is environmental. Bigger cities guzzle more energy and resources per head than do smaller ones. Smaller cities, which are located closer to resources, and in which people and goods need to move less, are lighter. Cities also guzzle land. A German Federal Statistical Office forecast in 1997 that Germany would turn into a 100 per cent settled landmass within 82 years if three per cent economic growth persisted.

MULTIMODAL MOBILITY

Mobile communications are already transforming time-space relations in favour of smaller towns, working together. Where this author lives, in the Netherlands, planners hope that transport telematics will make it possible for me to to think more, and drive less. They expect to reduce so-called vehicle hours (the time spent by vehicles in traffic) by an ambitious 25 per cent. A key concept in Dutch policy is the multimodal or 'chain approach'. The idea is that information systems will help me work out the best combination of walking, bicycle, private car, train, bus, plane, or boat - before I set off. Right now, individual transport information systems are pretty good - train and bus websites are reliable and reasonably easy to use. But they don't work together. The next step is so to connect systems that I will enter the beginning and end points of a journey (in place, and in time) into the programme, and be offered a menu of ways to complete it.

As Nokia future-gazer Marko Ahtisaari explained at Doors of Perception 7: Flow, mobile phones can enhance proximity and reduce the allure of ‘far’. “Although mobility and mobile telephony seem very much to do with being apart, in fact the evidence is quite to the contrary,” he said. “A lot of telecommunications behaviour is aimed at getting together physically - I mean, quite simply, physically close, the stuff that happens between the one-to-ten centimetres range and room-size interaction. While we talk about devices being connected, and everything being connected in a technological sense, social interaction will be a prime driver in the future as well, even in technologically enhanced social interaction.”

CLUSTERS OF COMPLEXITY

Architects and spatial planners started thinking about clusters in the 1960s. In 1963, Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff wrote that, in designing on a large scale, "We must look at the links, the interactions, and the patterns." Following that initial insight architecture and planning evolved rather slowly - but in recent years the sustainability agenda has given the networked approach new impetus.

According to Winy Maas, "The magnitude of information concerning a region is overwhelming: complex, and constantly changing. This multi-scalar approach is new for design. It is nearly impossible to represent all the relationships, and the webs of interdependencies, of a region. The integration of hard and soft factors is complex enough - but planners, policy makers and designers now also have to deal with a new dimension of complexity: a variety of new actors. Privatised network industries, such as railway companies, airports, electricity supliers, and telecommunications operators, are influential actors. So, too, are citizens who, with growing confidence, are demanding that social agendas - such as social inclusion, or sustainability - are factored into planning processes.

"As the speed of spatial, economical and political developments and processes accelerates, we need a more dynamic approach and tools for planning", says Maas. " Such tools turn massive volumes of raw data into visualizations. This is not about broad-brush visions of the idealised futures, says Maas. "We keep getting asked to make 'visions' for cities and regions", Maas explains, "but I want to make planning, design and thinking tools that people can really use. We are measuring an increasing variety of things, and collecting vast quantities of data. The question is: how to use it. How are we to perceive and connect all this information in ways that add value and meaning to the raw data? Increasingly, that means how do we represent the data, visually, in order to work on and with it. We also need to make these tools more accessible and usable by non-specialised actors and stakeholders".

THE REGIONMAKER

Maas and his colleagues have therefore become toolmakers. They have developed a family of software tools, called the Regionmaker, which was first devised by MVRDV for a project called RhineRuhrCity .The Kommunalverband Ruhrgebiet (KVR), a union of cities in the region, has invested in a series of initiatives to improve its post-indstrial situation, and today fewer than six percent work works in coal and steel. But perceptions remain that this is the Detroit of Europe, a landscape dotted with ghost towns, overgrown industries and polluted areas. "The region is very well connected logistically," says Maas. "It has incredible water resources, a dense university system, and successful media and computer industries. But these assets are fragmented. As you find in so many places in Europe, it's a mosaic of competing municipalities, rather than one entity." Hence the project to reposition the area as one place, one city: RhineRuhrCity.

The Regionmaker, which combines the function of search engine, browser, and graphical interface, brings together a variety of existing information sources and flows - for example, demographic data, or outputs from Geographical Informations Systems (GIS) or ‘geomatics’, as they are now called. "In a nutshell," says Maas, "the idea is that within the context of a globalizing world, international databanks, advanced computers, internet and intranet systems, game technology, global monitoring and information systems, can be integrated in ways that convincingly represent regions. With the Regionmaker, there is no limit to visualization. You can look at maps, study charts, access databases, export images, import video feeds from helicopters or satellites, connect to the internet, use CAD drawings, and so on."

Maas anticipates that the Regionmaker will evolve as a tree-structure of sub-machines and routines. MVRDV have plans to add representations of knowledge on the movement of people, goods and information. A housing sub-routine could develop scenarios for optimal housing designs. A light calculator could optimise the need for and control of, natural light in built spaces. A ‘function mixer’ would propose optimal mixtures of activities according to economic, social or cultural criteria.

Maas speculates that systems such as the Regionmaker could become decision support systems in a more pro-active and critical sense. "We could add an Evaluator, or an Evolver that can suggest criticism of the input we make," he speculates. But there will never be a single programme for everything - and Regionmaker will never be finished. "We think of it not as all-in-one Big Brother software, but as an intricate network of different software programmes operating at different spatial dimensions."

Posted by John Thackara at 06:00 PM

June 12, 2003

Chain gangs: reinventing the Hanseatic League

(In which John Thackara talks to Winy Maas about the design of webs, networks and archipelagos of cities and regions. This was published in July 2003 in Domus magazine)

Sustainable cities, working cities, are necessarily complex, heavily linked, and diverse. As the English writer Will Hutton has commented, just as local knowledge and information was key 150 years ago, when there were 80 different steps in the button-making industry, so, too, complex local knowledge and linkages are also key today if you are a software, media, care, or educational enterprise.The ideal city needs to contain a rich mixture of craft-based workshops, consultants, law firms, accountants, distribution and logistics companies, advertising agencies, universities, research labs, database publishers, and local or regional government offices. Unique skills, clusters of specialised suppliers, local roots, and a variety of human skills that are unique to a region - all these are a powerful advantage for local cities and regions on today's economic stage.

This picture confronts smaller cities with a dilemma: they cannot realistically offer the same density and complexity of knowledge skills that a large metropolis can. The metropolitan centers have their own problems, it is true, but they will always win on diversity, which is a key to evolutionary success. So how are the smaller ones to compete?

According to Winy Maas, a principal of the Dutch bureau MVRDV, the answer lies in webs, chains, networks, and ‘archipelagos’ of cities and smaller regions. By aggregating their hard and soft assets, collective cities - or multi-centered cities - can match the array of functions and resources of bigger centres, while also delivering superior social quality. The ability of small cities to offer a context that supports intimacy and encounter - what the French call ‘la vie associative’ - is where small-city webs will win out over the big centres.

City alliances are not a completely new idea. City networks date back to the thirteenth century when, in the Hansa League, an alliance of more than seventy merchant cities collaborated effectively for their common good in order to control exports and imports over a wide swathe of Europe. A powerful network of trading partners, with its own accounting system and shared vocabulary - the Hansa League became one of the major economic forces of the Middle Ages. At one stage it controlled much of Scandinavia, the Baltic states, northern Germany and Poland - and outposts can be found even today as far apart as Scotland and the Basque country.

TERRITORIAL CAPITAL

Today's urban and regional networks can be traced back to the formation of the International Union of Cities in 1913. The Treaty of Rome, in 1957, accelerated the emergence of networks of cities and regions as supra-nation state actors in Europe. Increased globalization has put considerable pressure on cities to network among themselves - sharing, partnering and learning. Globalisation has also driven smaller cities to re-discover Hansa-style alliances, and to market them using new business techniques. According to Philip Kotler, a marketing professor in the United States, some ten per cent of business-to-business advertising - a vast amount - is now spent on marketing places, regions and nations. Kotler has identified 80,000 communities within the EU which, in one way or another, need to differentiate themselves from each other. Place marketing - or, more properly, place and regional design - aggregates and networks complementary functions and core competiencies of a region. In Europe the concept of ‘territorial capital’ is used increasingly to describe the synthesis of these hard and soft assets of a region.The hard assets include natural beauty and features; shopping facilities; cultural attractions; buildings, museums, monuments, and so on. Soft assets are all about people and culture: skills, traditions, festivals, events and occasions, situations, settings, social ties, civic loyalty, memories, and capacity to learn.

For networked, multi-centered cities to succeed, these different kinds of territorial and social and intellectual capital need to be linked together by a combination of physical and informational networks. The hubs, links, and physical and informational flows of a region need to be proactively designed in ways that help a working culture flourish.

The biggest pressure of all on cities to collaborate is environmental. Bigger cities guzzle more energy and resources per head than do smaller ones. Smaller cities, which are located closer to resources, and in which people and goods need to move less, are lighter. Cities also guzzle land. A German Federal Statistical Office forecast in 1997 that Germany would turn into a 100 per cent settled landmass within 82 years if three per cent economic growth persisted.

MULTIMODAL MOBILITY

Mobile communications are already transforming time-space relations in favour of smaller towns, working together. Where this author lives, in the Netherlands, planners hope that transport telematics will make it possible for me to to think more, and drive less. They expect to reduce so-called vehicle hours (the time spent by vehicles in traffic) by an ambitious 25 per cent. A key concept in Dutch policy is the multimodal or 'chain approach'. The idea is that information systems will help me work out the best combination of walking, bicycle, private car, train, bus, plane, or boat - before I set off. Right now, individual transport information systems are pretty good - train and bus websites are reliable and reasonably easy to use. But they don't work together. The next step is so to connect systems that I will enter the beginning and end points of a journey (in place, and in time) into the programme, and be offered a menu of ways to complete it.

As Nokia future-gazer Marko Ahtisaari explained at Doors of Perception 7: Flow, mobile phones can enhance proximity and reduce the allure of ‘far’. “Although mobility and mobile telephony seem very much to do with being apart, in fact the evidence is quite to the contrary,” he said. “A lot of telecommunications behaviour is aimed at getting together physically - I mean, quite simply, physically close, the stuff that happens between the one-to-ten centimetres range and room-size interaction. While we talk about devices being connected, and everything being connected in a technological sense, social interaction will be a prime driver in the future as well, even in technologically enhanced social interaction.”

CLUSTERS OF COMPLEXITY

Architects and spatial planners started thinking about clusters in the 1960s. In 1963, Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff wrote that, in designing on a large scale, "We must look at the links, the interactions, and the patterns." Following that initial insight architecture and planning evolved rather slowly - but in recent years the sustainability agenda has given the networked approach new impetus.

According to Winy Maas, "The magnitude of information concerning a region is overwhelming: complex, and constantly changing. This multi-scalar approach is new for design. It is nearly impossible to represent all the relationships, and the webs of interdependencies, of a region. The integration of hard and soft factors is complex enough - but planners, policy makers and designers now also have to deal with a new dimension of complexity: a variety of new actors. Privatised network industries, such as railway companies, airports, electricity supliers, and telecommunications operators, are influential actors. So, too, are citizens who, with growing confidence, are demanding that social agendas - such as social inclusion, or sustainability - are factored into planning processes.

"As the speed of spatial, economical and political developments and processes accelerates, we need a more dynamic approach and tools for planning", says Maas. " Such tools turn massive volumes of raw data into visualizations. This is not about broad-brush visions of the idealised futures, says Maas. "We keep getting asked to make 'visions' for cities and regions", Maas explains, "but I want to make planning, design and thinking tools that people can really use. We are measuring an increasing variety of things, and collecting vast quantities of data. The question is: how to use it. How are we to perceive and connect all this information in ways that add value and meaning to the raw data? Increasingly, that means how do we represent the data, visually, in order to work on and with it. We also need to make these tools more accessible and usable by non-specialised actors and stakeholders".

THE REGIONMAKER

Maas and his colleagues have therefore become toolmakers. They have developed a family of software tools, called the Regionmaker, which was first devised by MVRDV for a project called RhineRuhrCity .The Kommunalverband Ruhrgebiet (KVR), a union of cities in the region, has invested in a series of initiatives to improve its post-indstrial situation, and today fewer than six percent work works in coal and steel. But perceptions remain that this is the Detroit of Europe, a landscape dotted with ghost towns, overgrown industries and polluted areas. "The region is very well connected logistically," says Maas. "It has incredible water resources, a dense university system, and successful media and computer industries. But these assets are fragmented. As you find in so many places in Europe, it's a mosaic of competing municipalities, rather than one entity." Hence the project to reposition the area as one place, one city: RhineRuhrCity.

The Regionmaker, which combines the function of search engine, browser, and graphical interface, brings together a variety of existing information sources and flows - for example, demographic data, or outputs from Geographical Informations Systems (GIS) or ‘geomatics’, as they are now called. "In a nutshell," says Maas, "the idea is that within the context of a globalizing world, international databanks, advanced computers, internet and intranet systems, game technology, global monitoring and information systems, can be integrated in ways that convincingly represent regions. With the Regionmaker, there is no limit to visualization. You can look at maps, study charts, access databases, export images, import video feeds from helicopters or satellites, connect to the internet, use CAD drawings, and so on."

Maas anticipates that the Regionmaker will evolve as a tree-structure of sub-machines and routines. MVRDV have plans to add representations of knowledge on the movement of people, goods and information. A housing sub-routine could develop scenarios for optimal housing designs. A light calculator could optimise the need for and control of, natural light in built spaces. A ‘function mixer’ would propose optimal mixtures of activities according to economic, social or cultural criteria.

Maas speculates that systems such as the Regionmaker could become decision support systems in a more pro-active and critical sense. "We could add an Evaluator, or an Evolver that can suggest criticism of the input we make," he speculates. But there will never be a single programme for everything - and Regionmaker will never be finished. "We think of it not as all-in-one Big Brother software, but as an intricate network of different software programmes operating at different spatial dimensions."

Posted by John Thackara at 08:53 PM

January 12, 2003

Trophy buildings are over

Three developments are putting an end to the boom in landmark buildings. The first is over-supply. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale show-cased literally hundreds of large, glamorous buildings that will be built in the next few years. But, precisely because they are conceived as spectacles, these signature buildings have started to cancel each other out.

We accord them the same perceptual status as an Armani ad on a wall in New York or Milan: we look at them, judge them in a glance - and then move on. That's not a great return on all the time, work and money invested to bring these totemic edifices about.

A second development: buildings conceived as tourist destinations are hard to sustain in business terms. City-hopping tourists seldom re-visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for example, where visitor numbers are now in decline.The UK, too, is awash in landmark cultural buildings - conceived politically as large and expensive signs, and paid for with lottery money - that seem doomed to go out of business once their novelty has worn off.

The third development is the emergence of "sociability" and "liveability" as new criteria for urban design. The French - who with their Grands Projets invented the craze for trophy buildings - have gone off in a new direction - towards the development of live, participatory events as ways of adding value to a place.

Describing itself as the "land of festivals", the region of Provence-Aples-Cote d'Azur, alone, published a 194 page catalogue for 2002 that lists more than 300 events and festivals.These range from land-art and arborescence, ancient music and falconry, to festivals of laughter, rythm, and fanfare http://www.laregie-paca.com

Formal cultural festivals have been booming in France for years, but the new craze if forles arts de la rue. So popular has street art and performance become that festivals on the subject are now staged every summer - in Chalon-sur-Soane and Aurillac. These events, which bring together street-level theatre, circus, music and dance, have spawned now well-known acts such as Royale Luxe, Iltopie, and Generik Vapeur (http://www.generikvapeur.com/)

Eyebrows were raised this summer when the French minister of culture, usually the epitome of high (read: expensive) culture, attended the Chalon event for the first time. And a professional asssociation for street arts has been formed to represent the artists and producers, and festival organisers. http://www.lefourneau.com/lafederation

Jean-Marie Songy, director of the Aurillac festival, says these events expemplify what he calls the "open city - the utopian ideal that a city as an open stage that supports freedom of expression". http://www.chalondanslarue.com/

Some artists have mixed views about the growing attention. Caty Avram, founder of Generik Vapeur, warns that "these festivals are indispensable for bringing performers and programmers together - but we must take care that our street-level interventions do not evolve into spectacles observed by a passive public.We should always be looking for new locales, and for people not accustomed to our kind of actions".

Olivier Brie, Director of Art Point M, agrees: "there are two real risks for a festival such as Chalon: the rain, and paying visitors". (Source: Le Monde 20 July 2002)

"Street artists are rightly suspicious of passive spectacle" confirms another producer, Catherine Lemaire, director of a dynamic Ganges-based agency, Eurekart. "The trend is away from set-piece performances towards smaller, more intimate interactions. The thinking now is that every spectator can also be an artist". eurekart@club-internet.fr (00 33 (0)4 67 73 98 40)

Lemaire observes that street theatre is becoming less aggressive and provocative. "Artists seem to have become less confrontational and more humane - less hard", she says."We are seeing smaller, more intimate events - and the emergence of troupes of one, two or three people - in contrast to the 15 or 20 we'd have seen a year or two ago. It's not unknown now for an artist to provoke an interaction with just one person on the street".

A second tendency, says Lemaire, is that street art is finding new types of locations."Performers seem to be moving away from decorative balconies in the town square, in favour of the workplace, the shopping centre, or the factory",

Every November, Lemaire organises the equivalent of a Cannes Film Festval in Montpellier - Label Rue - which brings together a selection of artists, and commissioners of events from throughout France. Lefevre, who has realised street art events in dozens of towns throughout France, Spain and Italy, selects about 40 acts and invites city and festival programmers to come and view them.

The artists do their thing in car parks, outside cafes and on the streets of Montpellier. There is music of all kinds - jazz, steel drum, morooccan fanfare, yeti chanting. There are graffiti artists, fire performers, and a sculptor, Patrick Lefevre, playing the saxophone a top a 15 metre pyramid of his own construction.

end

Posted by John Thackara at 08:57 PM

December 09, 2002

Trophy buildings are over: French turn attention to arts de la rue

Bad news for aspiring Frank Gehrys: buildings conceived as spectacles soon turn into white elephants. Mayors around the world are looking for alternative ways to develop their locality - ways that do not involve spending vast sums of money on trophy buildings designed by brand-name architects.

Three developments are putting an end to the boom in landmark buildings. The first is over-supply. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale show-cased literally hundreds of large, glamorous buildings that will be built in the next few years. But, precisely because they are conceived as spectacles, these signature buildings have started to cancel each other out.

We accord them the same perceptual status as an Armani ad on a wall in New York or Milan: we look at them, judge them in a glance - and then move on. That's not a great return on all the time, work and money invested to bring these totemic edifices about.

A second development: buildings conceived as tourist destinations are hard to sustain in business terms. City-hopping tourists seldom re-visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for example, where visitor numbers are now in decline.The UK, too, is awash in landmark cultural buildings - conceived politically as large and expensive signs, and paid for with lottery money - that seem doomed to go out of business once their novelty has worn off.

The third development is the emergence of "sociability" and "liveability" as new criteria for urban design. The French - who with their Grands Projets invented the craze for trophy buildings - have gone off in a new direction - towards the development of live, participatory events as ways of adding value to a place.

Describing itself as the "land of festivals", the region of Provence-Aples-Cote d'Azur, alone, published a 194 page catalogue for 2002 that lists more than 300 events and festivals.These range from land-art and arborescence, ancient music and falconry, to festivals of laughter, rythm, and fanfare http://www.laregie-paca.com

Formal cultural festivals have been booming in France for years, but the new craze if forles arts de la rue. So popular has street art and performance become that festivals on the subject are now staged every summer - in Chalon-sur-Soane and Aurillac. These events, which bring together street-level theatre, circus, music and dance, have spawned now well-known acts such as Royale Luxe, Iltopie, and Generik Vapeur (http://www.generikvapeur.com/)

Eyebrows were raised this summer when the French minister of culture, usually the epitome of high (read: expensive) culture, attended the Chalon event for the first time. And a professional asssociation for street arts has been formed to represent the artists and producers, and festival organisers. http://www.lefourneau.com/lafederation

Jean-Marie Songy, director of the Aurillac festival, says these events expemplify what he calls the "open city - the utopian ideal that a city as an open stage that supports freedom of expression". http://www.chalondanslarue.com/

Some artists have mixed views about the growing attention. Caty Avram, founder of Generik Vapeur, warns that "these festivals are indispensable for bringing performers and programmers together - but we must take care that our street-level interventions do not evolve into spectacles observed by a passive public.We should always be looking for new locales, and for people not accustomed to our kind of actions".

Olivier Brie, Director of Art Point M, agrees: "there are two real risks for a festival such as Chalon: the rain, and paying visitors". (Source: Le Monde 20 July 2002)

"Street artists are rightly suspicious of passive spectacle" confirms another producer, Catherine Lemaire, director of a dynamic Ganges-based agency, Eurekart. "The trend is away from set-piece performances towards smaller, more intimate interactions. The thinking now is that every spectator can also be an artist". eurekart@club-internet.fr (00 33 (0)4 67 73 98 40)

Lemaire observes that street theatre is becoming less aggressive and provocative. "Artists seem to have become less confrontational and more humane - less hard", she says."We are seeing smaller, more intimate events - and the emergence of troupes of one, two or three people - in contrast to the 15 or 20 we'd have seen a year or two ago. It's not unknown now for an artist to provoke an interaction with just one person on the street".

A second tendency, says Lemaire, is that street art is finding new types of locations."Performers seem to be moving away from decorative balconies in the town square, in favour of the workplace, the shopping centre, or the factory",

Every November, Lemaire organises the equivalent of a Cannes Film Festval in Montpellier - Label Rue - which brings together a selection of artists, and commissioners of events from throughout France. Lefevre, who has realised street art events in dozens of towns throughout France, Spain and Italy, selects about 40 acts and invites city and festival programmers to come and view them.

The artists do their thing in car parks, outside cafes and on the streets of Montpellier. There is music of all kinds - jazz, steel drum, morooccan fanfare, yeti chanting. There are graffiti artists, fire performers, and a sculptor, Patrick Lefevre, playing the saxophone a top a 15 metre pyramid of his own construction.

end

Posted by John Thackara at 05:54 PM

November 12, 2002

Architecture and flow

An introduction to flow issues for the October 2002 issue of Archis, the main media partner of Doors for its conference.

What happens to public space when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet – and when most of these chips talk to each other? What are the implications for buildings in a world suffused not just with sensors, but also with responsive ‘smart’ materials, and actuators?

Right now, the military are providing most of the answers to those questions. They are driving developments in the use of sensors, tags and remote monitoring in the physical world. Military-funded researchers are developing an operating system for smart dust’s self-organizing sensors and effectors; these tiny devices, that can manipulate matter, will be able to form wireless networks without human intervention. John Gage of Sun Microsystems anticipates that we will soon sprinkle "smart dust" over battlefields – clouds of tiny wireless sensors, thermometers, miniature microphones, electronic noses, location detectors that will provide information about the physical world, and the people crossing it, to battlefield commanders.

Meanwhile, in business, companies are wiring up digital nervous systems that connect together everything involved in their operations: IT systems, factories and employees, as well as suppliers, customers, and products. The aim is to be able to monitor everything important in real-time. Companies are developing 'dashboards' that will measure key indicators and compare their performance against goals - and alert managers if a deviation becomes large enough to warrant action. Control-obsessed firms – among them GE, the world’s largest - aspire to convert their information flows into a vast spreadsheet. They aspire to create, as Ludwig Siegele put it in The Economist, not a new economy but a "now economy".

This new wave of technology confronts us with a design dilemma. We are filling our world with complex technical systems - on top of the natural systems that were already here, and social/cultural ones that evolved over thousands of years – without thinking much, if at all, about the consequences. During the 1990s, we were told that complexity was 'out of control' - too complex to understand, let alone to shape, or re-direct. But ‘out-of-control’ is an ideology, not a fact.

Flows can be designed. The design agenda for flow has two parts: designing ways to perceive flows, and re-designing the design process itself. Firstly, in order to do things differently, we need to see things differently. We need dashboards for cities and buildings. We need to experience the systems and processes on which we depend, in order to look after them. We know, for example, that buildings consume a lot of energy - but we don’t ‘see’ heat flying out of the windows. If we did, our behaviour would probably change. Designing experiences won’t be easy: systems are, by their nature, invisible, and we often lack metaphors or mental models to make sense of the bigger picture. But many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times: physicists have illustrated quarks; biologists have mapped the genome; doctors have described immune systems in the body; network designers have mapped communication flows in buildings. And as Malcolm McCullough points out in this edition, geodata industries are exploding.

The purpose of systems literacy in design is not to watch from outside – it is to enable action. The second challenge for design in the space of flows, therefore, is the transition from designing things, to designing systems – and from a project-based to a continuous model of the design process. Systems and processes never stop changing, so neither can design. As we move from a project model, to a continuous model of design – which is increasingly the norm in information technology, and in management consulting – we need new metaphors for what we do: games, simulations and play may be more appropriate modes of designing flows.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:05 PM

October 12, 2002

Real-time design in the "world as spread-sheet"

In which John Thackara talks to Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UN Studio in an interview and article for the October 2002 edition of Domus Magazine.

For thousands of years, most buildings and products were designed for a single purpose - but our task is becoming more complicated. We are confronted by the need to design hybrid environments that encompass space, place, time, and interaction. We have filled the world with complex systems and technologies - on top of the natural ones that were already here, and social-cultural systems that have evolved over thousands of years. These systems are, by their nature, invisible - so we lack the clear mental models that we might otherwise use to make sense of the bigger picture.

A new change is now under way: pervasive computing. Pervasive computing has many names: ubiquitous computing; ambient intelligence; the disappearing computer; things that think; things that link; smartifacts. The buzzwords describe the ways we are suffusing the world with not just with sensors, but also with responsive and smart materials and actuators. There are already hundreds of microchips for every man; woman and child on the planet, and most of these chips will soon talk to each other, in languages such as 'Bluetooth'. Nobody knows what the consequences are going to be, except that these chips will find their way into most of the objects that surround us - buildings, airplanes, doors, door handles, clothing - even our bodies.

The US army is a big spender on wearable computing, for example. The military is also driving developments in the use of sensors, tags, and remote monitoring in the physical world. John Gage of Sun Microsystems anticipates that we will soon sprinkle "smart dust" over battlefields - clouds of tiny wireless sensors, thermometers, miniature microphones, electronic noses, location detectors that will provide information about the physical world, and the people crossing it, to battlefield commanders. Military-funded researchers are developing an operating system for smart dust‚s self-organizing sensors and effectors; these tiny devices, that can manipulate matter, will be able to form wireless networks without human intervention.

Meanwhile, in business, companies are wiring up digital nervous systems that connect together everything involved in their operations: IT systems, factories and employees, as well as suppliers, customers, and products. Their aim is to be able to monitor everything important in real-time. Companies are developing 'dashboards' that will measure key indicators and compare their performance against goals - and alert managers if a deviation becomes large enough to warrant action. Control-obsessed firms, among them GE, the world’s largest - aspire to convert their information flows into a vast spread-sheet creating, as Ludwig Siegele put it in The Economist, not a new economy but a "now economy".

This new wave of technology push confronts us with a design dilemma. The design of Large Technical Systems, pervasive software, and the inaptly named 'ambient intelligence', is an almost unimaginably complex process. To be effective in such a context, design needs to be renewed, and transformed. But in what ways? And how? During the 1990s, we were told that complexity was 'out of control' - too complex to understand, let alone to shape, or re-direct. But out-of-control is an ideology, not a fact. Flows can be designed.

The design agenda for flow has two parts: designing ways to perceive flows; and re-designing the design process itself. Firstly, in order to do things differently, we need to see things differently. We know, for example, that buildings consume a lot of energy - but we don’t see‚ heat flying out of the windows. If we did, our behaviour would probably change. We therefore need ‘dashboards’ for cities and buildings, not just for big companies. We need to experience the systems and processes on which we depend, in order to look after them.

Designing these experiences will not be easy. Systems and flows are, by their nature, invisible, and we lack evocative metaphors or mental models to help us make sense of the bigger picture. But many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times: physicists have illustrated quarks; biologists have mapped the genome; doctors have described immune systems in the body; network designers have mapped communication flows in buildings. And as Malcolm McCullough points out, geodata industries are exploding.

The purpose of systems literacy in design is not to watch from outside - it is to enable action. The second challenge for design in the space of flows, therefore, is the transition from designing things, to designing systems - and from a project-based, to a continuous, model of the design process. Systems and processes never stop changing, so neither can design. A continuous model of design is increasingly the norm in information technology, and in management consulting. Architecture as a service, rather than an art? Now there’s a thought.

UN Studio

Many of these trends are evident in the work if UN Studio. Its principals, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, have particular expertise in the design of transport interchanges in projects that can last years. These have become epicentres of extraordinarily complex spatial and building design processes. Increasingly, in the design of these complex places, high-tech simulations and physical structure influence each other. The design of multi-modal, multi-functional, multi-temporal transport intersections is particularly advanced in the Netherlands, where van Berkel and Bos have been ‘designing inside diagrammes’ since the mid 1990s.

“The diagramme functions for us as a sort of mediator” van Berkel explains; “we see it as an external element, in between the object and the subject, which we use to introduce other themes and organizations into a project with the aim of escaping from pre-existing typologies”. Right now UN Studio use diagrams two ways. First, for what they call the “the proportioning” of information – representing visually, and where possible in real-time, variable phenomena for a specific location such as climate, budget, construction processes, orientation, and activities. “The aim is to have a generative, proliferating, unfolding effect on the project…not only during its development in the studio, but also afterward, in its public use”, explains Caroline Bos.

A project like Arnhem Central exemplifies this convoluted type of public construction. The high-density project concentrates 160,000 m2 of mixed programme (transfer hall, underground car park for 1,000 cars and 5,000 bicycles, tunnel, shops, offices) on a 40,000-m2 site. Six different transport systems converge on the station area. Every weekday 55,000 travellers move through the location as they transfer from one system to another. Movement studies [PICS] are the cornerstone of UN Studio’ design proposals: the analysis of the types or movement on location includes the directions of the various trajectories, their prominence in relation to other forms of transportation on the site, duration, links to different programmes, and interconnections. The “Klein Bottle” diagramme [PIC] served as a reference for the spatial transformation of a surface into a whole.

Van Berkel and Bos describe as “deep planning” the process by which they scan a site for its flow structure. “These scans reveal its real problems and potentials,” says van Berkel; “the flows of the physical movements of people and goods reveal the relations between duration and territorial use”. The typical product of deep planning is a situation-specific, dynamic, organizational structural plan, using scenarios, diagrams, parameters, formulas and themes, that encompasses the mapping of political, managerial, planning, community and private relations.

Recently, van Berkel and Bos have looked outside architecture for inspirational images and diagrams. “Francis Bacon called his paintings diagrammes”, recalls van Berkel, adding that Gilles Deleuze was fascinated by the ways Bacon transformed the human figure into abstract forms. “Diagrams are instrumental”, he emphasizes; “they refer to something. They are kind of map. Maps may look abstract, but they always point at something. Diagrams are maps that point at organization - which can be the organization of space, or time, or movement, or any abstract but no less real phenomena”.

Diagrams are also a way to involve clients in the design process, and to modify the way a building is used through time. “When designing for people are in these perpetual motion environments”, says Bos, “ it’s a matter of combining circulation, with experiences they may have along the way. It’s not enough to design for pure movement: you have to build-in spaces, activities and intersections where people will leave the flow”. Pure movement is indeed bad for business. I recall an anecdote by Jan Benthem, master architect of Schiphol Airport, in which the commercial guys insisted he remove an area of seating to make way for another corridor of shops. The result was the opposite of that intended: revenues per square metre in the new shops, and in existing ones next to them, actually decreased. It transpired that the re-design had created a kind of canyon through which passengers rushed like white water in the Rocky Mountains - too fast to stop and shop. The seats were put back.

UN Studio pay attention to what they call “kaleidoscope moments” - the turns in flows where movement is tighter or more compact, or where you cross over other flows. “We are beginning to realise that obstacles to flow can be functional and add value, too” says van Berkel.”We work closely with infrastructure and traffic managers” adds Bos; “who usually have deep expertise about the possibilities, but also limits, in reconfiguring the flows of large numbers of people” Bos recalls a typically arcane piece of advice, that the heat generated by 20,000 people in an art gallery can damage paintings.

For their project to develop a pier in Genoa, Italy, UN Studio have transformed a 23,000 m2 harbour pier into a three-dimensional piazza. Four main clusters each address a different theme: entertainment, well-being, technology, and commercial experience. The design uses time-based planning represented diagrammatically as a circle of experience. Programmes in the piazza are organised around clockwise activities clustered on the basis of views, time of day, and time of year. Coffee can be taken in the morning sun with a view towards the sea; midday shopping offers shadow; evenings are spent watching the sunset. [PIC 24-hour distribution of active programs].

Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, principals of UN Studio in Amsterdam, are among the speakers at Doors of Perception 7 on the theme of Flow. The conference takes place in In Amsterdam on 14,15,16 November 2002.

Posted by John Thackara at 09:01 PM

October 03, 2002

Architecture, spectacle, performance

A chapter for the catalogue of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2002, edited by Deyan Sudjic (who was also overall Director of the event).

A few years ago I met a woman in Bombay who was completing her PhD in social anthropology. She had just returned from her last field trip to Rajhastan where she had spent time with a group of travelling storytellers. This particular group went from village to village, unannounced, and would simply start a performance in the village square. Although each story would have a familiar plot the story telling tradition dates back thousands of years ˆ each event would be unique. Prompted by the storytellers, who held up pictorial symbols on sticks, villagers would interact with the story. They would be part of the performance. I commented to the woman that with that depth of knowledge about interaction, and the combined use of words and images, she could get a job with Microsoft tomorrow. 'What's Microsoft? ', Was her reply.

This encounter confirmed my prejudice that we have forgotten how to design for communication and interaction. We know how design messages, yes: the world is awash in print and ads and packaging and e-trash and spam. And we know to design one-way-communication buildings: hundreds of sports stadia, museums, theatres, science and convention centres have been built in recent years. Most of these buildings do an adequate technical job in delivering spectacles to passive crowds - but they are all about one-way messages. In the open air, as in the Indian villages my friend described, people cluster around a speaker. Children wriggle through to kneel at the front. As the crowd grows, the more distant and adventurous will seek a higher vantage point tree, rock, wall, or balcony. The courtyard form of theatre evolved from there and remains the root form for most later theatrical development. It simply grew in size and sophistication. Today's monumental, overblown and inhospitable theatre and arena architecture is the creation of a point-to-mass mentality that lies behind the brand intrusion and semiotic pollution that despoil so many of our perceptual and physical landscapes.

A lot of the push towards a post-spectacular culture - perhaps surprisingly - comes from business and technology. The chicken breasts in my supermarket have started to bear a photograph of the farmers who rear the birds, plus a little story about their place. Globalisation promoted 'anytime, anywhere' as a value - but attention is shifting back from space to place. Even telecommunication companies see location as the next big thing. The new business thinking is that mass things - mass production, mass communications, and large public spectacles - are relatively easy for upstart competitors to copy. Abuzz with talk of closed and open systems, large firms now believe that the best way to compete is by making things more complicated, not less. Complex services, and customised experiences, will be harder for newcomers to imitate. Business has decided that there's money to be made in customisation and authenticity. The idea is to make a real-time 'now economy'. Vivek Ranadive, author of the power of now, has a rather precise vision of what he calls the "event-driven firm”. Business is also responding to spectacular erosion in brand loyalty, which calls into question the fundamentals of modern marketing.

A similar change of mood is evident in the traditional worlds of performance. In theatre, for example, big is over. Big concepts, big-ticket productions - and the big marketing budgets needed to make them pay - are out of favour. Tony Graham, Director of the Unicorn Children’s Theatre in London, looked at more than 100 buildings in London before deciding to commission a new theatre on the River Thames. "Scale is crucial in theatre" he says; "300-400 people is the maximum size at which you can be both epic and intimate, and we simply could not find a space that would allow us to those in the way we need to do". A 1500 person audience creates a differerent sense of what theatre is about. Prosaic issues to do with access play an important role: where do coaches park, how far is it to the tube, and so on. But. Graham's brief to Theatre Projects, who lead the functional design of his new theatre, was to move away the proscenium arch model, with its picture-book illusion of looking into a room. "We are moving back to the amphitheatre model which thrusts the stage into the body of the audience", says Graham; "audiences today don't want trickery, special effects and illusion. They want to see things as they are, without artifice". The amphitheatre model favoured by Graham "heightens the human figure and strips things back to the minimum".

Many in the theatre world question whether new buildings are needed at all. Big theatres, in particular, tend to sap energy out of productions and money out of their producers. Some producers have taken literally to the streets in so-called 'promenade' and site-specific theatre. In these Chaucer-like journeys, players and audience move together around cities, through forests, up mountains, or into resonant but abandoned or found spaces. The significance of place, and the localisation of knowledge, is now taken as seriously by companies as by theatre people. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid emphasize in The Social Life of Information, a lot of what we learn is remarkable local: History. Agriculture. Politics. Art. Geology. Viticulture. Forestry. Conservation. Ocean Science. For the writer Charles Hampden-Turner, too, we learn through participation in collaborative human activities. "Knowledge as it grows is necessarily social," he writes, "the shared property of extended groups and networks".

What matters most in a post-spectacular world is activity, not architecture. As the director Peter Brook once said, it is not a question of good building and bad; "a beautiful place may never bring about an explosion of life, while a haphazard hall may be a tremendous meeting place. This is the mystery of the theatre... studying what it is that brings about the more vivid relationships between people." In biology, they describe as choronomic the influence on a process of geographic or regional environment. Choronomy adds value; a lack of context destroys it. We all deserve to spend time in safe, pleasant and comfortable surroundings, rather than their opposite; but, beyond that, most buildings will surely do - for performance, for learning, for all forms of social connection.

Given that more space is needed for shared learning activities, many involving performance and interaction, where will it come from - and who will pay for it? Happily, large, expensive, centrally located informal environments, suitable for learning and performance, already exist in most cities in the form of museums, science, and media centres. The majority of these facilities were conceived and are now run as leisure facilities, spectacles for public and tourists who only ever visit them once. These buildings are therefore ripe to be commandeered and re-purposed as sites of informal learning.

Some of their Directors are eager for such a change. James Bradburne, for example, Director of the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Frankfurt, despairs that exhibition design ever since the 1950s has been "obsessed with the message - the storyline - and has seen itself as one of the broadcast media, reaching out to the masses with its messages". The apotheosis of this approach is the Guggenheim, whose director, Thomas Krens, turned the Guggenheim into a theme-park-like franchise operation and that now competes with Disney for the property and leisure developer's dollar. The word 'exhibit' is at the heart of criticisms of the museum and science centre model where, once again, a point-to-mass model of communication prevails.

Instead of looking at the design task as creating exhibits, modernisers like James Bradburne have shifted their focus from the exhibit as an end-in-itself to the exhibit as a setting for interaction between and among participants: discussion, dialogue, debate are the goal. Just as with theatre. At NewMetropolis in Amsterdam, where Bradburne's ideas were first implemented, the emphasis was not on science and technology, per se, but on being human beings in a world rapidly being transformed by science and technology. "Our aim was to foster skills of experimentation, abstraction, collaboration, and systems thinking", says Bradburne, who led the design team there before moving to Frankfurt. Puzzles, challenges, simulations and role-playing games were at the heart of his design strategy. "Our goal was to stimulate self-initiated exploration, encourage sustained engagement, and repeat use, and provided a framework in which competence demonstrably increases". Bradburne uses the metaphor of the piazza - in contrast to the arena - to describe this kind of museum as a resource to be used, rather than visited, or looked at.

The best collaboration environments provide the opportunity to meet, share ideas, discuss, and learn from each other's experiences. Seen in this way, anyone who plays a role in shaping a learning or performance environment - whether they are by training a researcher, a teacher, a multimedia specialist, a programmer, or an industrial designer - is a designer. Design must allow the user the shape her experience. "Design doesn't end with the opening", says Bradburne, "it begins with the opening".

Theatre and museum people are not alone in their search for a more rooted, animated context in which to work. Richard Sennet once complained, „When public space becomes a derivative of movement, it loses any independent experiential meaning of its own. On the most physical level, these environments of pure movement prompt people to think of the public domain as meaningless... It is catatonic space‰ The word catatonic is horribly apt as a description of the way many great modern spaces make us feel - arenas and stadia designed for passive crowds, as much as airports and hub wastelands such as Eurolille.

The problem is not new. Throughout the twentieth century artists intervened in a variety of ways into man-made space: futurism, cubist collage, Duchamp‚s ready-mades, Dada, constructivism, surrealism, Fontana‚s spatialism, Fluxus, land art, arte povera, process art, conceptualism: in all these groups the deadness and catatonia of modern public space were perceived to be both as a rebuke, and a challenge. They prepared site-specific installations and events whose meaning was to be gathered by the viewer over time. (Performance art itself was born in a fistfight in 1910 between Italian Futurists and Venetian townspeople reacted in anger when 800,000 manifestoes "Against Past-Loving Venice" were scattered upon them). The tradition has persisted that, in Marinetti's words, "there is no artifice here: this is happening now, in real-time".

Today, even real-time is mediated. In the age of the rave, street-level events have become big productions. Festivals, concerts, corporate events, church pageants, and fashion shows vie with each other tin the quality and sophistication of their production. The supply and use of technology for live performance is a large speciality business in itself: hundreds of companies specialise in every conceivable variety of lighting, sound systems, staging, video walls, and endless special effects. The rapid evolution of digital media, advanced materials and other technologies has further opened the way for technology to penetrate live performance. The design and evaluation of alternative musical and lighting controllers is currently the leading edge of an ongoing dialogue between technology and musical culture

It is not just real-time performance that is mediated. So is "here". With the advent of broadband video, satellite and wireless, and fixed networks, live performance has entered the realm of the reproducible and in the words of one critic, "barriers between the televisual and the performative are breaking down". The human actor who shares the same space and time with a body of spectators can now, to a degree, share other spaces and other times with different actors - in so-called electronic arenas in which spatial technologies, especially multi-user virtual environments, are coupled to new forms of artistic content and an understanding of social interaction.

But even in virtualised, networked contexts, the cultural drive is to support interactive performance and interaction, not passive spectacle. A European project called eRENA, for example, investigated a range of inhabited information spaces in which participants would be mobile and socially active. Audience members as well as performers and artists would explore, interact, communicate with one another and participate in staged events. Through concepts such as 'dynamic crowd aggregations', the aim was to support hundreds or thousands of simultaneous participants, bridging the gap between current small scale, real-time communication technologies such as video conferencing, and current massive-scale non-participative broadcast technologies such as television. The Erena consortium brought together digital artists, experts in multi-user virtual reality and computer animation, social scientists, broadcasters, experts in expertise in CAVEs and other projected interfaces, networking expertise, spatial technologies and novel artistic content. Avatars, both as individuals and in potentially large and dynamic crowds.

The point-to-mass age of big ticket spectacles is ending. We are in a transition to a post-spectacular, post-massified culture in which performance environments will be judged by their capacity to foster interaction and learning. The trend is towards spaces, places, and communities in which complex experiences and processes combine in new geographies of learning and experience - while also exploiting the dynamic potential of networked collaboration. A division persists between designers who believe that experiences can be systematically designed, and those who feel that the designer can only set the stage for what is experienced - but the consensus is clear: we are all actors now.

Posted by John Thackara at 05:48 PM

January 22, 2000

Nine surprising new job titles for facilities managers

Summary of a lecture to an international meeting of Facility Managers in 1999.

How are we to design modern space? saturated with information and systems; complex but incomprehensible; an exhilarating human achievement, and a terrifying prospect, at the same time.

Management of work environments, in particular, is moving centre-stage in discussions about innovation, learning, and the knowledge economy.

We are beginning to understand that innovation is a social process that involves complex interactions between individuals, communities of practice, and customers.

Fostering these complex interactions - designing the context of innovation and learning - brings ‘soft’ aspects of workplace design to the fore.

These soft aspects concern the constantly changing flows of people and ideas that characterise a dynamic learning organisation.

Facility management, in such a context, becomes the ‘placeholder’ of the activities, interactions, and encounters that lead to innovation and knowledge.

Looking a year or two ahead, and following our visit to Rover and the discussion afterwards, I decided to speculate about new roles for FM.

NEW ROLE 1 - "SPEED MERCHANT"
"Speed is God, Time is the Devil", goes Hitachi’s company slogan. But it’s hard to accelerate when you’re big. For many big companies, too much dispersal of places and people may be counter-productive. "Mobility is starting to backfire", says Lufthansa. Large organisations can emulate the dynamism and speedy decision-making typical of smaller firms by using IT and space in new ways. The designer’s new role is to manage the relationship between place, time and distance. Which is why Rover decided to put all those people in one facility.

NEW ROLE 2 - "ALBATROSS KEEPER"
Expect to hear more alarming comments like this one: "The physical assets owned by most corporate giants represent an albatross hanging around their necks. Ownership of any kind of asset other than information is becoming a liability. You gain flexibility by not owning physical assets, by concentrating on ownership of intellectual property and moving that around". These words were written (partly as a provocation) by Bill Mayon-White, a professor at the London School of Economics. But even albatrosses have their uses. If it is indeed the quality of interactions with other people and communities and customers that determines the success of an innovative, knowledge-nurturing organisation, then heavy material assets like buildings are ok so long as they contribute to that.

NEW ROLE 3 - "IMAGINEER"
Psychologists describe as "catatonic space" an environment that is so devoid of the contextual clues(daylight, heat, wind etc) that we fail to make sense of where we are. The Walt Disney Company employs "imagineers" to ensure that its supremely artificial environments do not become catatonic. I learned at the post-Rover discussion that we are beginning to see something similar emerge in FM - ‘office clowns’, ‘animateurs’, ‘showbusiness impresarios’ and other jobs whose role is to generally ‘liven the place up’.

NEW ROLE 4 - "DWELL-TIME MANAGER"
I did an interview with John Worthington maybe 10 years ago in which he alerted me to Marshall MacLuhan’s observation that airports are ‘universities of the future’. Since then I’ve become a minor expert on the phenomenology of airports, and see many connections with workplace issues.. ‘Dwell-time’ is the time spent by passengers milling around waiting for flight connections : it is also the time when they spend money - which is why airport managers (who are not the same as flight operations people) love it. My conceit is this: in knowledge-based organisations, managing space and time for reflection becomes a necessity rather than a luxury. ‘Dwell time’ will be time to think, time to reflect, time to process all the information poured over us in high tele-density workplaces.

NEW ROLE 5 - "KNOWLEDGE ENGINEER"
Knowledge management is the new imperative - driven by the shift away from a world of goods and services towards one of information and relationships. The keyword here is minds in the in the plural - and in particular the capability of a group. Traditional workplace design emphasised the individual worker; space and equipment for teams has more recently been given attention. Workplace design that fosters continuously changing and complex knowledge relationships and flows is the new priority.

NEW ROLE 6 - "CHAOS THEORIST"
Relationship between FM and mobility is a paradoxical one. Nothing would appear to be more immobile than a building - but if you look close-up, you see that everything moves - in a swirl of unexpected and unpredictable connections. The task for FM becomes ‘design for emergence’ - creating workplaces which can adapt themselves to cope with constantly changing configurations. The designers of ‘SimCity’ have, intriguingly, tied up with the SantaFe Institute (and been bought meanwhile by George Lucas’s Electronic Arts) to offer ‘design for emergence’ simulation tools for e.g. ‘SimSainsburys’.

NEW ROLE 7 - "LANDSCAPE GARDENER"
The Spanish economist Manuel Castells talks about the networked economy as a "space of flows" (a great slogan for workplace design, I’d say). Castells observes that connections can indeed be multiplied by IT - but understanding needs place, and time. FM can learn from this and decide to provide navigation tools (maps, electronic sign systems, human guides); learn from psychologists (who talk about ’liminal space’) ;and work with architects who have started to talk about ‘slow space’ and ‘landscape’.

NEW ROLE 8 - "SOCIAL WORKER"
The mephor of the workplace as a machine, or a factory, is breaking down as we realise that work and learning are social activities. The FM as social worker will understand that learning happens best when people participate in different ‘communities of practice’ :the role of FM is to maintain a sense of community and to use such skills as proxemics to link capabilities and optimise the collective intelligence of individuals and groups.

NEW ROLE 9 - "ENTREPRENEUR"
The original meaning of the word entrepreneur is ‘someone who brings two parties together’. But if workplace design is to be taken more seriously (than it already is) to by top management and the rest of the organisation- the motto has to be: "don’t tell me, show me!". This is why I commend the tool of design scenarios as a way to show people new ways to design and inhabit tomorrow’s workspace.
END OF SUMMARY

Synopsis for the book (another book I never seem to have received!)

Designing the space of flows: success factors in workspace innovation

Management of the work environment is moving centre-stage in discussions about innovation, learning, and the knowledge economy.

The Spanish economist Manuel Castells talks about the networked economy as a "space of flows" - a metaphor which for me perfectly describes the new domain of workplace design. But this new understanding is a mixed blessing for facilities managers. Consider this alarming comment: "The physical assets owned by most corporate giants represent an albatross hanging around their necks. Ownership of any kind of asset other than information is becoming a liability. You gain flexibility by not owning physical assets, by concentrating on ownership of intellectual property and moving that around". These words were written partly as a provocation (by Bill Mayon-White, a professor at the London School of Economics); but they describe the growing pressure on all kinds of organisations to invest more in immaterial than in material assets.

But even albatrosses have their uses. If it is indeed the quality of interactions with other people, communities and customers that determines the success of an innovative, knowledge-nurturing organisation, then heavy material assets like buildings can still deliver value so long so long as they contribute significantly to those interactions. Castells observes that while crude connections can indeed be multiplied by ICT, *understanding* requires place, and time, and reflection. Facilities management is the cross-functional process best placed to deliver such intangible qualities - but it will be a tough story to sell in a tightly run organisation.

We are beginning to understand that innovation is a social process that involves complex interactions between individuals, communities of practice, and customers. Fostering these complex interactions - designing the context of innovation and learning - brings ‘soft’ aspects of workplace design to the fore. These soft aspects concern the constantly changing flows of people and ideas that characterise a dynamic learning organisation. In this context, facilities management becomes the placeholder of the activities, interactions, and encounters that lead to innovation and knowledge.

Performance indicators are also changing. "Speed is God, Time is the Devil", goes Hitachi’s company slogan. But it’s hard to accelerate, or change direction, when you’re big. But for many big companies, too much dispersal of places and people may be counter-productive. "Mobility is starting to backfire", says Lufthansa. Relationship between FM and mobility is a paradoxical one. Nothing would appear to be more immobile than a building - but if you look close-up, you see that everything moves - in a swirl of unexpected and unpredictable connections. The task for FM becomes ‘design for emergence’ - creating workplaces which can adapt themselves to cope with constantly changing configurations. The designers of ‘SimCity’ have, intriguingly, tied up with the SantaFe Institute (and been bought meanwhile by George Lucas’s Electronic Arts) to offer ‘design for emergence’ simulation tools for - among other intriguing possibilities - a ‘SimSainsburys’. Large organisations can emulate the dynamism and speedy decision-making typical of smaller firms by using ICT space and real space in new combinatikons. The FM’s new role is to manage the relationship between place, time and distance.

I did an interview with John Worthington maybe 10 years ago in which he alerted me to Marshall MacLuhan’s observation that airports are ‘universities of the future’. Since then I’ve become a minor expert on the phenomenology of airports, and see many connections with workplace issues. ‘Dwell-time’ is the time spent by passengers milling around waiting for flight connections : it is also the time when they spend money - which is why airport managers (who are not the same as flight operations people) love it. My conceit is this: in knowledge-based organisations, managing space and time for reflection becomes a necessity rather than a luxury. ‘Dwell time’ will be time to think, time to reflect, time to process all the information poured over us in high teledensity workplaces.

Knowledge management is the new imperative - driven by the shift away from a world of goods and services towards one of information and relationships. The keyword here is minds in the in the plural - and in particular the capabilities of groups. Traditional workplace design emphasised the individual worker; space and equipment for teams has more recently been given attention. Workplace design that fosters continuously changing and complex knowledge relationships and flows is the new priority.

In summary: the range of disciplines with an impact on workplace design is widening. Psychologists, for example, describe as "catatonic space" an environment that is so devoid of the contextual clues (daylight, heat, wind etc) that we fail to make sense of where we are. We know that buildings can be physically sick; now, it seems, they can be emotionally dysfunctional, too, and will need the help of shrinks. Theatre people are getting in on the act: the Walt Disney Company employs "imagineers" to ensure that its supremely artificial environments do not become catatonic. We are beginning to see something similar emerge in FM - ‘office clowns’, ‘animateurs’, ‘showbusiness impresarios’ and other jobs whose role is to generally ‘liven the place up’.

end

Posted by John Thackara at 05:16 PM

Tokyo: Begin the next

This was originally published in The Listener, in the UK, in 1990.

In Tokyo, cement trucks sport the slogan, 'Begin The Next'. Buy sellotape at the cornershop, and the bag carries a slogan: 'Perhaps We Are At The Beginning Of A New Renaissance'. Ride Honda's new Dio motorcycle and an entire text on the faring declares 'Movement. The City is a 24 our stage where we act out a life. Be it day or night, we go out anytime looking for something new'.

Hardly surprising that they call Tokyo the Printed City, the Sea of Desires: its citizenry revel in continuous change and innovation. In the West, we whinge about our insecurity and the ephemerality of all we hold dear; in Tokyo, they exhilarate in the perceptual white noise of an information-rich environment.

Small wonder that the city has become the centre for a new phenomenon: post-modern tourism. Tokyo today is like America during the 50s: you go there to wonder, childlike, at a fantastical world where everything works - only in Tokyo's case, it's not just the phones, but a whole new culture.

Getting Real

Scene: the basement of Cleos, a very dingy night-club in Roppongi, Tokyo's fashion and entertainment district. By 3am, Cleos is packed, its clientele almost exclusively Western models, photographers stylists and other camp followers of the fashion circus. They drop ecstasy and acid like popcorn, dress real cool in expensive rags. But their confident, self-contained, manner cannot disguise the sense of desperation: there's panic in the air. Even the hard ones are Tokyo crazy.

Here to take an estimated ú25 million a year from Japanese magazines and ad agencies, this latter-day cultural diplomatic corps is in town to practice the black arts of consumer deception - to make a thousand advertising images in which they frolic, ultra-white, Aryan goody-two-shoes, stars of a fantasy Western culture that would be laughable were it not for the fascistic overtones. But in Tokyo, simulation is in the blood: not for them this fear of a three minute culture or the 'disappearance of the real'. Psychologically, Tokyo is like New York: you have to be born to it, or it takes a toll.

The new geography

Scene: any street. Tokyo lacks a visible plan, of the kind that we choose to find reassuring in London, Paris, or Vienna. Tokyo is the paradigm of the modern de-centred metropolis. It's not so much that it disorients you - you never get oriented in the first place. Tokyo is a place-by-place place - how location relates to the last remains obscure. Lacking vistas, and grand plans, you have no sense of travel between points: rather, you leave one experience, and start another somewhere else. The intervening motion is out of place and time.

Europe's boulevards and ringstrasses were built by tearing the hearts out of the old town; Tokyo, in contrast, has evolved chaotically. From the top of Tokyo Tower, you see none of the neat radial lines that denote the hand of one dictator or another in Europe - the 'Great Weavers', as Giles Deleuze calls them, bulldozing wefts and warps across whole districts and underclasses. Tokyo is a patchwork, added onto bit by bit.

Soft Buildings

Post-modern Tokyo has fostered a remarkable design and architecture revival - but you have to see it in context. Over here we remain in thrall to the stereotype of Japanese design as exquisite minimalism. This idea is the legacy of work during the 70s and early 80s by architects like Tadao Ando, who refined an aesthetics of order and designed perfectly-formed little worlds (and some big ones) as refuges from the chaos and disorder of the street. Ando's stark, concrete walls and interiors are a miracle of spatial control, and they're beautifully finished - one reason his work speaks of heaven to the Western modernist - but it's not what Tokyo, now, is about.

The sea-change was marked for some by a famous row when Nigel Coates was hired to design the interior of an Ando building. Coates represents not just western street credibility, but, more importantly, a less negative approach to change, an attempt not hide from, but to welcome, change.

The new sensibility according to Ke'iche Irie, one of several brilliant new architects to challenge the old guard, 'values the fact that Tokyo is like a computer program that ceaselessly keeps on adding new subroutines. Western language itself, and your aspirations for buildings, which both emphasise order and clarity, seem now, to us, to be like a straitjacket. We don't believe in moulding life to the straight lines of an ideal building'.

The new architects flourish on a diet of theory, fashion, and stupendously rich clients. The reason: so heated is Tokyo's real estate boom (Docklands is like a village fete by comparison) means that any device that can add value to even small patches of land is worth paying for. Hence the concept of buildings as 'news' - objects possessed of sufficient design or fashion charisma that they attract attention to the surrounding area which becomes smarter - and more valuable. In Roppongi, for example, one developer spent $40 million on a night-club, Turia, that 'paid' for itself before its doors even opened - just because adjacent small lots, which he also owned, shot up in price.

Comme Des Fire Hydrants

Another star of Tokyo's building-as-icon boom is Shin Takamatsu, famous for designing a dentist's studio in Kyoto that looked like an aluminium steam engine, and a club in Osaka that looked like nothing on earth. It is extremely satisfying to discover that Takamatsu live matches one's fondest stereotype of a fashionable Japanese architect - dressed from head-to-toe in Comme des Garcons, surrounded by an entourage of beautiful assistants, and ready to drop references to Kafka, Mishima and fractal geometry in conversation. Takamatsu speaks of buildings as objects, well aware that in Tokyo buildings are indeed commodities, bought and sold, made and destroyed in a frenzied bazaar.

But just because buildings are icons, and may soon be torn down again, does not mean they are badly made. On the contrary; although Tokyo's vistas appear confused - cluttered and insubstantial to western eyes - the quality of detail in things small is a miracle to observe. Door handles, fire hydrants, tiling on doorsteps, all can be exquisite. Even Takamatsu, master of the ephemeral building, points out that 'hard materials have power: the problem with western design is the poor quality of the facade - in Japan we believe in the concept of deep surface, no matter how short a building's life'.

Thin Skins and Disappearing Buildings

If the new urban sensibility in Tokyo recalls Marshall Berman's remark that 'the modern project is to make yourself at home in this maelstrom, to make it your own, then another of the key players on Tokyo's urban landscape, Toyo ITOH, is particularly comfortable. Itoh has made flux and ephemerality in architecture the basis of his work. His extraordinary Tokyo Tower in Yokohama, for example, a 100' high membrane-covered structure, software controlled, changes its very mass according to the wind, amount of daylight, even the density of the crowds which surround it. 'Our obsession with walls has been replaced by a search for openness and transparency in buildings, to be positive towards the outside world' Itoh is a leader in the use of thin-skins, or membranes, to make buildings permeable - to make them 'disappear', as he puts it. 'Buildings are like clothes - sometimes we feel sensual, and feel like going naked'.

Modern Movements

Getting to one of Itoh's invisible, naked buildings tends to be a life event in itself. If Tokyo's overall plan is opaque, its transport arteries are self-contained worlds of their own. Tokyo's road system strides over the top of the landmark buildings - huge, thick earthquake-proof legs carrying roadways, some of which are hundreds of feet up in the air: as you crawl along in an interminable jam, you can see straight into the 20th floor of the skyscrapers, where thousands, tens of thousands of identically dressed salarymen work away until late at night. This sight alone must dismay arriving businessmen - a vast human beehive buzzing with effort into the late hours.

Another surprise is that the cars are so big. In the central districts, there are hundreds of 560 Mercs with tinted windows - these belong to the Yakusa; recently, so heated has one-upmanship among the gangsters become that they've started stretching their Mercs, adding six fur-lined feet or more. They leave them in rows outside the clubs, engines running, keys in the lock - a million dollars worth of that nobody takes.

And the taxis. They're all called Cedrics, or Glorias - dumpy great Nissans purring around. You realise that Japan exports all those buzzy little cars to the gullible west, keeping a whole array of heavy, silent, comfortable tanks for themselves. And all so clean: buy a gallon of petrol and a swarm of guys wash the whole car. Taxi drivers wear white gloves - whether to signify hygiene, or as protection from infection, is never clear. Taxi colours, in contrast, are jolly pastels, with Chinese lanterns of the roof. The fancier ones have backlit turquoise numberplates.

Sometimes, when not admiring the cabs, you see - again overhead - the bullet trains heading off for other cities. Twice the size our 125s, the Shinkansen are incomparably more elegant, their rounded brilliant white noses carving through the sky in high speed silence.

Under Ground, Out Of Time

The tubes, as my uncle in California would say, are something else. Tokyo boasts a brilliant, perfectly run system of co-ordinated private lines which is almost completely mystifying to foreigners. Entering Shinjuku Station, a vast 500 acre interchange, you encounter an information landscape of stunning beauty and mystery - tens of thousands of Japanese typographic characters, on signs, on ticket machines, on tv monitors. Beneath them, hundreds of thousands of human Japanese characters move purposefully about, avoiding the foreigners who gaze about blankly, like whales stranded like whales on the icecap.

Even the ordinary tube trains are attractive. Thanks to deregulation, each line has its own company colours - but whatever the livery, trains gleam, as if someone had just polished every handrail. This probably because someone just did. (In department stores, they employ doll-like girls to stand each side of the escalator, polishing the handrails. And you love it. The pathology that afflicts visitors to Tokyo takes strange forms - like turning into your old Auntie Edna who hates litter).

They Nurture Neon

Tokyo's skyline at night is literally flashy, thanks to the remarkable columns of neon that adorn the sides of most buildings - particularly in Shimnjuku, where the commercial nightlife is based. The sharpness and high definition of these neon signs combines with the squareness of Japanese calligraphy to produce a stunning effect. Many of the signs are programmed, so that bars of light pulse up and down the columns of light like heartbeats. The signs are light-filled analogues of the buildings they are attached to: in Tokyo, shops, clubs and bars are stacked up high, story upon story - the pulses of light going up and down the neon columns remind you of lifts.

But just when you figure out some vague correspondence to what things look like, and the way they are, Tokyo feints. For example, the addresses on peoples' cards and letters refer to three-dimensional point in space. This is no doubt an extremely sensible system if you are a pigeon, but for the rest of us, it induces, once more, a sensation of displacement. The ritual of following directions (you have to write down verbatim things like 'head past the red door, turn left at the blue hut and look up for the 'I feel Coke' sign - we're the third window along from that). The fallibility of the system - odds are, someone will have painted the door - ensures that western visitors soon understand eastern thought processes, and in particular their tendency to arrive at a conclusion by a roundabout route.

Word Games

The English are particularly prone to delusion that they've got the hang of Tokyo, seeing in its graphic face an echo of their own image-saturated environment. At a club called Piccasso, for example, a boy from London's iD magazine has been imported to decorate the walls with graffiti drawn words of stunning banality: 'the more you consume the less you live'; 'London Town, check it out'; 'Check them out: Sacrosanct, Soho Brasserie'. Do us a favour. The 'artist' has approached Tokyo like a missionary speaking in pigin - words in Tokyo simply don't work like this. Someone explains: the Japanese use strange English formulations to express feelings, not to describe things - and trying to mimic it is guaranteed to offend.

Consuming passions

Which is not to deny that Tokyo displays all the symptoms you'd expect of a patient neurotically addicted to consumption. In discussions with business people you realise that they see 'lifestyle' purely in terms of the products you consume. Companies disguise this behind strange corporate slogans that they add, free of charge, to what is already an information-saturated landscape. Sharp adds 'New Life People' to its packaging; NEC: plasters 'Computers and Communications For Human Life' on its terminals; JVC, most runically of all, simply says 'Charming' on everything. In Tokyo, sociology is a shopping A man from the Hakuhodo Life and Living Institute, shows me a book called 'Keeping Up With The Satos', which tells you how many 'confident theoretical Japanese' give their grandmothers seaweed for Christmas (56%) - but tells you precious little about how they feel when doing so.

Shopping Software

The overlap between big business, culture and fashion - that is, shopping - takes fascinating forms in Tokyo. Who among us has not yawned as yet another returning Brit regales one with small black toys and cigarette lighters that look like frogs. More interesting, on the ground, are the 'antenna buildings' - shops, or galleries - often both - which are subsidised by big companies so that they can observe arcane consumer behaviours - such as buying a Comme Des Garcons chair - and decide if they should join in too. The Axis Building, for example, a four story, tile-clad edifice sitting on $100 million of land in Roppongi, is owned by Bridgestone, the gigantic tyre and car parts business. Inside Axis are a series of rarefied retail experiments - as well as the Kawakubo furniture, there are Nuno Textiles, a lighting workshop - and two galleries, in which a succession of design exhibitions are staged free of charge.

Axis is run by Mr Ishibashi, the urbane, American educated son of Bridgestone's president - who clearly regards the building as a private finishing school which will train his son to take his empire out of manufacturing and into the information age. And it will probably work: if Ishibashi junior can figure out why people buy Rei Kawakubo's chairs, he should manage to get Bridgestone out of rubber and into fashion.

Everywhere, unlikely people tell you they want to know how to get into the information era now. A town planner from one of Tokyo's localities - his equivalent rank in London would receive complaints about dustbins - tells me that 'we have ten years to complete the transformation of Tokyo from a hardware to a software city'.The architect, Takamatsu, says he sees Tokyo in the future as 'a cloud, an ephemeral city'.

Info-mania

The only cloud on Tokyo's rosy postmodern horizon the lowering threat of a terminal information glut. Hiroshi Sakashita, who runs Sharp's design centre, speaks of information illnesses by reference to 'the sword and the vase: western thought is linear; you establish a line of questioning, and then attack it straight on, like fighting with a sword. This enables you to ignore extraneous matter. In Japan, our minds are more like a vase, filling up with all the data available - themn we wait to see what grows out of it'.

Information floods Tokyo - visual, intellectual, sensual; this, plus its cartographic obscurity, explains why it is so hard to comprehend as a visual or conceptual unity. Our very vocabulary in the West is spatially biased - we have more words to describe measurements than we have to describe feelings. What we certainly lack is the emotional apparatus needed to understand the interaction of space, time and process that marks out Tokyo, and other post-modern cities like it, as a new phenomenon.

Pondering it all, the dazed departing visitor passes, on the way out at the airport, a graphic symbol of Tokyo's position at the centre of something we can't quite put our finger on, a vast map of the world, on which key cities are highlighted not just by names, but by digital readouts of their different local times. Beneath, a single arrow says: 'This Way'. ends

Posted by John Thackara at 05:07 PM