Thriving too

Big Society: Artists, Transformation and Collaboration

It took artists Jaap Verheul and Kamiel Verschuren two years to get the wording of the contacts right, but now they manage a project in Rotterdam called the NAC Foundation. The foundation now looks after 200 previously empty or squatted houses and lets artists occupy them as studios for a small service charge.  It has taken 10 years overall to develop the project to where it is now… and it started by approaching a Rotterdam housing association with an idea to start improving an area. In the Netherlands housing associations are vitally important, having built and managed whole neighbourhoods after the war.  Some of these neighborhoods have since been pulled down and replaced.  But they cannot pull down without a plan and funding in place to re-build immediately.

So in one particular area of Rotterdam the buildings had been neglected and become a problem with squatting, some with artists… but also with prostitution and drugs.  So the proposition that Kamiel and Jaap gave to the housing association was to transform the area into a place where artists could live and work.  And the housing association agreed, on condition that they had one organization to deal with…and so began the drafting of the first user contract that took 2 years to get right.

 

It also involved asking a lot of people to vacate the houses they were squatting in.  Jaap describes it as a ‘tsunami’ of bad feeling that was directed towards them during this period, but ultimately what they have achieved is completely stunning.   They have transformed the area into an oasis of beauty and calm.  Taking each house in turn they were renovated and made safe, sometimes in a whole street at a time.  The area was best described as a ghetto previously – low education and 44% unemployment.

They have reserved a number of houses as common spaces, which anyone in the local community can use for free.  These have become venues that 'generate a public life’ that was completely missing before.  People use these social spaces for events and meetings, workshops and art showings.

The foundation has spread to working in other nearby areas, setting up community gardens, after school education, language lessons (the area is only 20% Dutch).

So they have cleaned up the area and created a cheap and beautiful place for artists to live and work. They have transformed a ghetto through their imagination and grueling hard work.  And very importantly they have also been supported all along the way by the housing association.  The trusting relationship they have developed is a model for how authorities and citizens might work together in new ways to create thriving communities.  The value is evident to the housing authority: Jaap and Kamiel have transformed the area in a way they never could have. They give new meaning to the term 'social artist'.

In the post earlier in the week I questioned whether neighbourhood revitalisation of this sort, citizen initiated, rather than developer-led, still counted as 'gentrification'.  As I said - I am not sure it is - because it seems to reflect a new sense of value people are putting on 'contributing neighbourhoods', places where people are intrinsically involved in shaping the area.  It probably did move some of the problems onto another area, but it changed a neighbourhood from almost unbearable to sustaining in a very real and meaningful way.  I also described Willem's and Nol's project in Rotterdam where a 'presence' can be used to spread a warmth and sense of welcome that makes a neighbourhood feel different. Whatever these 2 projects are doing - they are doing something very inspiring in my view.

*Thank you* to Kamiel and Jaap and Maurice for giving me so much time to show me around and describe the project!

Big Society: Bring your own Restaurant

How could anyone not love Bring Your Own Restaurant.  A public demonstration of social honesty and inclusivity... and just plain fun!

{IOWs = building social capital though participatory creativity and citizen-led public urban design}

"In early May of 2009, four friends planning a Friday night on the town faced a common dilemma. The art openings at Holyoke’s Paper City Studios, located at 80 Race Street, were a sure bet. But in a city where downtown dining options dwindle after 5 p.m., where would they eat beforehand?

Instead of choosing a restaurant, Holyoke residents James F. V. Bickford, Rachel L. Lawrence, Daphne Board and Stan Glodes cre- ated one.

They set up a table and chairs on the sidewalk overlooking the second-level canal on Dwight Street. They each brought a dish to share. A tablecloth added a touch of formality. Glodes wore a bright pink tuxedo coat.

“During dinner, we brainstormed locations and how we could invite other people to take part,” said Board, a custom shoemaker who, with Glodes, is renovating two houses in Holyoke.

With that, Bring Your Own Restaurant—a bi-weekly event billed as “a plein air potluck on the streets of Holyoke”—was born."

See also Permanent Breakfast

 

 

Holding back the tide

So, what did y'all get up to on Saturday? Bit of a lie-in? Nice warm lazy brunch? Get dressed up in a blue mac and recreate the legend of King Canute on Brighton seafront as part of a worldwide art exhibition to highlight the impact of climate change? Numb toes from the cold, but a great atmostphere and hopefully a few more people thinking a little more about the impact of our lifestyles...
(I'm in the top wave, a few people in from the left)

350eARTh is the world’s first ever global climate art project. In over a dozen places across the globe, citizens and artists will create massive public art installations to show how climate change is already impacting our world as well as offer visions of how we can solve the crisis. Each art installation will be large enough to be seen from space and documented by satellites.

Read more
See the other photos

Eat your words

 

I've been getting out and about from the London bubble these past few weeks, and meeting more of the people who make the food most of us tend to take for granted. It's been a massive eye-opener.

This weekend, I saw two dairy farms and met two lovely, skillful and passionate cheese makers. Mary from Quickes Traditional (pic above) and Jamie from Montgomery's (pic below). Both of whom are making traditional cloth wrapped cheddar in the West Country.

I thought I was pretty up on food, but I guess I still hadn't properly thought through the time and care taken from looking after a herd of cows, to milking, culturing, mixing, salting, pressing, wrapping, turning, storing...

In an effort to encourage more young people to explore and develop a passion for communicating about local food, Slow Food Devon have just launched the Carol Trewin Young Food Writer Awards. For oung people under 30, living in or with a connection to the West Country - in memory of Carol Trewin, an influential food writer from Devon. Deadline for this year is 1 Feb 2011.

Find out more.

Living Concrete + Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture

Living Concrete is a cross-institutional dialogue with Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, an initiative of the Department of Architectural Sciences at Ryerson University in Toronto and is running from 1 October until 15 December 2010. 

Carrot City demonstrates how increasing public interest in agriculture, food supply, and food security is influencing urban design and how design can facilitate a more robust urban food system. This wide-ranging survey of Canadian and American cases examines projects at multiple scales – the city, community and knowledge-building, home and rooftop projects, and a range of products.

Included in the discussion is the newly launched Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

And the Vacant Lot - a project started by What If projects.  One of my favourites is their Food Factories which was part of the London Festival of Architecture in 2008.

Slowly but surely it feels like we are getting a proper visual of the future, it is collective, creative, handmade ..... and beautiful!

Farm Together Now

If you haven't discover the work of Amy Franceschini I hope this post will be an inspiration.  Amy is part of Future Farmers and has been working at the intersection of art/design thinking and sustainable food for some time.  Amy was behind the Victory Gardens project in San Francisco. We have blogged about Amy's work here and here.

The latest project, a blog and a book, is 'Farm Together Now - A portrait of people, places and ideas for a new food movement', which Amy has written with Daniel Tucker.

"This part-travelogue, part-oral history, part-creative exploration of food politics will introduce readers to twenty groups working in agriculture and sustainable food production in the U.S. Throughout 2009 the authors visited twenty farms from coast to coast, talking to farmers about their engagement in sustainable food production, public policy and community organizing efforts. Interviews and photo essays with each farm/garden/project will illustrate the inspiring histories, unique characters and everyday struggles of life on these farms."

One example I love from the blog is City Slickers Farms.

From the recent Grist article: “Started in 2001, City Slicker Farms is one of the oldest food and farming organizations in Oakland. Founded by activist Willow Rosenthal, the group, along with the food justice nonprofit People’s Grocery, has become an incubator and hub for agtivists who want to make fresh, healthy food available to all Oaklanders, especially those low-income communities and communities of color who typically have reduced access to quality produce at affordable prices.”

Big Society: Revealing Assets, system change and death

It is to Matthew Taylor’s great credit that when, in our last sit-down conversation a couple of weeks ago, he didn’t laugh out loud when I suggested that ‘system change’ would be a really good aim for the Social Spaces project and Big Society in general.  “A system change towards asset-based thinking from needs-based thinking “ I said.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t changed my mind whatsoever about asset-based approaches… The asset mapping that the groups in the Travelling Pantry workshops have done over the last week have only confirmed how exciting revealing community assets is… and how constructive this can potentially be as a starting point for community-led projects.  The pic below is one of the highly productive mapping exercises at the Travelling Pantry workshop in Glasgow yesterday, an event kindly arranged by RSA Scotland in partnership with CEMVO Scotland (Council of Ethnic Minority Voluntary Sector Organisations).

In the last few weeks there has been a lot more discussion about asset-based approaches (including Matthew’s post yesterday), and the search for approaches which are more effective and less  funding-hungry will only intensify as the cuts announced today will start to bite at local level. So this is good right – that is the way to progress towards ‘system change’?

Except that this system change – the one from looking at needs towards building on existing assets – isn’t just a change to a more positive mindset – it will involve literally turning the system inside out. And that will take a lot of time. The reason I believe that the change is so far ranging is because of how the system currently operates.  Every funding application I have ever seen starts with the heading ‘Needs’ and ends with ‘Outcomes’.  So while some projects can deftly bypass this by claiming a larger ‘need’ and then answering that need by an asset-based approach, the majority won’t be able to.

The projects we gathered for Hand Made are all intrinsically asset-based… and nearly all of them were also ‘emergent’.  In other words they were led not by the tightly pulled string of projected outcomes, but instead by people with a keen awareness of intelligent evolution, the power of collaboration and reflective navigation.  The effects have often been multi-faceted and unexpected. I was reminded of this yesterday when one workshop participant described how her work to get a bike rack built in their community was now resulting in a whole range of other new collaborative activities in the community.  Emergent activity is desirable but rarely predictable.

‘What’s with all this out-of-character talk of unachievable goals and death?’

The point I guess is that I am seeing more strongly than ever (if that were possible) is the need for us to take our communities firmly into our own hands .  If we had any residual doubt about any form of external rescue then the cuts today would have removed that.  I am terribly sympathetic with all the people effected by the cuts, particularly those who will lose their livelihoods. 

But in terms of developing Creative Communities *specifically* I think that the scarcity of available funding could lead to more collaboration, more citizen involvement and better ideas.  In Ten Faces of Innovation – Tom Kelley from IDEO describes how as an innovation technique many organisations remove one or more resources to encourage new thinking, and how ‘seeking out constraints’ can stimulate all sorts of unique solutions. Dave Briggs talked about the potentially positive aspects of lack of money last week. 

So here are my thoughts for today:

1. We don’t have time for system change.  We need creative action now. Forget lobbying, blogging and talking…not altogether of course. But do so with the realisation that our collective actions will prove the fastest and most effective change mechanism.

2. We don’t have time for personal egos. The ideas we are working with now are so complex that there is no one single source… in fact they are so multi-disciplinary they are almost impossible to unravel.  As one of the chiefs of PIXAR once explained: all good/complex ideas are never a single idea but rather many ideas (sometimes hundreds) re-connected and built upon. The pic below is part of a fantastic graphic about ideas by Frank Chimero.

And .... very importantly, in this case the whole really will be more than the sum of our parts - it is time for us to amplify each other's efforts! In this landscape I can't see any space for credit-takers.

3. Let's not mock genuine efforts to bring funding decisions closer to citizens through participatory budgeting or street level budgets (as boring as it sounds it really could be revolutionary). It may be our biggest tool to steer funds into projects which build on the human and material assets in communities.

 

 

 

Big Society: Travelling Pantry and The Problem With The Grass

Nothing makes my inner geeky garden designer sigh quite as much as the sight of a well manicured patch of grass.  It speaks to a sense of both order and beauty.  I tell you this only to emphasise now much I appreciate grass and how important it is having it cut well and regularly in order to make a neighbourhood look and feel well cared for. (Except in the US where the water used to irrigate lawns is unsustainable.  In soggy Britain this isn’t quite such an issue)

Grass cutting is also beginning to develop as a discussion example on issues of Big Society and citizen participation at local level… wrapped up in the question ‘who is going to cut the grass?’

I have been thinking about grass in the context of the first Travelling Pantry workshop to be held tomorrow in Sheffield. I have been putting the finishing touches to the planning and thinking about the best way to talk about why we have chosen an ‘asset-based’ approach for this project.  And thinking about the grass problem has been helpful.

If we broadly say that Big Society Thinking is about helping people make their communities and their environment their own - becoming more responsible for how their community functions, looks and feels – where does grass cutting fit?

The Travelling Pantry project is trying to help people develop creative community projects, make new things from local people’s enthusiasms and skills and use the material resources already available in the community. What we are doing differently from many community based workshops is that we not going to be creating a ‘snagging’ list for the community. There is nothing wrong with snagging lists of course – it just isn’t what we think we have time for at this particular stage.

There are a number of really very inspiring community projects which focus on maintaining (or even better refurbishing) the community  - and making your environment beautiful for the community is a wonderful and creative thing in itself.  The difficulty with the problem-solving format in a workshop situation in my experience, particularly if you start with grass cutting, is that typically, at community level at least, all these roads lead to ‘maintenance thinking’.  Once you have started, it becomes a list of pot-holes and dog mess, road works and graffiti and litter … and half an hour later you are talking about ‘hoodies’ being loud and rude and how lonely elderly people are and how bad the NHS is, and why aren’t trains on time, or the leaves collected quicker … and before you know it you are a sad heap of exhaustion and frustration just thinking about the terribleness of it all.

So we didn’t think we would do that.  At least not for the first couple anyway.

What we are planning on doing is thinking less about maintenance issues and thinking more about creating new things, new ways of doing things with new ideas and people – with an strong eye for how young people and older people and other people with less social capital, but loads of talents, can be properly included.

Maintenance after all can be pretty boring.  There is a lot of satisfaction in a clean house, and stacks of clean laundry are nearly as breathtaking to me as a manicured lawn but it really isn’t that exciting to the average person … is it? At least not to start with.

We know that people will come to the TP workshops with an open mind.  We are hoping to take them through a highly researched – but still experimental and innovative - process of asset-based community development: mapping assets and co-creating new ways of approaching community projects.

All this thinking in the car reminded me of the meetings I am lucky enough to have with Louise Macdonald from time to time.  Louise is Chief Executive of Young Scot (this fact helps me sleep at night)… and whenever I meet with her I feel that the world expands through her influence – possibilities open up before your eyes – things you never thought of before seem possible and exciting.  And she has never once talked about cutting the grass.

So there it is – my rationale for the Travelling Pantry workshops being asset-based, and why the intention is that participants will hopefully leave with a practical asset map of their community, a pipe to a whole host of tools and skills they can explore after the workshop and head full of possibilities. Rather than leaving with a list of chores... important as they are!

While the conversation on Big Society remains focused on services and 'fixing' issues in general, perhaps we are wasting precious time ... that we would be better spent talking about how citizens can be supported to re-configure their community in truly transformative, exciting and original ways. And to do that you need to know what's in them already.

Strive for Happiness

 

I had the *most delightful* meeting with Alice Osborne and Ella Britton on Tuesday in Covent Garden.  They have started a charming project calledhttp://thestriveforhappiness.wordpress.com/ Strive for Happiness.  The pic above shows their manifesto, which they displayed in a London train station - without even getting arrested! 

As they describe on their website "We want to look at the world and see lovely things, talk about them, think in magical ways, and do stuff." 

What I liked was the creativity of their projects, which include The Daily Strive for Happiness, The Nan Project, Correspondence Mondays and Potato Communities, which rather than simply talking about happiness, include putting objects out into the real world.  I can't wait to see how the project develops!

 

Nothing new under the sun

So I know many of the 'digital natives' among us might occasionally wonder if there was owt worth facebooking about before the rise of web2.0... but as these amazing photos go to show, innovation and forward thinking are nothing new under the sun.

"In 1958, the great American architect and designer Charles Eames holds a small "solar engine" -- dubbed his Do Nothing Machine -- that generates power to run the small, whirling universe of brightly colored toys surrounding him."

And if lab-coats looked like this when I was at school, I might have been more likely to take a chemistry A-level.

(by the way, as a child of the 80's am I classed as a digital hybrid? I am young enough to remember surfing the web at 16 before anyone really knew what the point of it was, and getting my first email account at 18. But thankfully old enough for Facebook not to have created a permenant digital record of my teenage indiscretions. Count your blessings.)

Solar Power Back in the Day - set of images from Life

The Power of Creativity

 

Garnet Millar has just published his book The Power of Creativity.  The book documents the results of the 50-year follow-up to The Torrrance Longitudinal Study of Creative Behaviour.

'In 1958, Dr. E. Paul Torrance began his longitudinal study of creative behavior in order to discover the answers to two questions. 1) Could a test to measure creative potential predict creative achievement later as an adult? 2) What other factors might influence, encourage and sustain creativity over time?

Fifty years later, Dr. Garnet Millar continued this study by analyzing whether or not the Torrance® Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) still had the power to predict creative achievement over a 50-year period; and whether other factors supported or sustained creative achievement." 

Sweat Shop Opens in Paris

 Amid cups of coffee and slices of cake, frivolity and industry are the order of the day at the Sweat Shop, Paris's only sewing cafe, which Duss and Holleis opened last month in a quiet street near the trendy bars and boutiques of the Canal Saint Martin.

So they decided to open a friendly workshop where budding seamstresses and enthusiastic amateurs could practise their art while sipping an espresso or munching on Martena's herb-laden Finnish cake. Along the lines of a typical internet cafe, users can purchase access to a Singer sewing machine – six euros an hour – and come to classes in the evening if they want to improve, for example, their knitting or customising skills. The idea, say the owners, is to reconnect people with the joys of sartorial DIY.

Via: Lauren Currie Via: Guardian

Culture Sharing Lab

 I was ill all week and had to cancel nearly everything! The thing I minded missing the most was the Culture Sharing Lab at University of Surrey on Wednesday - the result of our workshop a month ago!  The student produced a number of interactive art pieces, including the hanging postcard display (image above).

It looks fantastic! Can't wait to see the digital re-capture!

Geek Swoon

Concept for the Stockholm Library, rendered by a team of students at the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. If you could breathe in knowledge then this would be the place to stand.

Via: Notcot

 

 

David Gauntlett's Metaphorical Models at Reboot (London)

David set up a lego station at the Reboot Britain conference. This is the film of the marvellous models people made... and what they mean. Some great insights among them. 

If you made one of the models, leave a comment! 

*rubs forefingers together*

For anyone with an older sibling who has endured the 'smallest violin in the world' taunt for sarcastic sympathy more times than you've had hot dinners, this one is for you...

Tons more tiny things...

Creative Spaces

There was a lot of talk at the IMBES conference last month about research or 'lab' schools.  If I had a lab school I would be pretty inspired by this new space just opened in Paris at the centre 104 Centrequatre.  It is designed by French designer Matali Crasset and it looks an amazingly stimulating space.

"The venue aims to provide a public space where children can exercise their creativity. The space is divided into distinct areas for children of different ages and abilities and furnished with free-standing, mushroom-like structures. A circular seating and play area in the centre of the room features an inner, cushioned play-area for babies and toddlers and is surrounded by stools so parents can sit at the same level as their children. When covered, this area becomes a large meeting table or platform for activities or performances."

Fascinating

So, for those of you I haven't bored with it yet... I'm going to see the Queen in July, at a garden party in Buck Palace. And I'm taking my Gran along with me. Rules state I need some sort of headgear, so I'm going to try and make a 'fascinator'.

Instructions from CraftStylish where a community of lots of lovely creative people put up ideas and instructions for crafty projects.

Hamper

Hurrah for the great British bankholiday weekend! Sunshine and bbq's all round. If you want to carry a bit of the magic with you for lunches back in the office next week, why not make yourself a portable picnic in a suitcase...

Exactly What it Says on The Tin - Part 2

Sam Potts  has done some great design work for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. You see more of his product designs on his sign - under the heading 'probably why you are here'.

Free Store!

"The Free Store in Nassau Street, Manhattan, created by artists Athena Robles and Anna Stein has been creating a stir. It was inspired by a liberal hippie initiative from 1967, the Diggers Free Store which operated under the slogan “Don’t Waste Give To The Diggers”. This time Robles and Stein have created their own Free Store just a few from Wall Street in New York’s financial district.

The idea is simple. Everything in the store is free. You’re encouraged to donate something too, of course. In return for your purchase you’re issued with a receipt that declares no money has changed hands."

Via: William Shaw's marvellous RSA Arts and Ecology Blog

Stephen Fry on Why Email Liberates the Voice

Stephen Fry talks of the delights of writing emails:

Suddenly there's wit, charm, self-deprecation, self-knowledge, understanding - all kinds of qualities.

It's a literary form in the most basic sense that you're writing and it's rather wonderful. The phone will be seen, I think, as a terrible aberration.

As I talk to you now, and as one talks, especially to strangers, all the terrible problems of class, differences in education, race and gender all have their part to play in the embarrassment of real life conversation, but the moment one's let loose with a keyboard or a pen you can express yourself properly.

Via: BBC Article

Special People Like to Make Things Up

In a very enjoyable article by Will Gompertz in last week's Guardian, talking about the wonders of conceptual art Gompertz raises questions about knowledge and creativity.

"Facts are tedious. People who put great store by them even more so. Who wants to be stuck with the club bore or local know-it-all? Yet last week the country went weak at the knees before members of Oxford University's Corpus Christi quiz team, winners (and now, losers) of a TV panel show. Why? Just because they were able to chime back some speedy answers to some fairly arcane questions. Now they are being told they are special. They are not. 

Special people don't deal with facts; they deal with the unknown and the unknowable. Special people like to make things up.

Shakespeare made up over 3,000 words. Einstein's theories started out as ideas." 

Via: Applied Imagination

Let the encouragement begin

There is just so much negativity all around us these days, have you noticed? It’s infesting the internet, it’s taking over the big screen, it’s cutting you off, it’s showing up on your bank statement, it’s staining your new shirt, it’s breathing down your neck, it’s not giving you a vacation, it’s talking behind your back, it’s stuffing you in a locker, it’s cheating on you, it’s charging you more, it’s giving you less, and it’s making you miserable.

The deadline has passed to enter but they created a gallery of encouragement!

You can buy the Free Encouragement postcard pack here.
Thanks to lovely hellojenuine.

Brevity

Worn sandals scuffing sand. Sun on skin and a whole world free for the taking. Spicy scent and market bustle; curious looks and an alien language. Then quiet welcome: shared understanding over breakfast.

GnatGnat - say what you got to say in 33 words...