ACADEMY OF URBANISM CONGRESS VI, Glasgow 2011 Provocation workshop themes: Overview Prepared by A+DS
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ACADEMY OF URBANISM CONGRESS VI, Glasgow 2011 Provocation workshop themes: Overview
“The cities everyone wants to live in would be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, support a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and help heal society’s divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. This is so in part because the city is not its own master; cities can fail on all these counts due to national government policy or to social ills and economic forces beyond local control. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. Richard Sennet, Quant
Ed Glaeser recently asserted that cities are growth engines. He vividly portrays his view of both the benefits of the city, and the disbenefits of not supporting their economies in his new book. This was described in ‘Prospect’ magazine as a ‘love letter to cities’. Making cities work matters. If cities are engines of the new economic future, then neighbourhoods and communities are key parts. How we see them matters. Someone once said that ‘what is most general is most particular’. What this means is that the things which mean most to one person, probably mean something to someone else. This isn’t about preferences. This is about the qualities that affect us as humans. It is about lives. Starting with this matters. In discussing neighbourhoods, cities and communities it is important to be clear about what matters. For some, the design of the place matters, how it looks, how it works. If we locate a two year old in the centre of this question we might unpack the answer starting in terms of some of the basic elements of our lives: a house, health, a job, learning. Looking into each of these elements in turn, we inevitably start to look at relationships, between the elements, between spaces, between people, between service providers, investors, designers, users. Instead of moving from the general to the particular, we might start with the particular. Start with something that matters and move out to the bigger picture; sometimes we get different answers, and new ways of seeing things. This matters.
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It has been argued that one key source of health inequality is the lack of opportunity to get a job. Professor Michael Parkinson, in presenting work on competitiveness and social cohesion notes that ’the key social face of cities and regions is the emergence of social exclusion which is growing in rich as well as poor areas, in growing as well as declining areas. The growth in social exclusion is intimately connected to, and partly caused by, the search for economic competitiveness. But at the same time the growth in social exclusion is limiting the economic competitiveness of our cities and regions’. This is the key dilemma of the future of places, a real and concerted effort to build opportunity for all and tackle the wicked problems that have dogged communities for generations.
ACADEMY OF URBANISM CONGRESS VI, Glasgow 2011 Provocation workshop themes: Overview
This challenge isn’t about some theoretical set of ideas. It’s about engaging with people in place in our times, the nature of contemporary places. This is about enabling people to engage with place and make, and remake purpose and meaning. In a real sense, this is about participation. This doesn’t mean just a step in a formal planning process. It means process of active engagement with our environment. This inevitably leads to collaboration, the coming together of people to do things, to share resources and make things happen. This sense of doing things together is often driven by pragmatism over some sense of romanticism. In an increasingly diverse world, collaboration and the ability to connect to others is an essential part of making things happen. How people see place enables opportunity. If we were to see the city as a landscape for learning, where every aspect of the environment and the activities within it are learning opportunities, we might re-think how we use what we already have better. We might start to look at the institutional arrangements of place which enable or inhibit people using space and services in creative ways. We might start to look at the ‘software’ element of places differently. We might start to think about how communities could appropriate space for different purposes. This matters because the outcome of a creative use of resources is not just cost savings. It is the building of stronger social capital, the building of the foundations for a culture of innovation in all aspects of how a place works. If innovation is a central element of the new future of the economy, of social organisation and places, then growing the conditions for innovation is important. In this context, Professor Ann Markusen noted in the review of cultural industries presented at Glasgow School of Art that ‘ the creation of networks and support may be as important as the mere provision of space’.
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The outcome of a creative use of resources is not cost savings...it is the building of stronger social capital, the buidling of a culture of innovation in all aspects of how place works”
The discussion of networks brings in a set of important ideas about the nature of place and how we respond to the challenges of housing and health, learning and jobs. Communities can form in space, and through other networks, such as the web. They are fluid, and can form for reasons of mutual benefit. Neighbourhoods are fixed in space and provide a setting for some communities to participate some of the time. It is akin to a closed system. The idea of a community is like that of an open system, where meaning and purpose are created and re-created over and over again. There is no fixed end point, just a process of continuous learning. This builds capacity, in the formal and informal structures of communities and places. This capacity in turn enables places to be more or less responsive to change, to shape the direction of change, to be changemakers. If this is true, then how we build these networks, enable this capacity and promote this culture of continuous learning is important. This impacts on the way we see neighbourhoods, communities, cities. Every community needs space, and connections. The community of work needs different types of space, for different reasons in different parts of the city. The nature of work is changing. So too are the spaces of work. Service provision to our communities and in our neighbourhoods is changing for a variety of reasons. It is essential that in all this change that
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ACADEMY OF URBANISM CONGRESS VI, Glasgow 2011 Provocation workshop themes: Overview
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The blurring of the line between production and consumption... between designer and user, is a more open way of doing things”
the opportunity of better is not lost to less with less. This requires a more creative way of working with people. For some, place is where the house is: for relationships, for the communities of interest that inform the quality of life of a person, a set of wider connections are necessary in space and time. The issue here is about the balance between fixed, physical space, and specialised spatial needs to relate to the way we live today. Its about enabling people co-create spaces and lives together, moving from mass production as an idea to co-design and personalisation. These changing ideas about the nature of design are informing aspects of all parts of the economy and society. Some car manufacturers for instance can produce most of the car in a mass production process, but enable people to specify the last elements, to make the car bespoke. How could we adopt some of these ideas into the concept of place in a 21st century context, to make places more liveable? The blurring of the line between production and consumption in the car example, between the designer and the user is about a more open way of doing things, changing systems of thinking and doing. What might this mean for the urbanists of today thinking and doing things differently to make places more liveable in the context of contemporary society? • What might it mean fort how we see the idea of neighbourhood? • How might we develop tools and approaches to design in this way? • How might it inform the building of different senses of community? What is clear from Richard Sennett and from Professor Michael Parkinson’s thinking on cities is that tackling growth and social exclusion are necessary. Doing this requires people to think and do things differently. Unless these challenges are grounded in the real nature of places, and how modern places work, then the city as an engine of economic growth will remain both an abstract idea on the one hand, and an idea that builds more social exclusion as a consequence of growth on the other. We need to build a better idea of placemaking to address this challenge.
References http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/EIUA/EIUA_Docs/The_Future_of_Urban_Policy.pdf http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/tag/edward-glaeser/ http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/General2.aspx?pageid=16 http://www.nea.gov/pub/pubDesign.php http://www.academyofurbanism.org.uk/projects/10x/provocation_belfast.pdf 3
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