“Bairro Criativo” launched in Porto, Portugal on 24 May, the latest of my City As Platform projects which approach the urban landscape as a creative platform. I’m pleased to say that Porto has responded in style.

The agency ADDICT, lead by creative industries maestro Michael DaCosta Babb, asked me to create and direct a project exploring the question “how creative can Portugal be?”. The result is Bairro Criativo (Creative Quarter). Bairro Criativo combines the question they wanted to ask with one that I always like to ask:

We hear so much about ‘The Creative City’, but when do we get to see it?

For Porto, Bairro Criativo is that chance.

The framework for the project is quite simple. I put out the call through ADDICT’s communication channels to invite anyone in the city – designers, homemakers, business people, kids with crayons – anyone – to think of one thing they’d like to do to temporarily improve people’s daily lives in Porto. The only criteria was that the proposed ideas had to be simple, quick, and go in and come out with only a light touch on the city – nothing destroyed before they are installed, and no damage when they leave.

Of paramount importance to me was that this was an opportunity for a direct relationship between creative ideas and the physical city. No months of planning, no public workshops with post-it notes – let me know your ideas, let’s talk about how they’ll work within the framework of the project, and let’s make them happen. There are times when the long game is appropriate, and there are times when you just need to make the ideas happen.

It was interesting that a lot of people instinctively thought in what you could say were modular ideas – creating objects and opportunities to plug into the existing city to create new experiences, opportunities, and at times even temporary infrastructure. It was wonderful to see people think in modular, incremental terms – there was a pragmatic quality to the ideas at the same time as a fresh imagination which I enjoyed.

For a preview of a couple ideas I’m particularly excited about seeing happen…

"Farmville for Real" by Rita Maia, José Ricardo Cardoso, Pedro Cruz Lopes

Farmville for Real is a collection of modular structures made of two interlocking pieces. These small strucutres can exist on their own or in a group to enable pop-up community gardens anywhere, depending on the desire of the residents. The objectives of the project, say the creators are to:

• Provide people with an inexpensive opportunity to participate collectively in a project of common good.
• Promote shared responsibility in public spaces.
• Renew the urban landscape, making it more pleasant and healthy.
• Teach children and young people to start early to enhance the environment.
• Create an alternative way of spending free time.
• Create neighborly ties among the participants of the project.

Estrutura Simbiotica by Dioga Aguiar and Teresa Otto

Another piece, Estrutura Simbiotica by Dioga Aguiar and Teresa Otto is a modular construction that, as they say, “aims not only to increase the space of existing bus stops, but also to entertain those who are still waiting for their transportation.” I like it for both the visual qualities, but also for its symbiotic relationship with the bus stop (as the name would imply), and for its role in getting us to think of other areas and objects of the cities that could host a designed structure that plugs in to existing objects to increase both functionality and enjoyment.

Bairro Criativo article, Time Out Porto (click for full image)

More information on the project can be found on ADDICT’s website (in Portuguese).

For Portuguese readers, you can find an overview of the project in the current issue of Time Out Porto – scanned above.

If you’d like to keep track of future updates to Bairro Criativo or other projects, please subscribe to this site.

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Google Creative Labs’ Creative Director Ji Lee emailed me the other day to tell me about Chrome Experiments, a new product Google Creative Labs has just launched. Now that I’ve had time to play with the site and many of the experiments, I have to report out that not only is it all good, but there’s also something particularly worthy about creative catalysts such as Chrome Experiments, as I’ll explain.

Chrome is, of course, a new open source web browser from Google. I’m a new tech addict, so when it first came out last year I fired up the old PC (the Mac version is “coming soon” says Ji), and after taking Chrome out for a ride, looking under the hood and kicking the tires, I dig Chrome.

Browsers are quickly becoming the OS of our computing lives. When I first log on early in the morning, I open the browser, work on projects with partners all over the world, email, chat, video conference, review designs and tweak images and documents, and never once leave my browser. It’s the platform for my work and global connectivity. And with Chrome Experiments, Google is extending it as a platform for creativity.

While Ji recommends “Browser Ball” and “Video Puzzle” as experiments to get things going, personally, I’d like to highlight the Monster experiment as a model of the Chrome Experiment’s creative potential. There are other experiments that are more dynamic and vibrant, but as Monster is a demonstration “of what can be done with browser web standards (without Flash)” it provides a window into another key element of creativity that is obsessing me at the moment: the creativity of constraints.

When you begin playing around with Monster, its functionality feels so much like you’re inside a Flash movie, run through the Flash plug-in. But this is straight-up Java, baby – toggle the background colour, rotate it, pan it, get right inside the creative process, with nothing but you, your keyboard, and the given functionality of the browser itself.

There’s a harmony here between experiments such as Monster, and many others within Chrome Experiments, that use only the given functionality of Java and browser standards, and the recent Wired feature Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity. From magazine design’s constraints of a fixed page size and its 2D platform, to designing album covers for minuscule display on digital gadgets, across the board, constraints have always been a defining aspect of creativity. Today, however, as the general zeitgeist and the financial collapse turns all thoughts to one of constraints, those creatives who look at constraints, standards and fixed limitations as catalysts for expanding creative dialogue instead of choke points are well placed for a long ride upward through the downward economic cycle.

I recommend spending some time with Chrome Experiments and viewing your browser not only as a functional app, but as a platform for creativity. And for those of you who want to dig a bit deeper into Google’s platform philosophy, I recommend the book What Would Google Do?

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Creative re-use of existing urban areas is something of an obsession for me – I’m even moderating a dinner on the topic in a couple weeks. While my radar is tuned mostly to re-use done outside of formal cultural structures, Artangel is one organisation that always blows me away with their installations, and their latest work, Seizure by Roger Hiorns, is no exception.

Sited in an abandoned housing estate in London’s Elephant and Castle, Seizure literally transforms the mundane state of 1970s London public housing into a magical, etherial experience. Hiorns and his assistants pumped 90,000 litres of a heavily saturated copper sulfate solution into one of the units in the estate, then returned almost three weeks later to drain the unit. Once the liquid was removed, what remained was a glistening, glowing unit, lined with Yves Klein Blue crystals, outlining the walls, light fixtures, and, yes, bathtubs, as shown at top.

An exceptional project, providing an inspiring model for urban re-use, however fleetingly. After the project ends on 2 November, the estate will be demolished. In the meantime though, it is the focal point for thousands of people who will navigate through one of London’s more uncelebrated boroughs and explore the shell of a public housing estate, providing a community of experience in an area where community disappeared a long time ago. More information on the project can be found here, and my flickr photo set on the project is here.

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I’ll be addressing the congress on the development of creative urban environments – should be an interesting session, considering that my definition of what makes an urban environment creative challenges a lot of the usual notions. But I guess that’s why I’m there.

Joining me as keynote speakers at the congress will be Rem Koolhaas OMA, Charles Landry, Janis Dripe, chief architect of Riga City, and the economist Robert C. Kloosterman. For a list of the speakers and bios, go here. For more information on the World Urban Development Congress, go here.

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At the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris today as part of the final jury for the architectural design class being taught by my friends Karsten Huneck and Bernd Truempler of Office for Subversive Architecture fame.

As with most student work, there was a healthy range of ideas and varying degrees of talent on offer, but overall it was an fairly impressive selection of new thinking towards architecture by the next gen (well, France’s next gen). One piece that really stuck with me as I was walking around after the day was a project by students Berenice Gaussuin and Clair Tournier.

With a brief to redevelop an old firestation, they presented some impressively polished and well-thought out plans to gut the interior of the firestation and create an organically developing natural space within the building. Their ideas and execution of the project as they presented it reminded me of a lot of the thinking done in the second part of the Shrinking Cities project and even more radical explorations in terms of designing for shrinkage instead of growth in cities. Some nice work coming out of the ESA, guided by OSA. All hail the power of the acronym!

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Free For All
March 3rd to March 24th, 2007
Alberta Gallery of Art
Edmonton, Alberta
For a full write-up of the event, go here. But you can’t get more concise in describing what is going on there other than listing their primary exhibition guideline: If one person can carry their submission through the front doors of the gallery _ in one trip _ then we will include it in the exhibition. The size of our front door is 9 ½’ x 5 ½’.

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
2 March 2007 then ongoing
nüans, Ellerstrasse 187
Düsseldorf
The initial installation opens to the public and allows visitors to make changes to the work, (first at the private view, and for the duration of the show) by adding, moving and recombining elements, etc. The space and the changes will be documented daily, then monthly.

These of course aren’t the first shows to do this, but let’s hope this is just a sampling of a lot more to come.

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A little love from the media to kick off the new year. Nancy Durrant from The Times (UK) interviewed me today about my work with Village Underground in London. Village Underground is a project I’ve been working on with Auro Foxcroft for some time. For those of you in London, if you’ve seen several London Underground subway carriages sitting on top of a building on Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch, you are not hallucinating (even if you are, don’t worry, those carriages aren’t part of your trip; just find a fixed point to focus on, take a few breaths, and drink some water). The carriages are part of a much larger project to create a series of spaces in cities around the world to allow an international exchange of creativity and ideas. I’ll be writing more about Village Underground soon, but for now – the essence of the project is that Village Underground will be a catalyst for new creativity, where street-level innovation and skill sets are brought inside to refuel the tired and outdated practices that dominate much of culture today. Watch this space. And in the meantime, play the visualisation above to give you an idea of how it will look when it’s done. It’s pretty sweet.

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