The classic newspaper vending boxes have always played role in the city larger than their designated one. At their peak, when each box was filled with that day’s issue, even the most hurried urban citizen running for the bus could get an analogue news feed of current events by scanning the headlines as they ran past. They were infomatic barometers of an area – you could tell a lot about the average population of an area by the number of financial newspaper boxes vs. daily tabloid boxes on a given street corner. For the enterprising street merchant, they were a quick entrepreneurial resource – for the investment of a few quarters, you could grab that day’s entire stack of papers and go around the corner to increase your investment ten-fold. Even before Craigslist the business model of the daily newspaper had its weaknesses.

When I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago to speak at the Future of the City Conference, I was waiting to cross the street when I found myself next to one of the last innovations these form of vending will see – the unified newspaper box. Saddened by the lack of papers still populating these boxes, I stole a quick glance of the headline of that day’s FT to get a bite of the news. “Bush seeks remaining $350bn of rescue fund” the headline told me, and I crossed the street. I chewed over the headline for a while – “Bush? In the news today?” I thought to myself. Then, thinking about the $350bn referenced, the only thought I had was maybe that was how he was funding his retirement. Nothing about this made sense, so I doubled back across the street, and looked again – the issue of the FT I was referencing was dated January 13, 2009. My instinctive bite of the daily headlines was drawing information from 2 and a half years earlier.

While it was unfortunate that another newspaper box had been abandoned, the interesting thing for me was that my perception of the information delivery vehicle, the newspaper box, was still wired to an outdated model. Now, I’m about as much of a RSS feed addict as it is possible to be, and no luddite by any definition, but in my rushed moment of stealing a glance of the news in the hustle of crossing a busy street, I was drawing on an almost subconscious wiring formed during my student days in Boston when this would be my quick news feed on my way to class. My relationship with the newspaper box had already been formed, but instead of having to re-learn a relationship with this object, the responsibility now seemed to “un-learn”, essentially to have no relationship with this function-less object. That’s a tough thing to do – to change an existing relationship with an element of the urban landscape not into a new one, but into a non relationship.

Back home in London, I was sitting outside at a cafe thinking about this when a uniquely London game of cat and mouse was unfolding in front of me that linked with my thoughts. A public maintenance worker had just finished cleaning out one of London’s iconic red phone booths, with a pile of garish escort cards being swept up into his cart before he walked around the corner to tackle the next booth. As the sounds of his wheels faded into the next street, a man stepped into the clean phone booth, took a stack of cards from his pocket and began pasting a new batch of escort cards throughout the booth.

With the near universal adoption of mobile phones and almost total abandonment of using public phones, particularly in London, this has become something of the default function of these public booths – a street-level adult services directory. There is a slight sophistication to this use of the dormant phone booths, as each booth displays cards from locally based escorts; in this way, each booth becomes something of a local directory of services, and provides a private booth from which to make a call on your mobile phone. While it is easy to dismiss or discard this notion of use of these phone booths, the booths retain an informational function within the urban landscape by hosting these cards. The cleaners, while respectfully doing their job and removing the cards, also remove the booths of their new function. Yet within minutes, the cards come back and the modified function returns.

We are at a fascinating moment in our physical relationship with the city. As our relationship to information, news and communication channels have become deeply individual in both use and access, the public icons and objects anchored to our streets and shared spaces remain as memorials to when these services were points in the urban landscape. At times, we are left with no choice but to try and train ourselves to un-learn our existing relationships with these objects, such as with the American newspaper boxes, or to accept the informal re-purposing of these objects in the case of the London phone booths.

The instinct of most cities is simply to remove these physical embodiments of past behaviors. I’d like to think in a different manner – to think of re-programming these analogue structures into serving new functions in the city. A re-programmed, re-purposed object still retains its link with its original use, and there is value in that. There is a balance between sentimentality and breaking the commonality of relationship that we had with our physical urban icons. When we remove these tributes to objects of common use, our notion of common relationships with our physical surroundings is removed slightly as well.

For some examples of re-use and re-purposing of newspaper boxes, phone booths and more, see The Urban Guide for Alternate Use. You can also keep up with updates to The Guide and this site by following @scottburnham on Twitter.

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Over the next two weeks I will be speaking at two public symposiums which explore important aspects of the future design of our cities, so I wanted to spread the word here and recommend that anyone in the respective cities of London or Linz come along and join in.

On Wednesday 13 October I will be speaking about Urban Play and my “City as Platform” approach to design in the city at the Interactive Architecture symposium, held at Metropolitan Works, 166-220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB. Joining me will be Jason Bruges of Jason Bruges Studios, Michael Spencer of Sound Strategies, Usman Haque of Haque Design and research, Alexandros Tsolakis of UnitedVisualArtists, Eva Rucki of Troika and many others. Full details can be found here.

The following week I will be in Linz, Austria, speaking at the SuperStadt2010 symposium on Wednesday, 20 October. I will be delivering a talk titled “Open Strategies for Designing the Urban,” describing, well, I suppose the title says it all. Full Details of my talk can be found on the SuperStadt site here.

Unfortunately, my time in Linz will prevent me from being able to be in Berlin on the same day for the Exchange Radical Moments Congress, at which my Urban Guide for Alternate Use project will be launched. This kills me, but I recommend anyone in Berlin check out the Exchange Radical Moments Congress, and for everyone else, please visit the Urban Guide for Alternate Use site and join my exploration of “re-use and resourcefulness in the city through alternate uses for urban objects and areas.”

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Oscar Lhermitte working rooftop on his Big Dipper Project

One of the drawbacks of living in London (and most other major metropolises) is that the ambient light from the buildings, street lamps, etc, make it impossible to see the stars in the sky at night. So when designer Oscar Lhermitte applied to the London chapter of the Awesome Foundation, of which I am a proud trustee, with the proposal “to recreate the missing stars in London”, we knew we had something Awesome to consider.

Oscar’s The Big Dipper project is an ongoing project which uses a combination of balloons, LEDs, and various control mechanisms to recreate stars and constellations in the night time sky over London.

An Early Prototype of Big Dipper over London. Photo by Cormac McGloin

He presented his project at the Awesome Foundation London award ceremony earlier this month along with four other strong contenders, and at the end of the evening, walked away with the Awesome Fellowship to advance his work. If you were unable to make it to the awards, you can see his presentation here on slideshare, and view his video overview of the project below (see it on vimeo here), which features some touching commentary from people on the street who have watched his experiments:

For those of you in the UK, Awesome Foundation London is receiving submissions for our June 2010 funding award. Submissions close on 30 June, so please go here to submit your Awesome idea for funding consideration.

Congratulations to Oscar for an inspiring and Awesome idea. He’ll be back later this year to show us how the Awesome Fellowship advanced his work, so stay tuned.

Oscar Lhermitte with his Awesome Fellowship cheque

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Mader Stublic Wiermann lighting display, Uniqa tower, Vienna. Image from cityofsound.com

On Thursday 24 June 2010 I will be giving a talk at the Interactive Architecture 2010 conference, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

Featuring an impressive lineup of speakers ranging from Duncan Wilson of Arup Foresight to Usman Haque of Haque Design and Research, and chaired by Fiddian Warman of Soda Creative, the conference will be: “A forum for the building design community to gather and share ideas and experiences around exploiting new technologies to enable the built environment to dynamically respond to people in or around it.” Here is an overview of the conference themes and speakers:

• Sensory: Sound and light
  • Michael Spencer of Sound Strategies
  • Usman Haque of Haque Design and Research
  • UVA
• Metaphysical: Materials and structures
  • Armand Terrulli of Vector Foiltec
  • Duncan Wilson of Arup Foresight and
  • Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of TinkerLondon
• Art and Play: Community and interaction
  • Ghislaine Boddington of B>D>S
  • Matt Adams of Blast Theory
  • Eva Rucki of Troika
  • Scott Burnham of Urban Play
• Experiential architecture
  • Alex Haw of Atmos
  • Andrew Whiting of Hut

For more information and to get tickets for the event, please go here.

For an excellent overview and image resource of Interactive Architecture in general, interactivearchitecture.org is a great starting point. Another excellent angle on expressive, performative and responsive facades and architecture, this article by the prolific and inspiring Dan Hill of cityofsound.com is well worth a visit.

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It’s an interesting read, not least of which because it contains plenty of quotes from yours truly and references to my work with design hacking, but also because Hacktivist Otto von Busch, tinker.it‘s Brock Craft, and Emily Campbell of the RSA are all asked to chime in on the topic.

A good overview by ICON Senior Editor William Wiles, who curated a nice gathering of people and opinions which hopefully back up the quote attributed to me: “design hacking as reached the cultural zeitgeist now.”

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For most people with even a passing interest in innovative urban problem-solving, the words Jaime Lerner and Curitiba, Brazil will hold special reverence. Lerner is the urban planner and three-times mayor of Curitiba who transformed the once traffic-congested, economically and environmentally challenged city into one of the world’s most livable urban spaces. This Wednesday at the British Film Institute, London, a documentary exploring his innovative approaches for “transforming problems into solutions” in the city will be shown, and following the screening I will be joining Jaime Lerner on stage to discuss his approach and visionary techniques.

The talk will be hosted by Peter Jenkinson OBE, an exceptional individual himself for his work with creative solutions in the face of limited resources. For those of you in London Wednesday 4 November, please come join us at the BFI for this exceptional opportunity. More information on the evening can be found here. For those unable to attend, please watch the trailer above and go see the film as soon as you can. It is a game-changer for urban strategies.

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Walking around London yesterday I found myself paying attention to the secondary narrative of the city’s fonts, text and signage. How the current condition of some of the texts differ from their original form, and that within the aesthetic of that difference lies the story. The image above is from a suit maker and tailor in the City of London. While the shop is now closed and empty, the entryway shows that at one time, there was enough foot traffic to wear away the firm’s name. A sad marking of a once prosperous shop and tailor-based culture.

The signage from a toy store in Clapham Junction – the store itself is still in operation, but, as the sign tells, it has lost something of its glamour and relevance, selling mostly board games and models in an era of computer games and online entertainment. The sign has obviously lost its covering and illumination – requiring an appreciation of the tradition of the name and its stoic character instead of a glaring call to attention, as with the entertainment it sells, and recalls an era of a more robust engagement with its community and youth market.

Mismatched pavements are the scars of the city, showing its growth, repairs and upgrades. Not much can be done about the colour or texture of the pavement matching, but as is evidenced here, London roadcrews seem to take special care to only replace the pieces of text that their works directly disrupt. The half-rendered S and O above are especially painful to see as evidence of the rigid limitations of where someone’s job ends and the assumption that someone else’s job supposedly begins. The ‘not my job’ culture, as told in two simple words.

In Brixton, a multi-tiered story of a hastily-reworked sign, the passage of time, and the eventual upgrade bolted on below as fortunes improved. Clearly the first generation of the signage under a different name was done in vinyl letters, simply painted over rather than removed, with another vinyl lettered sign stuck on below. As time passed, the original letters peeled, revealing its history and slowly removing its new moniker. Rather than engaging with the organic nature of the sign and its time-based rebellion, the owners just slapped a new sign below, letting the old one continue its war.

There is a phrase in Britain, “it does what it says on the tin”, meaning that the product and function is as literal as its claim was when sold. Here, the gradual erosion of the signage is in keeping with its function when first installed.

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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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Last night CutUp installed their latest batch of work throughout London. For those of you not (yet) familiar with CutUp, they specialise in physically remixing the urban visual, taking down billboards, cutting them up into pixels, and re-installing them to create new images out of the original source material. While my personal favourite medium of their work is large-scale billboards as above, I also enjoy their bus stop hits, where they hack the lightbox adverts with their own remix. Here, a Spiderman poster takes an unexpected turn:

Most satisfyingly though, last night I got to spend some time with the guys and talk more in-depth about their methods and process. What can I say – I heart CutUp. For more photos, see the flickr set here.

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A) I decided I don’t spend enough time around supermodels
B) It’s been too long since I’ve spent an evening drinking rose-flavoured vodka cocktails
C) I was invited because of my relationship with Premsela

It was all celeb, glam and paparazzi, dahling, but hugely enjoyable in its own right. Fashion exhibitions are incredibly difficult to pull off, but this one is exceptional. The highlight, obviously, was the insanely huge doll house in the centre of the exhibition. Viktor & Rolf essentially re-created the entire exhibition, which surrounds the dollhouse, in miniature. If you’ve seen their website, this won’t be a surprise, but in the context of the exhibition, it not only added a layer of appreciation to their work, but also created the simple joy of smiling as you enter the space and see something truly fresh and exciting in a show. I really can’t recommend it enough.

However, with my recent time being filled working on Urban Play, I came across one piece in the exhibition that made me pause for a moment and mix wonder and appreciation for where some of their ideas come from:





Mark Jenkins’ “embed” to the left, Viktor & Rolf to the right. Coincidence? Discuss…

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