This weekend marks the first of many new ventures in my once, and soon to be again, home city of Boston. I have been invited by Boston University to design and host a workshop for BU students which explores creative urban responses to some of the challenges facing the city of Boston. You can find the website for the workshop here, or read on for more information.

The workshop is being run as part of my work with concepts to “reprogram the city”: working with the existing urban objects, spaces and infrastructure to create new functionality out of existing urban assets.

The BU Lab is an opportunity to generate multi-dimensional ideas for Boston’s future challenges, solutions, and opportunities. BU Lab will be a R&D department for the city, utilizing a cross section of disciplines within BU – from Engineering to Law; Biology to Fine Arts – creating a framework of ideas and applications for the city. The diversity of these disciplines is fundamental in creating holistic, sustainable solutions to the city, and Boston University is uniquely placed in having such a rich pool of resources to bring together.

The initial “test bed” for the BU Lab will be the Commonwealth Avenue corridor, defined by the MBTA route running from Kenmore Square to Agganis Arena. This corridor provides a rare sampling of almost all urban elements that need to be addressed with future urban thinking: public transportation, traffic, pedestrian areas, retail interfaces, shared space, green space, bridges and essential infrastructure.

BU Lab can also function as a means of creating tactile environments for some of the larger issues facing Boston and cities at large. T platforms (Boston’s subway is known as “the T”) and shelters could be test models for everything from rain water collection systems to energy production sources and sustainable shelter design. The student population and transportation corridor provide quantifiable and predictable metrics of use and population statistics which are highly valuable and can be used for everything from specific testing opportunities to opportunities for arts students to create visual or narrative journeys for these populations along the corridor.

The first BU Lab workshop will serve as an insight into a new way of approaching the city – using a mosaic of skills, interests and insights to develop robust, sustainable ideas for urban issues.

It’s going to be a wonderful experience to return to Boston for this, and promises to be an inspiring time ahead, for the workshop, myself, and Boston. Watch this space.

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1. Reprogramming the City: Article Series for Boston Society of Architects The Boston Society for Architects recently asked me to write a...

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Urban hackers and DIY urban designers gather round: The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is hosting an urban design hacks competition to find the best examples of urban re-use and re-purposed urban design.

To encourage and celebrate resourcefulness in the city, EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival is awarding a prize for the most innovative re-use of an urban object or area for a new purpose. The GO11 Award is a €500 prize for the best examples of design hacks and re-use in the city – the winner will receive €500, and their work will be presented in the festival magazine, published October 2011. Winning and shortlisted entries will also be presented as part of the Exchange Radical Moments festival in Berlin on 11/11/11.

I created The Urban Guide for Alternate Use as an online guide to urban design hacks and examples of individual design resourcefulness in the city. The response has been tremendous in the short time since it has launched, and I’m looking forward to discovering all sorts of new urban design hacks and re-purposed objects courtesy of the GO11 Award.

Please contribute your urban hacks and re-purposed design ideas or discoveries on the GO11 Award submission page here.

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Madrid’s Luzinterruptus remain one of the most consistent collectives of urban creatives working today. Their latest work, Pedaleo Seguro (Pedal Insurance), applies their iconic light-based DIY urbanism to the city’s bicycle lanes. As they state on the project website (via my translation from the original Spanish):

On November 21 we decided to install more bike lanes in downtown Madrid. What we wanted our “ephemeral bike lane” action to show that at the heart of our city there are no possibilities to bicycle safely, so we must move to outlying areas so that cycling is a weekend activity instead of a real mode of transportation … [with this action]… we hope that some late-night rider might now be able to use these lanes.

More images by Gustavo Sanabria on the Luzinterruptus site here.

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If there are two things I love, it’s serendipity and clever urban interventions. As I was working on my Urban Guide for Alternate Use today the two came together when Collective CC in Lisbon sent me some images of their latest intervention, Senioritas.

As most who live in or visit Lisbon and most southern European cities will know from experience, there exists an eagle-eyed population of women who spend their days keeping watch over the street outside their window, one phone call away from reporting any wayward activity to the police – in effect, functioning as an alternate version of CCTV in these neighbourhoods. So within Collective CC’s intervention – in addition to the clever re-contextualization of the role these women serve – is another great visual joke. The signs that Collective CC has secretively placed beneath these women’s windows is a perfect copy of the omnipresent Securitas security/CCTV company visual identity.

There’s nothing about this project that isn’t superb. Well done, guys, and thanks for sharing.

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RI >>>CHPOOR by Above

I think we’re missing the boat on street-level design R&D.

That’s pretty much the summary of my latest essay and photo gallery exploring the visual and physical interplay which is taking place between urban intervention, street art and the urban landscape which was just published in the journal CITY: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. When they asked me to do a piece for them on a trend in urban aesthetics that I felt needed more attention, I gave them the above sentence, but they said that they usually like pieces longer than 11 word statements. Fine, I thought. I’ll flesh it out some more. So here’s some more of what I’ve been thinking.

As many people know, I’ve long been fascinated by the resonance between objects in the city and its inhabitants. My Urban Play project looked into this in great deal in both the exhibition and the city-wide design intervention project I did with Droog Design in Amsterdam in 2008. What continues to inspire me is the ongoing relational design that is taking place at the margins of urban culture – the interventions which form intrinsic relationships between individual creativity and the physical city.

Most dismiss these non-sanctioned urban interventions as playful tokens of creativity at best, and vandalism at worst. But there is a lot more going on beneath the surface of this activity. As I say in the essay:

If we were to consider the dialogue of design in the same way we do the linguistic development of a culture’s language, then just as informal street-level vernacular has innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture’s formal language, the street has as well developed its own vernacular to fill the gaps in the city’s formal design. This new street-level language of design – non-commissioned, non-invited interventions in the urban landscape – transforms the fixed landscape of the city into a platform for a design dialogue.

Take, for example, the work of Gualicho:

San Jose bridge support by Gualicho (click image for full size)

Interventions such as these, at their core, are more than simply creative play in the streets – they signal a new aesthetic correspondence between the individual and the physical city; a step-change in not only the street art scene but in the relationship between the power of the individual and the aesthetics of the city.

Of note are those works which not only reflect a specific relationship with space, but also with time. For example, the shadow skaters by Singapore’s TR853-1, which only have a terrain to skate on at night:

TR853-1

TR853-1

And of course, Montreal’s Roadsworth:

Bible Bench by Roadsworth

Some of the great victories in this genre are those works inspired by the cast-off, degraded objects and areas of the city. The objects kicked to the side of daily life in the city. It is from these areas of urban compost that new crops of work grow. DIY up-cycling? Creative urban re-use? For people like Jim Darling, the cast-offs you might find in an alley – old mattresses, discarded tires – become source material, returned to the alley in a new form:

Trash Dude Beacon by Jim Darling

Artist Mark Jenkins is in a category of his own in this field. For Jenkins, there is a dramatic tension in the objects and detritus of the city waiting to be revealed.

“Sometimes I’ll come across something in the city that will give me the idea to do something site specific. But other pieces aren’t so much about a particular site but more about affecting city objects and structures [and] exposing the vulnerabilities of these structures to be extended into the surreal.” - Mark Jenkins

At times, all that is needed is a discarded bed frame and an exposed lamp box for his characters to get up to mischief in the city:

Storkers at Play by Mark Jenkins

Or an overlooked trash can in Moscow to add a twist to people’s daily experience:

Trash Sperm by Mark Jenkins

Echoing Guy Debord’s belief that “what changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than what changes our way of seeing painting”, there is an opportunity for contemporary urbanism itself to pay attention to the energy and innovation that can be found in the streets today and learn from the relationships it creates between people and their physical city. Just as online and digital media has been transformed by remix culture and open source methodologies, the same metamorphosis is occurring in the creative relationship of the individual and the physical city. We should be paying attention to this as an equally transformative movement.

The full text is published in the current issue of CITY, featuring Above’s signature work from Lisbon on the cover.

If you would like to read the essay in full, you can find it online here.

A PDF is also available on the site featuring an extended image gallery of some of the artists and works shown here.

If you’d like to keep in touch with my upcoming projects or publications, please subscribe or get in touch directly via the email address in the header.

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UPDATE: The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is now live! http://www.altuseguide.com

I was recently asked by Die Fabrikanten in Linz, Austria for ideas for their upcoming Exchange Radical Moments Europe-Wide Festival. The result is The Urban Guide for Alternate Use – an open source city-specific ‘field guide’ for alternate uses for existing urban infrastructure.
It was a wide brief, but as I’m far more interested in exploring hacks and re-use of the existing urban infrastructure than air-lifting new creations into a space, I wanted to create a platform for exchange of ideas for alternate urban solutions based on existing structures and systems. The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is meant to be a platform for urban hacks, interventions, innovation and play with and in the city’s objects and areas. Projects such as Nina Mrsnik’s Open Chairs (pictured below) perfectly capture what the Guide is about – most people see a drab cement corner. Nina sees a chair.

Open Chairs by Nina Mrsnik

As the folks at the Exchange Radical Moments Festival explain in the festival catalogue:

Resourcefulness has become one of the most important skills for people to develop today. What resources do you see being treated as waste in your city that could be used to benefit others? The Urban Guide for Alternate Use is a catalogue of city-specific opportunities for resourcefulness  within existing urban environments, compiled simply by asking the city’s residents to devise alternate uses for things already present in the city. It is a guide that acts as a catalyst for a new form of resourcefulness in the city, and as a communicative vehicle for exchange among residents.

For the festival Exchange Radical Moments, a guide will be created for one of the participating cities, filled with the ideas submitted by the city’s residents, as gestures of donation to their fellow citizens. The city guide will be written by the imagination and resourceful thinking of its residents,  and can serve as an alternate guide to the city.  Together the different submissions will form a powerful collection of insights into how people mentally and physically play with the urban landscape  as a conglomeration of readymade objects ripe for intervention.

From hacks such as using traffic bollards as ladders to gain a better view of a football training session (top image), to re-imagining Amsterdam street sweepers as bird baths between shifts (as seen below), the Urban Guide for Alternate Use is an open platform for people to explore and re-imagine the uses of their existing city’s objects and areas. It’s early days, so release date, call for contributions, etc., still to come, but thought I’d share one of many things to come in 2010. Stay tuned.

Improvised Amsterdam Bird Bath

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1. Photoshop Palette (by FTW Crew: Mr. Tailon, Baveux Prod., Kone & Epoxy)

More can be found here, and on each of the artist’s flickr sets:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/epoxy_one/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31192713@N03/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baveuxproduction/

2. Pop-Down Project (by F!L___)

“On the Internet, getting rid of unsolicited pop-ups is pretty easy. In real life, things are a tad more complicated. The Pop-Down Project aims at symbolically restoring everyone’s right to non-exposure: Just stick a “Close window” button on any public space pollution.” – Pop-Down Project

3. Citation Needed (numerous)

A superb hack drawing from Wikipedia culture and commenting on the boastful yet unqualified credentials ads attribute to themselves.

4. Docteur Gecko’s lightbox poster hacks

An old one, but a classic. Docteur Gecko‘s lightbox hacks, in which he slips an alternate transparency behind the advert – by day, normal advert. By night, when the lamps beneath turn on…

5. The Bubble Project (Ji Lee)

Ji Lee’s Bubble Project needs no introduction, but certainly deserves a place on this list. It was an honour to work with him on this in Amsterdam.

6. Image Missing (unknown)

Another classic playing with the absence of an image in the city’s visual landscape while referencing old school web icons.

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