The Boston Society for Architects recently asked me to write a series of articles for them outlining strategies for “The Resourceful City” by reprogramming existing urban infrastructure to serve new urban functions. The four-part series runs this month, and the first two installments are up now.

The overall arc of the four parts is about urban resourcefulness and exploring alternative potentials for the city through the reuse and reprogramming of its existing buildings, objects and spaces instead of tearing things down and starting over again. As urban citizens, we are dealing with two realities. We have come to terms with the fact that our resources are finite, whether material, financial, or spatial. We also live in agile times – our cultural, economic and political relationships are in a constant state of flux, and often the physicality of our structures and cities are not able to respond to these shifting dynamics. Reprogramming the City introduces agile and malleable responses to a usually rigid urban environment. The existing city is the infrastructure we have inherited; it is our shared hardware. Strategies to reprogram what we already have is the software.

The four parts of the series are below (linked pages are the articles already up; others will appear in the BSA’s Ideas section later this month).

+ The Resourceful City, Part 1: Reprogramming Buildings

+ The Resourceful City, Part 2: Reprogramming Space

+ The Resourceful City, Part 3: Reprogramming Infrastructure

+ The Resourceful City, Part 4: Reprogramming Possibilities

I hope you enjoy the series.

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The pleasure of being asked by Roadsworth to write the introduction to the first book chronicling his work was only outdone by seeing the book itself when it arrived in the mail recently.

I’ve followed Roadsworth’s work with great interest and appreciation over the years. His sense of play and imagination in his reworking of the most functional elements of the urban ephemera – its pavement markings and signage – have drawn the sustained interest of street art lovers (and authorities) and made him one of a handful of artists who have moved the goal posts of street art and have changed public perceptions of the form.

Famously, when Roadsworth was arrested in Montreal in 2004 and brought up on 53 different charges for his work, the local authorities went big with the story. Radio shows hosted public call-ins to ask the public what the city should do with Roadsworth now that they caught him. The public response caught many by surprise. As one caller said, “What should the city do with Roadsworth? Leave him alone.” The divide between authoritative and public perceptions of street art was on full display.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Roadsworth on several occasions, and getting to know him personally over time. So when he asked me to write the introduction to what is thus far the definitive book of his work, it was an honour and a privilege. As I write in the introduction:

Roadsworth’s work plays with more than the visual language of the city; it plays with our relationship with the city. It returns us to the moment in our youth when the streets and sidewalks could hold moments of our play and humanity, before we learned that they were the domain of structure and order. His work asks questions in a streetscape of absolute instructions, and invites double-takes and smiles in areas where you’re supposed to be quiet and fall in line.

Granted, I’m partial to this book, but it is a worthy overview of his work through the years. From his earliest middle-of-the-night visual interventions of street markings to his recent commissions, along with his well-documented brushes with the law in-between, it provides a solid visual catalogue and narrative of the development of a remarkable artist.

Roadsworth (left) and I during a magazine photo shoot

You can find more information about the book, and a downloadable excerpt, from the publisher’s page here, or get a copy from Amazon here. Resisting the temptation to write an entire second overview of his work here, I’ll close as I close my introduction:

When first discovering his early work, I once joked that looking at images of his reworked street markings made me wonder if there was a supplement to my driver’s instruction manual that I had missed when I was learning the language of the street. As his work has expanded over the years to encompass so much more of the urban ephemera and our relationship with it, that missing manual would now include a vastly expanded range of images, objects and relationships that we need to learn in the city. This book could be that manual.

My thanks to Roadsworth for the invitation to contribute to the book, and to all who read and enjoy it.

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Break that phrase down more and you have a real jewel: “the authenticity of action”.

As a motivating concept for almost any pursuit, it doesn’t get much better than that. It also resonates strongly with one of my favourite quotes from my business side:

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
- Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines

I love the simplicity of that statement, and the no-nonsense reality that the most effective strategies are in fact no more complicated than doing things. It was fitting that the invitation for the piece came on the back of a talk I gave to a conference in Italy called The Nameless City, as from both a design and urbanist point of view, the authenticity of action and the simple strategy of doing things is the most effective techniques we can employ against the sameness of our visual, narrative and physical landscapes.

The piece is a fleshed out version of one of my The City as Platform talks, as delivered in Italy. It’s a gorgeous full colour A3 production, so please search for it at your local international magazine source. For more information on the publication, you can download a PDF of their English press release here (2.8MB), which also has contact information if you want to get in touch to get a copy or help distribute them. At the moment, they don’t have a website.

They went with an Urban Play identity to illustrate my text, so until you can get a copy, here’s a couple spreads from the issue:

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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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Street Market Hacking Stall, Hong Kong. Photo: Scott Burnham

To launch my publication “Finding the Truth in Systems: In Praise of Design Hacking”, London’s Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is hosting an event on 14 October 2009 to open the dialogue on design hacking.

The RSA commissioned me to write the text as an overview and exploration of ways in which individuals are taking design decisions into their own hands by hacking, reconfiguring and reworking the products, systems and spaces that make up our lives. The publication and event are part of the RSA’s Design and Society programme, which states:

“Contemporary society needs to be more resourceful: its citizens more engaged, self-reliant and collective in their striving. A combination of professionalisation, bureaucracy and consumerism has reduced our resources of common competence and as citizens we often appear to be less resourceful than ever. At the same time our consumption has diminished the earth’s resources and we now have fewer resources of energy and natural material at our disposal.”

- Emily Campbell, RSA Director of Design

It is from this perspective that “Finding the Truth in Systems: In Praise of Design Hacking” is launched. Design hacking is the resourcefulness of the individual stepping in when the products and systems we are offered fall short. In the text I explore ways in which this is being done as a response to both the limitations of resources and economies in the developing world, and the imbalances which exist in the products, systems and cities of developed regions. I feel that hacking methodologies and philosophies hold profound benefits, as I explore in some of the topic areas in the text:

• Hacking creates new engagements between the product and the consumer
• Hacking mandates relevance and necessity in design
• Hacking is resourceful
• Hacking creates abundance from limited resources
• Hacking finds the truth in systems

And when it’s not being summised in bullet points, the text goes like this:

Hacking gives people a voice. Hacking creates new realities, options and possibilities from those we are given, whether commercial, social or civic. It offers forth the notion of a democratisation of design, by enabling the end user to be part of the process and not only on the receiving end of it. There is a triumphant message of individual resourcefulness and direct engagement when a hacker sensibility is applied.

Most of all, hacking is evidence of our fundamental self-reliance in spite of professionalism, bureaucracy and industrial supply. In many ways, it is a return to, or a rediscovery of, the skills which saw us through our pre-consumerist times, when ‘making do’ with what you had to hand required inventiveness. To relegate such activity to the realms of ‘amateurism’ is a dangerous dismissal, for it not only further deepens the ‘us and them’ disconnect between design and society, but ignores the vast potential of the creative energies at work outside established channels.

I will make the PDF of the publication available here after it is launched in dead tree form next week. For those of you in, near, or visiting London, I invite you to come to the event. Famed fashion hacker Otto van Busch will present an overview of his work, with Sunday Times journalist Colin Mcdowell, Dr Paul Thompson – RCA Rector and former director of London’s Design Museum and the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and David Godber of the Design Council joining to dig into the realm of Design Hacking. I will be chairing the evening.

The event is free, but booking is essential. For more details and to reserve a space, go here.

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I’m pleased to share the news that the latest book to feature my work and approach towards urban creativity has just been launched in Italy. The book, Disegnare le città (Drawing cities), is an overview of a more organic and people-driven approach to design, creativity and the city rather than the top-down model that has been dominant for so long. As the introduction to the book states:

Drawing cities today cannot simply mean creating (or re-designing) an emblem for public administrations. As the populations’ needs change and diversify, so do the competences and the ways they are represented and communicated. Therefore we now can observe, alongside traditional elements, the more or less aggressive affirmation of new instruments requiring attention, specific cultural standards and creative sensibility.

In it you will find text and commentary from myself, images from some of my projects, and a number of superb contributions from others. More information can be found 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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DAMn magazine asked me to do a piece on artist Mark Jenkins, and I obliged, as I love Mark’s work and writing about it is always a pleasure. The issue has just hit the stands, so check it out.

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As the title of my section, The VJ of the Everyday: Remixing the Urban Visual, indicates, the book is an academic little number, with co-authors from Harvard and Princeton. But that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed getting invited to the gig – getting urban intervention, street art and guerrilla creativity into the hallowed halls of university study. Yeah, there’s a lot of sneakerboys out there who will bitch about how this activity has to remain on the outside to keep it real, but that line is so played out. There’s something much larger going on with this activity that needs to take centre stage in a larger conversation about our relationship with the city. I tried to capture some of that in an early outline of my piece for the book:

As Antonio Sant’Elia wrote in the Futurist Manifesto On Architecture in 1914, ‘Every generation must build its own city’. And, mark by mark, sticker by sticker, intervention by intervention, that is precisely what is taking place in cities around the world. As urban environments become denser and their influence on our mental and physical selves greater, new relationships are emerging between the individual and the visual environment of the shared spaces (and surfaces) of the city. One-way communication is not enough anymore, and static imagery doesn’t remain that way for long. Featuring recent street art and urban interventions done in the streets of cities including London, New York, Stockholm, Chicago, and Amsterdam, a street-level overview will be given of the visual remixes that are forever taking place in the public realm of cities around the world, and the influence this is having on our relationship with the city.

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