cityofsound

Fritz Haeg / Edible Estates (Postopolis! LA)

Fritz Haeg of Edible Estates kicks off Postopolis! LA with an engaging talk around urban food production, a topic which I’ve become fascinated by since I moved to Australia. Edible Estates is one of the standout set of projects in this burgeoning area, with a particular take on how to bring localised, distributed food production to our city’s streets.

Haeg discussed how he had focused from an early age on architecture and buildings, drawn to being an architect for as long as he can remember. So he says Edible Estates “comes from a place where I had an obsession with buildings”. He got over this obsession though, almost coming out the other side, such that he’s no longer interested in buildings, “or in the physical structure at least.”

When he moved to LA 10 years ago, he started exploring the activity that happens inside and outside of buildings, almost the ‘life between buildings’ as Gehl would put it. (I thought that in the context of Los Angeles this is particularly interesting proposition. Amongst the spaces defined by the more Anglo Angelenos life between buildings is often brief and transient. The Latino community - and others - has utterly changed this, but Haeg’s work focuses on those urban and suburban spaces where “activity outside of buildings”, as he put it, has been most invisible.)

With 30 events over 6 years, all centred around his house, Haeg started started strategies for “inhabiting spaces and occupying environments”. These included events like ‘Sundown Salon’, knitting salons, events for kids where they built a fort and a mudpit, conventional literary salons, hair and makeup days and so on. The output of all these performances/events is being gathered into a book (a 150ft long page of paper with images on one side and text on the other).

With an arch of his eyebrow, Haeg notes that he understandably got a little ‘over’ having hundreds of people in his home every weekend, and then took on the idea of ”reconsidering the role of the home in society”, converting it into something akin to a schoolhouse and running a series of itinerant projects, via a mobile geodesic tent, where he would coordinate community education activities as companion to projects for institutions such as the Whitney, a ‘Philadelphia Training Camp for Expression Skills’ and so on.

On particular project ‘How To Eat Austin’, in which workshops would start with “dirt” in week 1 and progress to cooking in week 8, leads directly to the Edible Estates projects. These grew directly out of the 2004 election, and the perception that the USA was divided in two halves - red and blue. That there was a cultural divide here, at the heart of America. Haeg thought that architecture and art seemed an introverted dialogue and wondered whether an art project could bridge audiences. He started in Kansas i.e. the geographic centre of country, and with the front lawn itself.

Haeg sees the humble front lawn as a space that has so much potential. He says that it “also epitomises everything we stand for as Americans. It represents comfort and prosperity. I mean, how free must you be at the weekend to care of it?” It’s also a space that’s homogenised across America, such that it can look exactly the same in LA or NJ.

For Haeg, architects tend to be obsessed with making a mark - making something permanent. The lawn, for them, has a powerful function in terms of ‘frame’, almost “pushing the landscape down to make room for the awesome building”. The lawn us thus a “repressed vacant abstract nothingness”. It’s an anti-social no man’s land and often polluting.

So could we transform that into productive connecting space? He divided the country up into 9 squares and decided to do one garden each season. He references the High Line project in NYC as a reclaiming of such space for an urban garden (though this isn’t productive as far as I know).

In Salina, Kansas, he worked with people to create these little ‘edible estates’ - productive gardens in what was their front lawn. All gardens are permanent, all are productive.
In terms of methodology, Haeg intriguingly notes that he “dictates the terms on a project and then finds collaborators”. (Hm wonder if there’s more to this process?)

The converted lawns can have a tendency to “piss off other suburban neighbours”, a side-effect Haeg clearly enjoys when it happens. He notes that with one house, one neighbour freaked out, while the elderly German immigrants next door were ecstatic. Haeg finds it fascinating to look at the spectrum of responses to “what is basically, y’know … a vegetable garden”. To see what “responses that space elicits”.

Other projects include some outside the US, at Brookwood Estate, London, commissioned by Tate Modern, creating a kind of pleasure garden in middle of city, which also produces food. He set up an Edible Estates Temporary HQ in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. (The website notes: "This first planting includes fruits, vegetables and herbs: apples, plums, raspberries, currants, tomatoes, aubergine, brussel sprouts, scarlet runner beans, peas, lettuce, rocket, spinach, bok choy, artichokes, fennel, onions, parsley, coriander, sage, bay, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, mint, dill, calendula, marigolds and nasturtiums.")

Other gardens are in Austin and Baltimore, and you can find out more in the book Edible Estates - Attack on the Front Lawn and on edibleestates.org.

Haeg’s clear that he doen’t want to make gardens that are beyond peoples’ means - it must be “something anybody can make In the weekend”. As a result, it might sometimes look “scrappy”, at least as viewed through conventional means.

His next project sounds fascinating. It’s in Chelsea, NYC, and centres on the idea of what the space was on September 10 1609 I.e. a simulation of what it looked like and how native Americans lived off the land. This is linked to a project for the Whitney, ‘Animal Estates’, that explored the animals that used to live in that particularly space, including the construction of a beaver pond and beaver dam in spirit of Whitney architect Marcel Breuer. “Sort of”.

Regine asks a couple of questions, including one about why the use of the word ‘estate’? Haeg notes that graphic design and names are an important part of the work, and that the Edible Estates logo was designed to look familiar to Americans that might have seen suburban housing developments - that he was playing with the idea of legitimising it, of taking a radical activity to the people least likely to accept it (interesting echo here with Stephanie Smith on day two - more later). Haeg knows how hard it is for many homeowners to take the first step to plant the edible lawn there - it’s such “a big break with habit to change the antiquated notion of the lawn we have”.

Regine also asks about how the gardens are later on. Haeg says he’s In touch with all families, and almost all (if not all?) are still tending the gardens successfully. In fact the new owners of one house contacted him to take care of the garden they inherited from the previous owners - you have to be a relatively skilled gardener to pull this off, he notes - and he’s now working together with the family. (I’m interested in the skill level. I know from my own experience how much care and attention is required to grow even the smallest crop, and this seems to be a crucial factor in how this takes off. Having said that, I also know the time taken in such activities is hugely enjoyable, therapeutic, and generates a genuine sense of achievement. Even in the production of a few cherry tomatoes.)

(Distributed urban food production is a fascinating topic, not least for the civic possibilities of people working together in shared community gardens, allotments, and increasingly the little strips of urban space that were previously decorative at best. While it may never supply a ‘base load’ of food, it’s of fundamental importance to our cities going forward, for numerous reasons. It was good to hear Haeg talk about his experience here.)

(A local friend later notes there is a deeper irony here in terms of Los Angeles - again with the Mike Davis 'Magical Urbanism' idea in mind - that the Latino population has an almost intrinsic understanding of  public urban space, as if carried down in some kind of urbanism gene from the cities of Southern Europe, and that they’re increasingly retrofitting this onto LA’s urban fabric. My friend noted that Latino culture in LA has always had chickens running around in the yard, for instance, and this was generally very much frowned upon by the Anglo-Saxon Angelenos. So while Haeg is attacking the front lawn of suburbia, Los Angeles in general may be racing ahead to a future where food production is intrinsically part of the warp and weft of urban space anyway. The productive backyard may engulf the manicured front lawn either way.)

Fritz Haeg / Edible Estates
Edible Estates - Attack on the Front Lawn, by Fritz Haeg et al

Røde, and the new manufacturing

Over a year ago now, before the real emergence of the current economic ‘global financial crisis’, I wrote a piece for Monocle on Røde, the Australian microphone manufacturer. I’d used their microphones at Monocle, and had been intrigued by this Scandi-sounding brand producing beautifully crafted mics that could only be German or Japanese … until I saw ‘Made in Australia’ on the box. The story appeared a couple of issues back in truncated form but I thought I’d post a longer cut here for a number of reasons.

I find Røde interesting as they exemplify the possibilities of manufacturing in the contemporary city, using advanced but increasingly affordable techniques like rapid prototyping via laser cutting, and so integrating design processes with manufacturing. As a result, they have many of the benefits of a pre-industrial craft economy (design and manufacturing aligned; mass customisation possibilities; stock levels managed flexibly, almost on-demand; reduced environmental externalities through aggregating all activities under one roof and with increasingly light industrial processes), with the potential global scalability of the industrial model.

They suggest that a modern diversified economy could - should - still have manufacturing at its core, alongside service industries. And that so-called knowledge-based work is present in both. They employ local people, and have global presence. Sure, it won't employ the thousands that, say, the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont once did but they employ people nonetheless. It’s a design-led business, with the aspirations of a premium brand, but sells in high volume at affordable prices.

So in the context of previous writing about Sheffield and other cities largely (though not totally) stripped bare of their manufacturing heritage, this little story from the baking hot streets of Sydney’s western suburbs may have resonance elsewhere.

Although the proportion of manufacturing industry in Australia (10-12% of GDP) is even lower than the UK’s (13-16% of GDP), oddly it feels higher here. Despite Australia being a laissez-faire economist’s dream, there’s somehow still a strong debate about the importance of, say, the car industry to Victoria. There may be some deeper understanding that actually making things is important. As I noted earlier, I wrote this piece before the GFC - as you can tell from only the early portents of a “US-driven recession” - which continues to hammer economies structured as Australia’s is. While I personally won’t shed a tear for the devaluation of mining and shopping malls the speculation that, for instance, Melbourne is to be hit harder than Sydney due to its larger manufacturing base sends out the wrong message. The recession originates in the service sector (financial services, to be precise) and manufacturing need not be dragged down with it (though they are of course linked). Now is the time to innovate our way out of this with new models, and these examples of new, smart hybridised businesses that are both manufacturing- and knowledge-based may be all the more important right now.

'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09 presentation

Saving me from having to transcribe my presentation, the very well-organised Lift09 conference got Swiss French Television to film all the talks. So please see the embedded video at the end of this entry, or here on Vimeo.

When I finally got to deliver this speech, I'd been travelling for some time without rest, as previously noted (and indeed, as described at the beginning of the talk). So perhaps understandably there were a few points I accidentally missed out, or stumbled over.

• Firstly, the reason I was dwelling on the airline story so much is that it's the commercial model underpinning contemporary aviation - a model I see as part of soft infrastructure - that leads to poor service, not any particular technical issue as regards hard infrastructure. Boarding the passengers whilst doing the safety checks on the aircraft is a manifestation of how close to the wire airlines have to run things. Equally, there is little or no redundancy built into the system, due to the particular financial models underpinning them, which are in turn expressions of underlying social, cultural, political fabric. When something goes wrong, therefore, it causes very large ripples through that soft infrastructure of service and system, in turn.
• The effect of bike-sharing networks such as Vélib' and Bicing, are so key to me as they indicate how soft infrastructure can utterly change the perception of the city - in this case the sense of mobility, effectively warping physical distance - without altering much in the way of hard infrastructure.
• The closing video, which people always find compelling, is lifted from a fantastic advert for the Madrid Metro, which I discovered on SuperSpatial a while ago. I re-edited, and replaced the soundrack (using a bit of Jacaszek, I seem to recall). I'm not sure who created the original advert, but it's a beautiful piece of work and I usually try to declare its provenance. Here I forgot/ran out of time. I deploy it to illustrate the promise of informatics in terms of seeing through the hard infrastructure to the activity and behaviour of the city itself, the way people actually use the city. Here's my cut of the video:

I can't show much of my work in detail due to the stage some of the projects are at - and the nature of those projects - but they'll all make it out here in time. Thanks to Keynote's effortless integration of video I now use clips heavily in presentations, but that makes it a little tricky to easily share talks afterward. The camera crew often neglected to capture the screen, so missing out on a few of the videos. So for the record, here are a few of the videos used during the talk:

Recent and forthcoming

Spot of admin, forgive me. I'm doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I'll be doing something around these themes of urban informatics, or how information and communications technologies are re-shaping all things urban: form, everyday life, planning, wayfinding, architecture, public space and so on. Keynote is glaring at me from the dock, below, so I'd better get to it shortly.

I gave a precursor of the talk at a public lecture organised by University of Technology Sydney, a couple of months ago. I was invited by Adrian Lahoud, and it formed part of an excellent series of public lectures around architecture and urbanism. If you're at a loose end in Sydney tomorrow evening and would prefer an alternative to my talk, you could do worse than go and see the next installment in the lecture series, delivered by none other than the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore MP. She'll no doubt be majoring on their recently launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, much inspired by Jan Gehl's recent report for the City of Sydney. I'll post my own thoughts on all that soon enough.

For my lecture, I essentially 'performed' my Street as Platform piece, augmented with candid pics from a recent trip to Melbourne. I think it worked well, as a kind of freeze-framed narrative, in terms of conveying how much the street weighs these days, as Bucky might say, when you take into account the largely unseen digital communications. I called it The Not-So-Quiet City this time, as a nod to Aaron Copland's lovely 'Quiet City' piece of 1941, and to play up the sensory design aspects. This was partly due to it being a roundtable on 'Atmospheric Urbanism', where I was presenting alongside the excellent Nadia Wagner, a researcher in 'urban olfactics'. Her work is absolutely fascinating, and most Pallasmaa. The reason I think the two lectures worked well is that we got some absolute corkers in terms of questions afterwards, many of which have been percolating through my mind ever since. And I'm still not sure I have particularly concrete thoughts on them. "What is the creative challenge for architecture, in response to all this?" was one intriguing question in particular, a googly bowled by the ever-thoughtful Lahoud. (He's organised a follow-up roundtable too.)

Next week, Duncan Wilson and I are attending the Pervasive 08 conference here in Sydney. Our position paper was accepted by the workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability and so Duncan and I will be taking part in that, alongside a bunch of international researchers and practitioners in this area, such as the likes of Eric Paulos, Paul Dourish, Tom Igoe et al. I'm looking forward to the whole conference hugely and hope to post our paper shortly, including reflections on the workshop.

One of the workshop organisers is Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here), and in June I hope to be attending a related conference at QUT, organised by their Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Called Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, the workshops on 'Broadband innovations and the creative economy' and 'Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add' look great. Richard Allen of Cisco is a particularly good addition to the cast of speakers (see also Henry Jenkins.)

Finally, in July, I'm speaking at Design Capital, part of the State of Design festival in Melbourne, as part of the 'Convergent World' session on day 3. It'll be great to hook up with friends like Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Michael Trudgeon of Crowd, and to meet a few new people too.  Also happy to say I'm a judge in the 2008 Premier's Design Awards there too.

Do get in touch if you're in town at the same time, or want more info on any of the events.  More news to follow, and then a return to your usual programming.

Loose ends, February 2008

A few recent entries attracted useful responses, and several contemporaneous links opened up new angles on similar subjects. I thought I’d pause briefly to tie a few of these loose ends together.

The “Shinkansen to Melbourne …” story on the potential for a Very High Speed Train (VHST) link up and down the east coast of Australia generated a fair bit of buzz, and some extremely useful comments from readers. Several comments provided detailed reasons why it would be difficult, though none of them convinced that it shouldn’t happen. Have a read and let me know what you think - particularly if you have further insight or experience on large infrastructure projects of this nature. To me, it feels like a case of ‘when not if’, but a concerted effort is clearly required to help people here believe that.

Partly, this will be enabled by moves elsewhere - in that the road and air alternatives are not only being seen as increasingly out-of-step with the times, but shooting themselves in the foot (if indeed a transit system can have a foot to shoot itself in). Road traffic congestion in and around Melbourne is now reaching the breaking points also witnessed in Sydney and Brisbane (with some talk of congestion charging at last, even if not officially. It’s mildly instructive to read this piece from Mayor John So from only 2006, boasting of how ‘the car is welcome in Melbourne’, and then reflect on these subsequent and ensuing woes; and so different in tone to the Gehl proposals for Sydney’s CBD). The train service in Sydney is now being used so heavily that it’s at bursting point - almost necessitating the use of ‘push men’ - despite clear evidence of some years of under-investment. Ditto buses, which desperately need further investment but are still heavily used. This at least indicates that Sydneysiders are not that averse to public transport.

Moreover, Sydney Airport is about to close down one of its runways due to safety concerns (was due for April and now put back in the year, for reasons unclear). This will have a massive impact on the ability of the airport to service demand to Melbourne and Brisbane. Reports suggest that it’s already struggling with that. Closing this runway can only cause problems for that air corridor, and those who live along it, for that matter (I didn’t go into noise pollution in the piece I wrote, but it is of course an issue.) Meanwhile, oil prices 'surge past' 100 US dollars a barrel …

The item also featured briefly in The Architects on Melbourne's Triple R (cheers Rory). It’s just good to hear this being discussed, and most fervently by those who have experienced the likes of the Shinkansen and TGV.  To be clear about the piece: I’m not anti-car or anti-plane. Far from it. I find the New Urbanist rhetoric that attempts to expunge the car from the urban memory to be wholly misplaced and not useful, and air travel can refresh the parts other modes of transport simply cannot reach. It’s a massive shift of balance that’s important, towards the likes of a tripartite framework for rail (VHST interstate, loca/regional and then inner-city); augmented by smarter bus networks (see Curitiba, Bogota and beyond), as well as an overlay of quality pedestrian and cycle networks. Ferries, monorails, integrated ticketing systems, the lot. This, augmented by minimised air travel, and car-use that is, primarily, recreational (as Iain Borden has recently suggested). It’s about redesigning the city for public transport, and redesigning public transport for the city (see also Mitchell Joachim) - and that includes rapid links throughout the spaces in-between the cities. Infrastructure is in the news a lot at the moment, not least due to China’s extraordinary expansion, and Infrastructure Australia has recently been announced (chaired, intriguingly by a former BA boss). So watch that VHST network-shaped space, I reckon, not least for an interesting debate.

“The Street as Platform” garnered even more attention, not least because William Gibson and Bruce Sterling both linked to it. (I think I just need RU Sirius and Rudy Rucker now, to complete my Mondo 2000 Panini sticker collection. Younger readers will have no idea what I’m on about.)

With startling serendipity, Adam Greenfield happened to post a piece at almost exactly the same time, detailing his ‘central dogma’, related to his forthcoming book, and discussing many of the same ideas and issues, but from a usefully different angle. Do go and have a read (and his follow-up, which is indeed ‘On the same side of the street’). Molly Wright Steenson has also started a useful blog, which looks like it will frequently cover the work of City of Sound pin-up Cedric Price, and specifically his Generator project. One of her posts reminds us of the fundamental importance of designing the social and operational frameworks around technological systems, a point I was very keen to make in "The Street ..." (see also recent Economist articles on e-government; this sense of redesigning the systems and organisations around technology, when designing a technological system, is a generally sound tenet.)

A piece earlier this year, The Personal Well-Tempered Environment (based on last year’s presentation at Interesting South) got picked up by USA Today and FastCompany amongst others and it’s also worth checking again for the many useful comments. I’d pick out Usman Haque’s work on XML schema for communication between objects and their environment, some research from the States indicating that basic feedback can seriously improve personal energy usage, and also note a follow-up post at Headlessness and a beautiful realisation of some related ideas by The Living in NYC. I’m collating links to do with these concepts at delicious/PWTE.

I’ve had very useful conversations around much of this, so watch this space for more developments on the ideas in “The Street…” and PWTE soon, I hope.

And finally, an update on the Best Urban Places project. James, Russell and I are knee-deep in good, honest production issues for the first issue now - we’ll give a further update on that shortly. In the meantime, the group keeps growing and the photos keep coming. Please do keep them coming in, ideally accompanied by your short introductions, as issue 2 is already being set up nicely.