cityofsound

Benjamin H. Bratton (Postopolis! LA)

Benjamin Bratton’s talk was another absolute highlight for me, and indicated the value of having someone on hand to pick apart, delineate and articulate the theoretical landscape emerging around the event. I also value his saving me from what would’ve been a particularly tricky write-up by sending me the talk and letting us post it here in full (see below).

I hugely appreciated his contribution. Benjamin had spent a few days soaking up Postopolis! LA by the closing day, and so was well-placed to be performing a kind of ‘summing up’, speaking as a sociologist rather than a designer as such. But he went beyond that, placing the talks in a fundamentally important wider context, politically and theoretically.

Despite being prepared for it, I’d been fascinated by the quantity and ferocity of attention focused onto the ‘global financial crisis’ in the US, from the mainstream media’s news channels certainly but also as a pervasive topic of conversation and concern amongst most I met - it’s way more so than in Australia (which could be because it hasn’t hit Australia fully yet; or because it won’t to the same degree) and although I saw more signs of it in the UK recently, the concern in the US is more so than there too. It appeared to be gripping almost everyone and often with a paralysing effect. (Though there were also healthy signs of the apparently innate American drive to reinvent a way out of dead ends, fresh shoots in unlikely places, and Postopolis! LA was far from pinned down by gloom. Wandering around the city, too - rather than watching CNN - I feel more confident for its future. And in the context of Bratton's talk, the dizzying depth of the crisis here might actually be constructive.)

Bratton quickly and usefully outlined some broad brushstrokes of what this all means, exploring the vocabulary of ‘post-’ in numerous contexts, and then went at least one better by outlining a few key ideas that might move us forward. I was drawn to three in particular. Firstly, that of using subtraction as a design principle rather than addition (a theme that LA is well-placed to explore, having both an over-abundance of macro-scale infrastructure in the first place, which could be pared back in interesting fashion, as well as an endemic informal creativity at a micro-scale). This alongside an openness to accidents and informal improvisation (something I’ve explored over the years around the idea of adaptive design). Secondly, that we should “resist the recovery”, as ‘recovery’ necessarily implies going back to something, trying to recreate conditions which would then merely set us up for the fall again. So we need a new way of thinking about moving forward from this place, rather than looking backwards or thinking we are post- yet. Thirdly, that the political - including governance in all its forms - is something we cannot allow to simply disintegrate, but we must actively engage with, including (perhaps especially, though he didn’t emphasise this) from a design perspective.

His talk was deeply serious - perhaps we’ll soon be post-irony, and not before time - without being soporific or sanctimonious. It was also deeply learned, and pinned up on a complex latticework of useful references, yet accessible and entertaining in a fashion that’s often beyond academics. This, despite his laconic performance comprising of simply reading out his printed-out talk, leaning against the lectern in the late-afternoon sun - “I want to be precise” he said.

(Somewhat interestingly, in addressing the ‘post-’ in the Postopolis! title, he became only the second person out of over 50 speakers across both events so far to take on this idea, along with James Sanders in NYC. Although as Geoff later pointed out, the Postopolis! name is derived from the ‘posts’ that bloggers produce - almost imagining a city composed of so things - rather than implying it necessarily concerns a condition ‘after the polis’ as such. I personally like the ambiguity of the title, and both Sanders and Bratton took the idea for a walk in interesting directions, and both quite differently, amidst different global conditions.)

Bratton later said modestly that there’s an “inherent advantage in batting last”. Well, you still have to step up to the plate and knock the ball out of the ground. Which he did.

So here below and in full is Benjamin Bratton’s talk from Postopolis LA!, entitled Pre and Post, and which he’s releasing under a Creative Commons ‘attributions no derivatives’ license. I've added contextual links where I felt appropriate.

Writing, about Sydney

As Australia settles in to its blissfully warm summer holidays, and as I emerge from a particularly crunchy period of work largely responsible for the intermittent posting here recently, I thought I’d bring you up to date with a few bits of writing I’ve done for other places this last year.

I’ve already posted The Adaptive City essay I wrote for the Urban Play exhibition catalogue a few months ago, which provoked thoughtful responses from many, for which much thanks.

I should also point out a short piece in the book that accompanies the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Actions exhibition, edited by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi. The book is available soon, and the exhibition is on now - the website is well worth a look. While I can’t make the trip to Montreal, I’ll report back on the book when I receive a copy.

Even earlier this year I wrote an article for Architectural Review Australia, addressing the late-2007 report on Sydney’s central business district (CBD) produced by near-ubiquitous Danish urban design firm Jan Gehl Architects. Gehl is a one-man force for good in terms of reawakening cities to the promise of walkable - and bike-able - urbanism. Yet I suggest there are flaws in their approach when it came to addressing what I consider to be the real problems of contemporary Sydney. While I agree with much of what Gehl’s team suggested, it seemed to miss several of the wider issues, as well as the newer area of urban design I’m pursuing, around urban informatics. However, please note also that it was written for the end-piece of AR, a traditionally opinionated section of the magazine, and this context shows a little in the eventual piece too. I’m actually more of a fan of Gehl’s work as an advocate for cycling and walkable urbanism than it sounds, though I find that his firm’s wider urban design and planning strategies are often less interesting (see also Jonathan Glancey and David Barrie.)

I’m posting a slightly extended mix of the article below - partly for the record but also to spur a few related entries on urban strategies.

While it’s a specific piece, focused on Sydney in late 2007, it also betrays some of my thoughts on contemporary cities at the time. I have to say, eight months on, I wouldn’t write the same piece in the same way, which I hope indicates some development in my thinking, as well as almost a year wrestling with Sydney in the ‘day job’. The problems in this wonderful city are complex. Indeed, it’s all too easy to develop a love-hate relationship with Sydney - although casual indifference is the dangerous mode most citizens are in, as the city’s obvious natural charms lull people - including politicians - into accepting poor quality of thinking and execution in too many aspects of everyday life.

Sydney certainly can live up to the well-known image of the global city bejewelled with beaches, ocean pools and a glittering harbour, as seen in these beguiling little tilt-shift-like movies by Keith Loutit:

It benefits from a thrusting, ambitious CBD (albeit overly-focused on the 'B') and the many wonderful inner suburbs surrounding, most built around diverse ethnic mixes, the ghosts of former industries in Redfern, Waterloo, Pyrmont or Paddington or the finely grained streets of Potts Point and Rushcutters Bay, often threaded with compact rows of reusable terraces with numerous pockets of startling greenery, and much more besides. These inner suburbs are perhaps a little overly-residential, rather than more usefully mixed up, but each have their own character and promise. The basic 'natural' qualities of life - climate, terrain, food, and good-humoured, bright people (in the main) - are all enviably rich along Australia's immense coastline, and Sydney benefits from all of them.

But Sydney is also the following, often overwhelming all this:

These extremes set up an interesting counterpoint, more so than most. Sydney has perhaps the most effortlessly beautiful urban mis-en-scéne imaginable, but its built fabric is often truly, breathtakingly awful. Most of Sydney, of course, is somewhere in-between. At a basic, almost topographical level, the tension that results from this may contribute to the city often being fractured and knotted in a peculiar stasis.

Yet creative tension is at the heart of all cities - cities are not things which tend towards equilibrium - so this is really no excuse for consistently stuffing up infrastructure projects, over-gearing towards shopping malls, or the internecine squabbling that often characterises city-state relationships. Analysis of that means swimming in deeper undercurrents again, as even a cursory glance at the first sections of Norman Abjorensen’s excellent article at Inside Story will make clear, indicating the ideological backdrop to liberal city hall politics in Sydney (though even this is muddied by the varying contenders for a ‘city hall-like’ function amongst the three tiers of government overlaid onto New South Wales.)

The Gehl report - which is available for download via the City of Sydney - was a precursor to the major strategy for the city unveiled only a few months later, Sustainable Sydney 2030. Note that all this concerns the local authority, the City of Sydney, rather than the actual city of Sydney itself, which is composed of 40-odd other local authorities and sprawls over one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world. Therein lies a problem, as I indicate below. Despite this focus, and while it’s not a bad strategy as far as it goes, the other danger of such initiatives is that they don’t deliver genuine change in the city and can be too easily sidetracked - cf. Melbourne, a successful site of Gehl Architects’ work years ago, but whose Melbourne 2030 strategy (no relation) appears to be increasingly ignored, with particularly egregious decisions occurring all too regularly now.

Further, these strategies rarely get at more productive strategies for the city, instead focusing on the thin (though important in its own way) veneer of urban design and planning. I hint at this in the following piece - what is Sydney for? - but a much sharper critique of Sustainable Sydney 2030 was made a few months later in Monument magazine, by Ingo Kumic and Gerard Reinmuth. Excuse the lengthy quote but it's worth it, as they outline alternative, productive approaches to urban strategy:

"The result is a document concerned with designing the city - its image - rather than empowering it to exist. So, while it is rich on images of happy people on bicycles, it falls short of anything we may call a productive strategy. The city is redesigned rather than empowered to produce and re-produce itself. The task of empowering the city requires a serious analysis of the many varied yet interdependent economies that comprise 'Glocal' Sydney. This is a different project to the one the City of Sydney has championed, as it is fundamentally based on understanding the impediments to building capacity in the city to exist in a highly competitive world and therefore the capacity of its people to make their place. Having established the limitations and strengths of myriad economies, we can begin to innovate the systems of production, distribution and consumption that define them. We can temper them with new and emerging social and environmental agendas and we can introduce new ideas concerning governance and inclusion, such as corporate social responsibility. This project will then ensure that the economies that define Sydney are grounded in our unique proposition and thereby exploit the increasing importance of cultural capital ... The current emphasis of strategic plans on designing cities, rather than empowering them, stems from the fact that the design economy revolves entirely around the capitalisation of the experience of a designed object ... Mature cities - such as Barcelona, with its Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Barcelona and London via the the London Plan - demonstrate that the consumptive experience of the city is a consequence and not a driver of a city's capacity to make its own place ... The Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision simply delivers design images of creative capacity rather than the productive strategies that may enable creative capacity to emerge ... This city, like any city, is its society - not its bricks and mortar. If we fail to build capacity for the city to make and re-make itself, we fail to underscore the fundamental reason for its existence." ['(Re)Making Sydney: Image, form and crisis of vision', Ingo Kumic & Gerard Reinmuth, Monument magazine #87, October/November 2008]

(Actually, while I agree with much of their article, I'd quibble with the idea that design only concerns image - good design also includes the re-framing of questions like what is Sydney for, and image is only one aspect of its output. But that's a designer talking. I'd also quibble with the idea that London doesn't partake in the kind of 'design economy' practises their critique focuses on. Much of this ideology stems from London directly, for good or ill. Finally, there is a more subtle interplay between urban infrastructure (including urban form and the quality of urban design) and the productive practises that emerge there. It's not quite one leading the other, as they make out, but rather more symbiotic. However, their article reinforced my perennial interest in the soft infrastructure of a city - people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships - and its interplay with the hard stuff, expanding on a few points I'd tried to make below.)

Either way, such strategies do provide a forum for debate about what flavour of urbanism is appropriate for the city, and that is of immense value. It’s somewhat ironic that one of the world’s most urbanised nations needs to kick-start debate about its major cities, but that remains the case. So in that spirit, I offer this piece up as constructive criticism, an attempt to take a good report and make it better.

(And apologies for wheeling out the Saarinen quote yet again, but as usual I can’t resist it.)

Father of modern Brisbane

Clem Jones seemed like a decent man. A dedicated republican and Labor party stalwart, he died aged 89 on Saturday 15th December 2007. The press are widely crediting him with 'building Brisbane', which is now the fastest-growing city in Australia and the 'Third Metropolis' finally forcing the traditional cultural capitols of Sydney and Melbourne to sit up and take notice.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh says Jones was "the father of modern Brisbane ... his lifelong civic contribution and love of the city of Brisbane was unsurpassed ... Clem will long be remembered for his vision and commitment to transforming Brisbane from a conservative country town to a vibrant and cosmopolitan city." Local boy and new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - another sign of Brisbane's currently rising star - said "Clem was a longstanding personal friend of mine, a great source of support and encouragement and friendship."

He may well have been the key catalyst in transforming Brisbane in the latter part of the twentieth century. The city is increasingly unrecognisable to that described by those who saw it in the '70s and '80s. Wealthy from numerous sources, a strong hi-technology-oriented industrial base, with an increasingly well-respected university and research sector, the best new art gallery and library in Australia and currently the country's most innovative architecture scene, a wonderful sub-tropical climate and handy for the jaw-dropping Queensland coast, increasingly good restaurants and fabulous local produce, a tree-covered hilly topography on which the extremely liveable suburbs sit, and with the distinctly Asian aspect that most Australian cities should have.

There is still a residual sense of the earlier Brisbane in the culture, of course, as these things take generations to shift (more on this later). The city had to come a long way too, from the frankly unbelievable Joh Bjelke-Petersen years. But the character is now orientated towards an educated, cultured, outward-looking and sophisticated city - a world away from the 'Brisvegas' that the out-of-touch in Sydney and Melbourne would still tag the city with, albeit with an increasingly insecure note in their voice.

Jones, as lord mayor for 14 years from 1961, pulled the city's socks up and set the scene for all of this. But along the way Clem Jones was also the man who pulled the trams out of Brisbane in 1969. By all accounts, no-one was particularly happy that last day of the trams, except a few of the traffic engineers.

As a replacement, Jones and his administration embarked on the vast road-building schemes that now define the modern Australian city, and all to no avail. Brisbane is horribly clogged with car traffic, no matter what. Just as Sydney is. And that, perhaps more than anything, holds both cities back from fully realising their modern vision. Jan Gehl's recently announced plan for Sydney's centre is not without its flaws - listen to his lecture from September to see where it comes from - but a pretty close version of it needs to be implemented in Sydney, and Brisbane should do likewise, though spreading the ambit of the plan over the sprawling city's outer suburbs.

As with most cities, the trams were a part of the urban infrastructure that resonated long after their demise. The great Brisbane writer David Malouf suggests that the city is still marked up with the ghosts of the tramlines:

"The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/The Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few; and this sense of radial opposites has persisted, though the actual tramlines have long since been replaced with 'invisible' (as it were) bus routes. The old tramline system is now the invisible principle that holds the city together and gives it a shape in people's minds." [David Malouf, 'A First Place: The Mapping of the World', Southerly, vol.45, no.1, 1985. Found in The Third Metropolis by William Hatherell]

That's such a beautiful evocation of the city's form that it seems churlish to wonder how many people today, a generation later, would sense those radial opposites. Malouf's imagery is so strong that it would defy simple quantitative measurement, and by repeating it here I'm hopefully reinforcing the image one more time. However, today's Brisbane has very visible swollen arteries - principally Coronation Drive into Riverside Expressway, and the ICB (Inner-City Bypass) - rather than invisible principles, and they appear to do little to hold it together.

Jones did what he thought was necessary - albeit advised by American planners, apparently. Certainly, someone had to lift Brisbane into the post-war period. Before Jones, many of Brisbane's roads "even those just a kilometre from the GPO", reports The Australian, breathlessly - were "uncurbed and unsurfaced dirt". Admittedly the dirt roads weren't tenable and Jones's administration sorted all of that. But in doing so, it fully orientated the city towards the car. There's an in-built prejudice against public transport around this. Jones was quoted as saying that his ideal was for the working man to be driving his own car, not catching a tram. This is where Australia looked to American values rather Mittel European or Asian, and for the worse. There are clearly spatial similarities between Australian and American cities, but I'm yet to perceive the swing back towards public transport seen across the US west coast, from the Bay Area up to Portland and Seattle (never mind New York City, which might be a special case). It's not a party political issue either; Jones was solid Labor, though his sentiment was close to Margaret Thatcher's infamous statement: "Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life."

Hear we see not only Thatcher's near-psychotic levels of misanthropy but also, crucially, her lack of long-term strategic vision. The question now is, at what point will we be saying "any man who doesn't ride a bus won't be getting to work".

Jones was far less destructive than Thatcher but either way, an entire car-centric infrastructure will now have to be taken apart, bit by bit, and reconstructed with mass-transit systems in the ascendancy. As with Sydney, that realisation is not widespread yet, and the culture is so ingrained as to actually prevent people from thinking there could be another way. The dramatic flourish in Gehl's plan for Sydney, pulling down the Cahill Expressway across Circular Quay, is described by the Sydney Morning Herald's urban affairs editor as overly "drastic and impossible".

Frankly, that's the unconsciously defeatist talk of someone who's spent too long in their city's skin, and can't think the the unthinkable. Equally, in Brisbane, it seems people can't think of another solution to near-fatal levels of individual car traffic than building more roads. Listening to Gehl's talk, they'd hear that building more roads only leads to more traffic, a pattern we've seen many times over. Almost every day in the local rag, the Courier Mail, you'll read of a simple unfortunate accident causing hours of chaos throughout a system organically interconnected through necessity rather than strategy. They even have a 'Stop the carnage' campaign, due to the increasing number of road deaths on Queensland's roads. These are all symptoms of the same spiralling metastasis you see when systems run at overload (see also Heathrow, the world's worst airport). Yet the solution offered up - despite the carnage, even - is usually tunnels, bypasses, bridges, while rail and bus services suffer from the bad management often seen when implicitly deprioritised.

Sadly, the shrill new urbanist agenda doesn't help change people's views that often. It's overly orientated towards the pedestrian, and needs to find a way of handling moderate levels of private car traffic as well as mass transit and pedestrianisation. Equally, some of those elevated road systems can be amongst the most thrilling aspects of modern cities, particularly Brisbane's Riverside Expressway (section pictured top), which is virtually a big-dipper casually sweeping out over the river. It's going to take far more imaginative campaigns than we've seen thus far - it's a hegemonic battle, ultimately - alongside serious build around mass transit systems and related infrastructure, hard and soft. And even then the strongest clear message will probably be peak oil.

A recent BusinessWeek article seems to assume that citizens have got the message:

"The size of a city determines its need for a metro system. Cities of a few million people—or those anticipating huge population growth—really can't do without a mass transit system. But cities of one or two million inhabitants can choose between a subway and a surface tramway, which costs far less but also runs more slowly."

But I'm not sure it's that well understood - simply a case of choosing between subway or tramway. Of course, there are now plans to for the trams to return to the 1.8m strong Brisbane (the person holding that 'you won't see this again' sign in 1969 was wrong), along with bus systems weaving underground and around the centre. Bike lanes are emerging, albeit threaded through some of the busiest and most dangerous roads in the country. These are usually seen in addition to road-schemes, rather than as progressive replacement. So it's a start, but hearing the currents in everyday conversation in this city, people have yet to understand the scale of change required to the city, that quite shocking sense of dismantling the entire infrastructure.

It's too simplistic to blame Jones or his administration - as a New World city boss of the 1950s and 1960s, almost anyone would have seen cars as a first order object to organise around. Only the already dense cities of the Old World were fortunate enough to have the right form for mass transit (even then Paris, New York, London, Boston, Barcelona et al did their best to slice their fabric apart with roadways, turning their backs on rivers or harbours, only to have to now re-build.) Yet even with a shift towards private ownership of cars, there was no real reason, strategic or economic, to pull the trams and light rail systems out of cities, and certainly no need to go as far as Jones or Thatcher suggested.

So. Brisbane is potentially beautiful and Clem Jones seemed like a good man. He helped shaped what's emerging as a great city, and now is not the time to speak ill of his generally valuable work. Yet it's symptomatic of the lack of understanding of the ills of the modern Australian city that few people are pointing out the flaws in building Brisbane around the car.

The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown

The APEC summit is in town, and Sydney is on full-alert. At least as much as Sydney is ever going to be. The leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum have more or less brought downtown to a standstill. Drawn from nations representing over 60% of the global GDP, featuring the premiers of the USA, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Australia and many others, it's the most powerful international assembly ever in Australia. To some APEC appears to be little more than a talking shop, and others have grumbled about the upheaval the event is causing. But former Australian PM, the brilliantly outspoken Paul Keating, who provided much of the impetus for APEC in its early days, essentially says that the city should be proud APEC is here, and deal with it. (I agree with him, for what it's worth, and despite what I write below.) Keating intriguingly goes on to suggest that "one of the greatest pieces of software that Australia developed in the 1980s and mid-1990s was foreign policy", describing APEC as an artifact of that, and suggesting what the forum should really be about, particularly for Australia.

Meanwhile Sydney is just agog that Vladimir Putin is here, Shinzo Abe is here, Hu Jintao is here. George Bush "arrived by water" - I love that phrase, as if he splashed up a beach in the dead of night, face blacked up, knife clenched between his teeth - a couple of days ago, and the local media are twittering about everything from his surf'n'turf'n'no-veg diet to his understanding on Iraq with current Australian PM John Howard. For Howard it may be one of the last things he does in office, but for Sydney it's a chance to play host at a glittering ball, and it's laid on its jewel, the Sydney Opera House, as the venue. Playing host these days, however, means less a spirit of welcoming, open embrace, than a total lockdown of the urban environment.

First up, read fellow Sydney-resident Marcus Trimble's excellent piece on what this has meant for the city's urban form, describing the extraordinary 5km fence that's been built around the Opera House area in the CBD, Sydney's new temporary (non-autonomous) zoning, and the informational security measures in place.

Yet not everyone finds it as interesting. The New South Wales Transport Minister John Watkins said of the traffic restrictions and the fencing off of Sydney's centre:

"The message is very clear - there is nothing to see so please stay away."

Actually, it is of course fascinating: I overhear people talking of going to actually see The Fence, as if it were a new temporary attraction, and when I visited on Wednesday, many Sydneysiders were just hanging out in the "sniper-ridden ring of steel", watching the whole circus. News sites are full of it, and Sydney has been radically altered for a few days. There is plenty to see.

The city's lampposts are festooned with APEC banners, creating orange gates - a Christo fan somewhere? - and the place is largely devoid of traffic.

In addition to the slightly desperate plea of Watkins above, today was declared a public holiday and the official literature actually suggested people leave the city for the weekend - and a somewhat inadvertent drive towards walking the city and taking public transport.

In the Sydney Morning Herald's special APEC section, John Huxley writes of prison language - 'lockdown' - and the Dead City that's left behind. I find the peculiar atmosphere a little reminiscent of the accidental pedestrianisation of London after the 7/7 bombings, though here cultivated through the power of nightmares rather than actual terror.

The eminently quotable Mr. Watkins again:

"The fence is ugly but is there to keep delegates and people of Sydney safe from public order problems and the threat of terrorism. These are the ugly realities of our world."

His ugly realities perhaps. But from an architecture or urbanism perspective, it's ugly and interesting.

In the spirit of Cedric Price or Archigram, you could see the entire fenced structure as one transient building - a kind of tentacular walking city, with its own streets and arteries, overlaid temporarily over the concrete city beneath, as if it's squatting on the CBD, attempting to suffocate or strangle, perhaps. I'd like to see a photograph or plan of The Fence from above, and then extrude its form from the streets (sketch below).

Of course, it's the antithesis of what Price and Archigram attempted with their visionary work - a kind of Anti-Fun Palace, in which possibilities are diminished and the only course of action is to be shepherded out to the perimeter of the city. From an urban planning perspective, it's the opposite of creating a contemporary open space. You could see the whole thing as a design problem - perhaps run as an avant-garde exercise in a crazed design school somewhere: how to tighten the grip a very public space, centred around one of the country's principle attractions? Again, you begin to look at The Fence as a temporary architectural incursion in the city, a reversal of the usual - or at least more written about - architectural and urban design work. You half wonder where The Fence is heading next.

As Marcus points out, this design work now also include a tightening of the informational grip on the city, by deliberately eroding data services over strategic locations. He describes as a "lo-fi-ing of Sydney, resolution as security measure", in which Google Earth/Maps high-resolution imagery of the Sydney CBD is subtracted, such that it becomes temporarily blurred over the Opera House and other related places. One speculates as to how that happened. (Of course, Google wouldn't want to be held responsible if anything terrible did happen, as will no doubt have been pointed out to them. Though it's a little ludicrous to suggest that their service offers the potential plotter anything over the many readily accessible, detailed paper maps of Sydney apparently still in existence.) It's also strange to note just how overly precise the blurring is. In this image below, of Google Maps on my phone taken on Wednesday, note how the edge of the Opera House (left) is the exact point at which the blurring/sharpening occurs. A curiously limited definition of the danger zone.

Shifting the map inland to the Royal Botanic Gardens, we see the same sharp:blurred boundaries, creating odd hybrid buildings with one wing in focus (lower-half), the other dark and blurred (top-half), perhaps like Diller+Scofidio's blur building. Presumably this link to that exact spot will improve in resolution after APEC, so writing about this transient architecture necessitates a screengrab:

It's an oddly crude tactic, and in terms of an analogue to the physical Fence, it's far less effective. The Fence covers a huge area, across 5km, whereas this strategic blurring seems a little tokenistic. However, note also that this informational space extends to the media too, with ABC's satirical TV show The Chaser being warned off "trying anything" in the area. Of course, that didn't work [video]. So, seeing its media as a part the city's digital fabric, APEC's security measures attempt to restrict that too.

As a precursor of things to come, it's instructive to see all this as the kind holistic informational urban planning - blurring physical and digital cities - that the academy has been rattling on for years. Here it is, folks.

It's also going to be instructive to think how these powers might extend, just as the Declared Area has extended police powers in the streets - to a carefully orchestrated temporary enfeebling of the informational city. I wonder which city is the more resilient in the face of these strategies - physical or digital?

Wandering around on Wednesday, I manage to take several photos of The Fence - despite claims that people would be stopped doing so - as police close off streets, occasionally check IDs, and generally funnel people away from what are usually Sydney's busiest streets.

The Fence is very configurable, allowing different streets to be closed at different times. Indeed, the police occasionally seem unsure which streets to shut off, when.

The transport services have been reconfigured too, with bus stops shifting location for APEC and indicating just how malleable the city can be.

The casual militarisation of the space is clear - again recall how Archigram, Price et al were influenced by the temporary, configurable or prefabricated architecture of WWII; pillboxes, sea-forts, funnies &c. - but I also begin to see that the whole thing is working a little like a reverse of la tonnara, the traditional Italian fishing net structure, which can be seen as a kind of transient, underwater building. With la tonnara, tuna were ushered through a series of netted chambers, ultimately towards entrapment. With The Fence, people are ushered through a series of steel fenced chambers, out of the city and away from APEC.

It's eerily quiet, save for the constant drone of helicopters patrolling overhead. I feel a little cheated, as we were promised Black Hawks, which are an entirely beautiful if malevolent machine. Instead we get bulbous police helicopters, sprouting with antennae. Yet their ambient drone adds a new note of threat to the city, in streets otherwise bereft of their usual soundtrack.

The atmosphere is a little tense - with that many armed police around, and people being corralled through metal fencing, how could it not be? - but I suspect it's far less tense that it would be in other countries.

Back in sleepy Vaucluse, at the mouth of Sydney's wondrous harbour, I spot a small, grey Australian navy patrol boat, bobbing up and down in the whitecaps off the South Head. Helicopters buzz the cliffs a little more persistently than usual. Yet this seems like an empty show of force. I wander past an old disused gun emplacement - looks circa WWII - with the rusted mount for an anti-aircraft gun, angled towards some imagined enemy approaching from the ocean. Any threat to Sydney now is apparently in the opposite direction, within the harbour, around the Circular Quay where modern Sydney was founded. The defences the city mounts are now internalised, covert, temporary digital or light steel structures. In a week or so, there'll be no trace of them, quite unlike the crumbling chunks of concrete, as if a child's discarded toys, quietly sitting up here on the raw bluff headland.

For a full set of larger images relating to the APEC fence, see cityofsound at Flickr.

For more architectural perspective on walls and fences of all descriptions, check Bryan Finoki's excellent blog Subtopia.

Flat rates, Flat whites

Before moving to Sydney, I'd promised myself that this site wouldn't become completely overwhelmed with notes on Australia. Yet these are precious moments, when my wide eyes are eating everything up, even more than usual. This is a rare time, first impressions hitting hard - as Dyer said of Lawrence, he would start writing about a place from the train on the way there. The active naïvety of the outsider -  familiar in some of my favourite writing by Raban, Robb, Carey, Dyer - is a powerful force when well trammelled. Mark Twain said something similar. Though you never know with Mark Twain.

Every day provides a cavalcade of differences, a sensation will be familiar to anyone who has lived in another country. From yoghurt pots to the layout of bus timetables to bar protocol to forms of government, and all points in-between. Even the certainties of death and taxation will be handled differently. Australia, which shares the same language as my native Britain - to some extent - and with it a strong residual cultural influence, is still utterly different. Perhaps it's more surprising as at the meniscus, the culture seems familiar, but the differences are actually fathoms deep. If you're on top of things, this is a wonderful feeling, a gently bewildering, continual mild surprise.

The basic setup of life in a new country immediately brings many of these differences rushing to the foreground, in a way that holidays never do. I won't bore you with my thoughts on what the differing designs of electrical plugs can tell us about national characteristics (OK, then: the overly safe, sturdy British plug, as if made of brick; the insouciant apparent lack of a pin for earth on the Continental European; the Australian discreetly positioned half-way between European and American styles, doing its own thing etc.) nor the other quotidian surprises: Weetabix being called Weetbix, the shape of coins, randomly different pronunciations, the curious affection for lawn bowling, the abundant size and flavour of local produce, with exotic fruits no longer exotic, the prevalence of school uniforms, the trajectories of news coverage. More immediate again: the more expansive, more experimental architecture; the obviously different climate and beautiful flora; the genuine political issues; the enlivening sense of limitless space, of earth and sky, that you just breathe in 'till your chest swells and your head is filled with possibilities ...

All these subtly different experiences will ultimately tell me a lot about this place, as the dust settles. In all this, I discover a bit about local approaches to technology adoption, regulation, geography, urbanisation - and some global patterns too. As with most western economies, they're all caught on the apparent dilemma of providing both individual choice and effective public service, bobbing up and down in the often turbulent wake of Milton Friedman's work, particular interpretations of the call-and-response between government regulation and market forces. Australia has of course developed numerous iterations of its own political and economic strategies, filtered through a complex historical prism and multiplied by geography and regional aspect - it's far too detailed and subtle for me to appreciate yet. But if the reasons for things feel obscured, blurred, opaque, the differences are felt sharply nonetheless.

In setting up a business, I encounter more contrasting systems - here, the importance of state-level business administration versus national taxation systems. Equally, registering for health care, opening a bank account, moving about. In terms of public transport, one has the feeling that Sydney is sort of trying them all out at once without really getting behind any of them with any vigour: bus, tram/light-rail system, an urban rail network that briefly dips underground downtown, as if trying out being a subway then quickly thinking better of it, ferries, taxis, water-taxis, even a monorail for goodness' sake. With banking, we find internet-based e-banking and contemporary financial services, but also charges on ATM transactions and in-person appointments with an actual human representative to open an account. (This latter turns out to be a more improved service, actually.) Health services are far more responsive, less under the cosh than in London. Getting a mobile, I find a far more confident, competitive and coherent 3G market than in the UK. Bolder, sharper.

Alongside all the myriad benefits and improvements I see - albeit through the rose-tinted view of the newcomer - one negative difference that hits home quickly is relatively woeful broadband environment. It's a shock to feel it, coming from the UK, where the rabid competition in telecommunications has hammered everything in favour of the consumer, leading to low, low prices and relatively fast speeds. And this is something you feel; it's like suddenly carrying a lead weight. In Australia, the available speeds are much slower on average, products can be non-standard, service can be poor (connections drop without warning), the former state telco Telstra still dominates, and the deals are structured around limited data usage and bandwidth per month, rather than the flat rate 'as-much-as-you-can-eat' packages you get in the UK and elsewhere. It's only with flat rate packages i.e. consistent pricing irrespective of usage, that this technology is really freed up.

In this respect, Australia suffers from a particularly unfortunate comparison with its South East Asian near-neighbours. Urbanisation is often mentioned as the key to South Korea's reputation as high-speed haven, as it's only really Seoul that benefits from ubiquitous high-speed connectivity but that's the majority of the population. Seoul's infrastructure was built through a combination of government drive and corporate muscle, but neither driver appears to have really kicked in yet in Australia, leaving the environment caught between regulation and competition with neither apparently able to move quickly. It needs to invest, sharpish. The government should make it a priority, at national, state and city levels, and provide whatever catalysts are needed for infrastructure provision and then let intense private competition do the rest. I'm too new to the market and culture here to take the detail of this argument much further, so listen to Leith Campbell:

"If the race has started to develop really fast broadband in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia has already all but lost, a leading telecommunications analyst says. And if that situation is to change, the Government has to encourage investment in taking optical fibre cables not just to street corner nodes, but all the way to homes." ['The connection's just not there', Sydney Morning Herald]

Australia has one of the most urbanised population in the world, so it should be able to share some of the natural benefits South Korea had. Given that, there's no need to worry too much about far-flung communities. (They can almost be picked off as special cases, and will not get in the way of commercial roll-out to the majority. Again this is different to dispersed European populations, where there's a complex variegated spread of population in a relatively smaller space.) So despite its massive scale, Australia benefits from a very usefully focused dispersal of its population. Yet some think this is not the case:

"The comparisons are somewhat unfair, of course. In Asia, with high population density, a fibre-optic cable connected to the base of a large apartment block instantly connects hundreds of people to very fast broadband." ['Wide hopes on broadband', The Age]

Indeed, Australian housing patterns are lower density than in Seoul, but they're still highly concentrated, when viewed at a macro-level of broadband rollout and compared to the European situation. By far the majority of the population lives in the well-organised 7 coastal cities - opinion varies as to the actual proportion, from 75% to 95% of the population - and these cities are relatively contained spatially, despite Australia's effectively unlimited space. Any resistance to the idea that Australia should have extremely fast broadband, competitive with its Asian neighbours, smacks of defeatism, myopia and lack of ambition.

The best story I heard recently for a successful technology- and culture-inspired rollout that takes advantage of urbanisation is perhaps somewhat oblique. But it's also an Australian story; that of how it ended up with the best coffee culture in the world. (Yes, New Zealand, you may quibble now.)

Coffeegeek.com has a great article explaining how this happened, written by coffee entrepreneur George Sabados. Before 1948, and the invention of the mass produced electric pump-driven espresso machine, most Italian emigration was to the United States, taking with it the old-fashioned approaches to making coffee, and little knowledge of the espresso as we know it. The invention of this new espresso machine coincided with the Australian government attracting vast numbers of new immigrants, via its '£2 ticket' scheme, whereupon most Italian emigrants then switched course and headed South. (For the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, a third of the city's population were Italian, or Italian-Australian. And Peter Robb, in his majestic 'Midnight in Sicily', writes briefly of this Italian emigration to Australia, particularly from the mezzogiorno, and the taste for coffee that went with it.)

The way Sabados tells it, the acceleration of coffee culture in Australia was enabled by its urbanisation - "The concentration of the population bases in these cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane) set the framework for the rapid spread of espresso" - and then through competition, during the eighties and nineties, competing in terms of quality of experience as well as quality of coffee. This leads happily to a vibrant, distinctive small entrepreneur-led market, as well as some national franchises. (Interestingly, Sabados tells of how Australian coffee developed the integration of milk with espresso too, leading to more variety than the Italian market and the fabulous Flat White.)

The result is an extraordinarily rich coffee culture, arguably the best in the world, with numerous fantastic cafés throughout its cities and a highly knowledgeable populace brewing at home too.

It's perhaps frivolous to suggest telcos and government could look at this and learn from it, but essentially this too is a story of regulatory catalyst, technology adoption and new cultural influence through immigration to an urbanised population, wherein competition can improve quality. The ingredients may be electricity and water supply, trade routes and knowledge, and the context quite different historically and culturally, but all these facets are also the results of that 'call-and-response between government regulation and market forces' I mentioned earlier, and take strategic advantage of Australia's urban culture. Seeing broadband as a feature of a culture akin to coffee shops, rather than technical problem, may help too. Coffee shops often get used as metaphorical placeholders for the information age - not least here - but here's something that describes their genuine culture- and technology-driven evolution, through urbanisation. Equally, in terms of immigration-driven change, standing in a long, busy line at the Department for Immigration and Citizenship the other day, I was only one of a handful of immigrants who didn't appear to be South East Asian. Perhaps they will bring the broadband, as Italians brought the coffee.

Postopolis!: Gianluigi Ricuperati

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here

Gianluigi Ricuperati, a journalist and writer, gave us a presentation which was disturbing, enlightening, complex and fascinating in equal measure. Based around his book, 'Fucked Up', it concerned graphic, uncensored imagery of the current Gulf War. Ricuperati was Interested in the effects of war on those who don't make war; and of seeing war through the eyes of those that do make war. It's the story of, in his words, one of the "most effective mimetic presentations of war in recent memory". For Postopolis!, as with Krulwich's talk, it relates to the media's space, and the landscape of a place as altered through representation.

He tells the story of his encounters with the website nowthatsfuckedup.com, and its producer, Christopher Wilson. It was a moderately successful amateur porn site, before Wilson decided to contact servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ask for images of daily life during wartime, in return for free access to the porn. It's not quite clear why he decided to do this – Wilson never agreed to meet Ricuperati – but Ricuperati feels that it was out of sheer curiosity. That he, like millions of other young men in America, "wanted to desperately know how it feels". At same time, they wouldn't go there. For Ricuperati, "This is the difference on a moral plane ... (saying) I want to know everything about what it's like to be there, but I wouldn't go."

Over the next 6 months, the amount of porn stayed consistent, but it increasingly offered a rising amount of war images, images that covered all shades of what is representable in war. Of what war is. Uncensored, and direct from the front line.

Ricuperati's book was an attempt at "a democratic tool". It sold a couple of thousand copies in Italy, and he feels that the fact it didn't sell many is "totally due to fact that images are beyond limit of what is representable in mainstream media." We see examples of these images, with Joseph Grima translating the captions, sent in by the servicemen, in real time, from the translated Italian. The captions are amongst most interesting things as they present the raw voices of American servicemen, struggling to deal with the reality of their situation. In some senses, you hear their bewilderment – they can barely try to work out what's going on in Iraqi or Afghani minds. Indeed, there is much scorn as to the motives of locals. It sounds hateful. But perhaps they are trying to figure out it, in a way, through their sheer frustration, manufactured hate and ennui. Ricuperati also studied the interesting community visiting the site. He reckons the captions, and responses to them, was also part of some kind of mass query: "What's the story behind the picture?"

The images are of dead bodies torn apart, prisoners humiliated, photos through the sights of guns and rocket launchers, focused on people, places. The landscape of Iraq and Afghanistan is immediately recognisable; what's not familiar is that these images are inhabited, full of civilians or insurgents about to get shot. We're over-familiar with videos shot from the nose cone of missiles, but the targets are always buildings. An abstraction. Here, they're people. We also see the end result. They're fairly shocking, but the more affecting images to me are those through the sights.

What we see here – "digital images daily life in Iraq traded for images of sex life in America" – soon came to the attention of the Pentagon, who investigated Christopher WIlson's servers, but couldn't prosecute. They blocked access to soldiers in Iraq, but soldiers still found access numerous other sources. Eventually, a judge invoked a 19th century decency law, and Wilson was jailed for 2 months and fined $100k. The site got shut down, effectively, so Ricuperati decided to ensure that the material, and the story, was preserved in book form. Christopher Wilson disappeared from public eye, although not before becoming a cause celebré of the anti-war movement, despite being "somewhat totally conservative, someone pro-war, that becomes, by paradox, about freedom of expression". He didn't want to shame the American army at all. Rather, it was kind of a tribute. A totally militaristic act. Ricuperati's greatest regret is that Wilson never accepted a meeting.

He notes that these kind of photographs are totally different to professional war photography. It's war as seen through eyes of those who make war. None of the images have the quality to win a Pullitzer, but for Ricuperati they do show the essential qualities of war, particularly those of "shame and boredom", and the everyday idiocy that results (e.g. Abu Ghraib.) He wanted to create an anthropological dark fable of our time. Everyone who submitted pictures, dead people in pictures, people who commented, even Ricuperati himself, he says – all contributed to something that is really disquieting from a moral plane.

In questions, Ricuperati notes that you can find same pictures in soldiers' wallets from WWI, WWII etc. And it's not exclusive to American soldiers either; soldiers all over the world do this. Ricuperati says, "If I were there, probably I would shoot these pictures. I take pictures of daily life, and the daily life of soldiers is fucked up." So what's different with these pictures is the velocity; the shortened, almost non-existent time in which photographs are made and then displayed.

Ricuperati's talk gave us another angle from which to consider place, landscape, the space of war, and representation through photography and new media. If I say it provided a sober, sharp, disquieting point of difference within Postopolis!, I mean that as a compliment. He's working on a form of revisioning of Arbitare later in the year, so watch that space.

Recent work at Monocle.com

Been working on a new wave of material for Monocle.com. Over the last week, we published a few features which relate to stories in issue 02. For each issue, we try to take a some stories online, twisting in a new direction, or providing further context. For instance, issue 02's Andrea Lenardin Madden profile expands into a little feature about her collaboration with the Sprinkles cupcake empire.

So, related to our lead story on Norway, we were extremely privileged to be granted an interview with HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. He doesn't often do them, and proved to be an extremely engaging interviewee. Progressive, intelligent, diplomatic yet involved - everything a modern monarch should be.

Additionally, we'll cover material which isn't mentioned in the magazine. Regular readers here might enjoy the brief documentary on Swiss robot bricklayers - yes, really - in which we discuss mass customisation, digital fabrication and architecture, talking to the profs at DFAB, ETH Zürich.

Back to issue 02, where we created our ideal broadcaster (other than Monocle of course): the 'Nordic News Network'. So, we got architect and designer Anders Nord to render a quick fly-through of the imaginary studio set, and we also quickly worked up an identity and soundtrack. Behold NNN.

See also our first infographic work - rather straightforward but clean, I think, and presenting new data on projected freshwater resources worldwide to 2050 (again, a link from the Norway story.)

Oh, and I hope you saw the lovely Kuntzel+Deygas work we posted up previously, such as these title sequences, music videos, character animations etc. There's more there, and much more to come of course. We're simultaneously working on reworking the site - and a million other things - particularly for subscriber-only material.

In other news, I managed to slip a QR code into our manga for issue 03 - fun! Sneak preview:

Hopefully a lot more of that kind of action to follow. Next week, off to Osaka and Tokyo with Tyler to explore this and more.

City states and global federalism

Bruno Giussani reported something very interesting recently. According to a report in Corriere della Sera, Letizia Moratti, the mayor of Milan, speaking at the Science and Technology in Society conference in Kyoto, Japan, has essentially called for a return to organisation via city states rather than national governments.

Suggesting that problems were just beyond national governmental organisation at this point, due to the complexity of governance by nation states at the global scale - and for evidence, look around you - she said:

"The big cities have today a strategic role in the global context ... They should start assuming some foreign policy rights and responsibilities ... Let's call it "global federalism ... Many countries have not signed the Kyoto protocol because at a national level it's often too difficult to commit to such engaging policies. But we could start experimenting with smaller-scale global agreements - among cities or regions"

I'm reading between the lines somewhat, and that may be as her words are coloured by a certain historical context.

But equally, there's something in the idea. A fair amount of mid-90s European urban policy was subtly informed by similar thoughts, though rarely explicitly voiced - perhaps for fear that nationally-organised EU funding lines might suddenly dry up. But the sense that, say, Manchester has more in common with Milan, Tilburg, Helsinki than it does with London or the rest of the UK, has a certain credence, and is a useful transformative image to work with.

Giussani picks up the idea and runs with it a bit, also pointing to other powerful regional bodies such as California etc.:

"Moratti has maybe found the term that may make it stick - global federalism - and that can give a sort of theoretical underpinning to the idea that, if cities start acting as global actors towards sustainability, new mobility solutions and traffic strategies, clean energy, water resources management, etc, when you add it all up there could be significant progress even without national policies and international treaties."

Despite Moratti's relatively right-wing stance, it strikes me that there's nothing politically determinist about this level of organisation. It's actually an attractive idea as there's a genuine sense of meaningful, local, civic value involved at the scale of the city - and thereby rejecting individualist or libertarian politics. It certainly tends to find fertile soil within mainland Europe, with a history of city state organisation, and a robust, respected, metropolitan urban culture. The more powerful idea is the sense of shared urban experience from Amsterdam to Sao Paulo, Sydney to Helsinki, Manchester to Milan, Seattle to Shanghai, and so on. The notion of a network of cities extending their history of trading partnerships more progressively into areas of cultural and political collaboration is too delicious to ignore. So it's just a little bit thrilling to hear the mayor of Milan beginning to make the case.

It's also worth noting that many others have envisioned future city state organisation:

Lunch over IP: Global Federalism: what if the big cities start acting on global problems?

An industrial policy for creativity. Nearly.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sir George Cox for a chat last week. Cox is Chairman of the Design Council, and has recently submitted his review of creativity in British business ("The Cox Review of Creativity in Business: building on the UK’s strengths") in response to the Chancellor's request in his Budget speech earlier this year.

We had a wide-ranging discussion, which I found highly interesting and useful - more later, I'd guess - but it's worth dwelling on the Cox Review for a moment. This has to be seen in the context of an increased focus by the Government on design, 'the creative industries' and their role in the UK economy. There are numerous complex contextual aspects to this increased focus from Gordon Brown, and arguments either way as to whether it's simply paying lip-service to this sector, an attempt by the Blair administration's to gain 'cred', or genuine insight and infrastructural support on a vital and thriving component of the British economy (see Nico Macdonald's article for the RSA Journal for a balanced series of views here). However you see it - and personally I'd welcome the focus but be keen to see true understanding and developmental support as a result - the fact that Sir George Cox was commissioned to 'stock-take' and provoke discussion via concrete recommendations can only be a useful thing.

In a nutshell, it's a good report. I'll do no more than note a few key findings here, and suggest my own take on it - which I should stress is unrelated to my conversation with Sir George. The full review is available in PDF format via the Treasury website.

The context stated in the review, and set by Brown, is the emerging challenge of the 'BRICs' (Brazil, Russia, India, China) in particular, not only in manufacturing industries but also in the informational economies that the post-industrialised West had assumed would be their 'value-added' economic base. This rings true, not least due to being supported by a well-aimed broadside of data. While we've heard these warning signs before - cf. Japan in the '80s - what we know of Shanghai, Mumbai and the like does suggest a fundamentally transforming balance of economic power.

To which, the traditional strategic answer had been 'our' apparently more advanced stage of development in the knowledge-based industries. This, however, is not enough. Indeed, the UK's strength in creativity and innovation, not just in the thriving creative industries, is noted in the Cox Review but the general air is of now not being a time to be complacent. Hence the report's recommendations are genuinely infrastructural and development - not simply a case of re-stressing the importance of 'creativity'.

The central recommendations address financial support for innovation within business, providing a decent focus on the bottom-line, particularly for SMEs. They're couched in the 'advisory' language of such reviews, of course, and have to navigate the labyrinthine circuits of public policy, but if enacted would certainly help. For instance, Treasury reviews of R&D tax credits should 'consider' changes to increase the effect on smaller businesses. The powerful public procurement sector should be adapted to encourage innovative solutions from suppliers, too - if that seems like a mealy-mouthed recommendation, it's worth noting that this is a UK market worth £125 billion a year in good and services, which can be manipulated to some degree (despite deregulation and a virulent 'value-for-money' meme).

Changing the culture of business itself is another arena for the Review, with a range of recommendations running across the business environment, from support programmes for SMEs right up to changing the Institute of Directors syllabus. This might appear tangential or too nuanced but this kind of change management, in the unfortunate jargon of business consultancy, is certainly crucial to the success of any such strategic activity. Switching the hardware without addressing the software rarely works. I've been engaged in work at the BBC recently to look at the cultural changes effected appointing creative/technical staff to senior positions, and it's interesting to see Cox's recommendations like "steps should be taken to get greater understanding of creativity and innovation into the boardroom by recruiting people with creative experience onto company boards" in that context.

Closer links between universities and SMEs should be a given, and it would be impossible to deliver a report such as this without making that recommendation. However, putting it into practice is rarely as easy. I have personal experience of the worth of these kinds of activities, via my work at MMU, in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, but Cox rightly notes that UK education needs a root-and-branch upheaval of the way it handles creativity, rather than forcing students to choose between two cultures at such an early age. Again, a clear recommendation but I'd suggest that the problem is a a deeper cultural issue for Britain, with education a particular manifestation within a symbiotic causal relationship. The report clocks this, with a sense that a multidisciplinary emphasis within education would help hugely. Again, from my own experience creating multidisciplinary teams, I'd endorse this. There's a decent discussion of some opportunities for education and business here, and still a sense that "the UK appears to be adept at developing world-class subject-matter experts who too often lack commercial aptitude ... too many great technological ideas are squandered as their creators have little to no idea how to express their inventions”. I hear echoes here of John Kieffer's talk at the Sibelius Academy's 'Future of Music' symposium, in which John noted arts graduates equally devoid of entrepreneurial or business skills (with a notable exception being the YBAs, who somehow emerged as fully-formed artists and business people. More here in John's recent article for AEA Platform).

Over and above the suggestions around financial support, business practice and education, the grandest gesture within the Cox Review would be the most significant if delivered with imagination: "A network of ‘Creativity and Innovation’ centres should be established throughout the UK, with a central hub in London." This would mean building actual bricks-and-mortar (and digital, one presumes) infrastructure to support this industry, providing a focal point for the more diffuse recommendations elsewhere in the report and for this kind of industrial and creative development in the UK in general. The proposed benefits will be familiar to those working in the field, from business performance to more nebulous but equally important cultural impact.

It's up to the regional development authorities (such as the LDA in London) to deliver these centres, and I'm yet to read anywhere that Brown has committed significant additional money to facilitate this, despite giving it and the Review a thumbs-up in general. If so, a fair amount of advocacy and persuasion is going to be required to deliver a coherent network, one suspects, as well as a commitment to high-quality architecture, integrated with urban centres and cultures. Delivering this effectively will take real skill and sensitive engagement, capable of traversing physical and cultural structures with equal facility and imagination.

Personally I'd suggest any such architecture should be a supportive act for a higher goal - the creation of intellectual architecture around creativity, truly enabling networking and business development via information, discussion and support around design in the widest sense, distilled into these physical centres for impact but conceptually and actually far more diffuse. Again, addressing software, in this case social software for business and creativity, alongside hardware. The informational relationships between the buildings and the cities - and the businesses and citizens which provide the life of both - is the real essence of these networks, not the buildings themselves. It can also flex, grow and adapt, sustainably, in ways most buildings struggle to. John Thackara makes a similar point. But if constructed in this context, and if constructed well, it should become a transformative, defining act for creativity in UK industry - the one recommendation which compares to that context in chapter one.

It's immediately telling that there are few examples from BRICs throughout the report. In short, this may be to how difficult it would be to recommend such policies to a G7 government at this point. This is state-led investment beyond even the most dirigiste gestures of the modern European social democracies. The few shining examples from the East occur in the 'national network of centres' chapter, mentioning the Korea Design Center in Songnam City, Taiwan's national design centre, and the mother of them all, the £158m 'Fusionopolis' centre in Singapore:

"The centre will bring together businesses from the ICT and creative sectors in an iconic new building occupying 1.2 million squarefeet, sited in the middle of the ‘Central Xchange’ – one of three ‘Xchanges’ aimed at fostering knowledge transfer and providing a vibrant work-live-work-play environment. The centre is a key component in the country’s aim to increase the contribution of the creative industries to six per cent of GDP by 2012."

A recent email from Our Man Sometimes In Shanghai (ahem) notes the level of investment in China, not just in scientific infrastructure, R&D etc., which we'd traditionally recognise as instruments of industry - through the prism of the last century - but also in terms of new media labs, creative parks, vast student numbers, incubators, distribution chains etc. i.e. all the components necessary to build an informational economy too. In other words, there may currently be a creativity and innovation gap, but not for long. When the results of such investment in the creative industries truly kick in - over and above existing harbingers - the BRICs may able to exploit that too, not by virtue of their scale but by having a genuine industrial policy capable of flexing muscles across all sectors with real purpose. As Justin pointed out to me, our deregulated political environment means we simply can't enable state-led investment on the same scale as the BRICs (ironically analogous to the way Britain was overhauled throughout the course of the 19thC). I personally dislike an oppositional approach to defining our strategic response to the BRICs - the dull FUD of head banging on wall, attempting to raise the troops - preferring to see the opportunity and intrigue in a a world at once global and local ... but again, it's no time to be complacent. As Cox puts it:

"What is impressive – and worrying – about the emerging economies is not where they stand today but how they are positioning themselves for the future. Alongside the enterprise and vigour that characterise their economic growth, they arebuilding up new technology-based industries and impressive capabilities in scientific research, and investing massively in education, technical skills and creative capabilities. As a consequence, it is now the high-skilled jobs in the hitherto leading economies that are coming under threat."

The point is not to necessarily build another Fusionopolis, but to find a truly culturally specific response from within British industry, capitalising on our strong history and rich potential; a response which engages with the BRICs as true partners where possible - importers, exporters, co-creators - as it's going to be difficult to play them at their own game. Building something better than Fusionopolis should be the aim, and a smart, sustainable combination of physical and intellectual architecture described above could be just that. In this context, the Cox Review may be correct not to focus too much on examples from the BRICs, and draw instead from our own terrain.

So the Cox Review is a welcome 'focus-pull' on to a range of fundamentally useful recommendations which would genuinely create useful conditions for the continuity and growth of UK PLC, via creativity. However, by drawing the focus so neatly it also illustrates the gap between our ability to nurture industrial culture and our ability to truly shape it. At the moment, it's as difficult to create an industrial policy for creativity as it is to create an industrial policy, other than laissez-faire, in general. The Cox Review's closing remarks are entirely apposite, as is almost the entire report - well-timed, well-made, and convincing. Exactly the kind of rallying call required. And yet ... and yet ...

"This report has been prepared for the Chancellor. It therefore focuses on the things Government can do to stimulate greater creativity in UK business. And, as illustrated, there are several things I believe can be done. However, the real messages are for business. Competition is going to get tougher. In the modern world, the only answer is to be more enterprising and more creative, and this has to come not in response to exhortation but out of enlightened self-interest. "

In asking what you can do for Britain, and not vice versa, the Cox Review sends the right message out to industry but requires a receptive ear at nos.10 or 11 - if not the whole postcode district - to truly take things forward. Cox's team have done their part - will real support emerge as a result? The British knowledge-based industries are powerful, robust and endlessly innovative, possessing a rich heritage from which to draw and a bright future well within their grasp. But it will still require coherent, brave policies creating a fertile loam to nurture growth, delivered with skill, sense of purpose and bold visionary thinking, if we are to have a meaningful stake in the 'harmonious world' envisioned by the Chinese president. We need rich mortar to build with these new BRICs.

Cox Review of Creativity in Business
John Thackara on the Cox Review
Related: DTI Economics Paper No.15: Creativity, Design and Business Performance [PDF]

Shanghai Diary 2005 #7

A further entry in Justin O'Connor's Shanghai Diary 2005 [context and introduction here]. This entry is dated 1st July 2005, and in visiting a football match in Huangpu, and reading Momus's blog, Justin discusses how the perceived homogeneity of Chinese working class - if that term makes sense at all - is differentiated from the heterogenous yet much-maligned working class in Britain and the US, particularly in comparison with a 'creative class'.

On Saturday night we went to a football match. It was Shenhua against Zhejiang. 'Shenhua' means flower of Shanghai. They seem to be the older of the teams, with a new stadium in the Huangpu district (in the '30s a dense impoverished working class neighborhood). There are two other sides, another based in the stadium near where I stay, and Pudong, which is in the new district across the river. This was a third-round China Cup match - against a team from the lower division. Everybody thought it was a match not worth bothering about, given the lowly status of the opposition - and this included the Shenhua club management who moved the venue from their usual stadium to a much smaller one up the road. This one had about a 20000 capacity. We got tickets outside for a quid each. There was a down-and-dirty noodle shop opposite, but disappointingly no hot dog sellers or chip vans. People sold small paper horns but I could not see any memorabilia. Maybe the shirt sellers stayed away also. Going up the stairs in the space just before you emerge into the seating area was a huge bank of computers all being played excitedly by 'youth'. This was as excited as anybody got all game. The telly was there; and indeed, if it was England the prospects would have looked good for an upset. A second division - well, Championship or whatever - team taking on one of the top clubs; it was over two legs and the score had been 2-2 on the away leg. But the ground was three quarters empty. In front of me the active 'Blue Devils' supporters numbered about 50; they wore Shenhua shirts and sang. Over the other side a small green knot of 'Green Spirit City' supporters sang and jumped, as they were to do for the whole game. It was a long way away and I couldn't hear them. The Blue Devils hardcore were teenagers, some with scarves tied around their wrists and about 60/40 boys over girls. They were happy and smiling. Nobody drank beer. Obviously nobody had tanked-up beforehand either. The songs made no reference to the other side; and indeed, after a ten minutes slot of various songs along the lines "Shenhua are champions" (they're not actually) they sang an oo-ayy sort of lyric to a common football chant tune whose title I can't remember - and they did it for 30 minutes. After the break they sang it - a sort of repeating, endless melody that returns to its starting point with great glee - again for 30 minutes. Only occasionally di the supporters look at what was going on on the pitch. Which was just as well 'cos it was bloody awful. It was 0-0 so Shenhua won on away goals. There was no piped music though, and people could smoke, so there was some relief.

I was the only western person there I would say. The ground was way up in the Zharbei district, which is not where tourists get to. And maybe the foreign workers don't go in much for football. Or maybe they did and they know better than me how crap it would be. It's a shame though because a lot of the explorer-type foreigners would have enjoyed being in a place where they were unique. This is not about vanity or being the center of attention - hardly anyone took any notice of me; though this would be different outside Shanghai - but about not seeing other westerners. I'd like to develop this idea as the contemporary scourge known as 'homophobia'. This is not fear of homosexuals - in a way that should be heterophobia, fear of those different from you. This homophobia is about fear of the same. Go to any monument or tourist site, and other westerners inevitably stand out from the crowd. You can't not look; like seeing famous people, you are staring before you remember that you don't know them. Another western person can be read instantly - a split-second check-out. We can't do that as easily with Chinese people; we don't know the codes. But you look and you turn away. It would be the biggest faux-pas to acknowledge another westerner simply because he or she was, well, like you. This is not what you came for. OK, this might happen later in bars, or at a hotel. But this is comparing notes; whilst out there you want to be on your own. Maybe it's ok to meet other westerners from a different country - but not from your own. As an Englishman it's difficult for me to be fully objective - what I say might well apply to other nations, and most probably does. When you meet people from your own country you are brought back home, back to the place which, for a few weeks or months, you have left behind. And they bring you back home. Sometimes this can be welcome. But many other times it's an unwelcome intrusion into your Chinese (or wherever you are) reverie. Maybe homophobia goes deeper, and this especially in the English context.

Encountering 'the other' is what we are here for. Walking past the poor areas, glimpsing unimaginably constricted lives, dealing with waiters, cleaning women, hotel staff, ticket sellers, street beggars, local staff (if you are here with work), police - all those encounters of a foreigner - we act with the politeness, the understanding, the deference that comes from meeting 'the other' face to face. Back in England, however, the lower classes are to be met with fear and loathing. I've been reading Momus' excellent blog from Berlin - last week he went to New York via London. His vitriolic account of London is worth a look. But this very acute and sensitive guy uses the word 'chav' to describe those wandering around Hoxton - not there for the digital art but drunk and taking the piss out of his eye patch and funny pants. The 'working class' in England is not only deprived of decent pay, health, education and social services but also of any legitimacy. It is stupid and aggressive and racist and no sooner is it given money than it becomes stupid and aggressive and racist and vulgar - footballers and their wives. Last year I spoke to an intelligent, sensitive English artist based in London and the South Coast. Talking about Manchester he asked if I had had any problems from my family given that I have a Chinese partner. "What do you mean" I asked. “Well, they're all a bit racist up there aren't they?". He had images of riots in Oldham and BNP victories in the Pennines I suppose. But it was also clear that this is how London thinks of itself - not more cultured but more multi-cultured. In The Guardian Kevin McCarra (I think) wrote about the Arsenal-Chelsea game being a celebration of London, with le tout London turned out to see a game with only a small handful of English players. This was a good thing because it reflected the multicultural strength of London - something that sets it apart from the narrow, blinkered racism of the rest of the country. If only the chavs would stay in Essex. Sociologists used to talk of the group and the grid. In the old days, middle class people saw themselves as part of a grid - a hierarchical matrix with loose social ties which allowed for social mobility. The working class saw themselves as part of a group, to which they were strongly tied in solidarity. In the old days, this solidarity was seen as restrictive but also as a good thing, a warm thing, a supportive thing. Today the grid covers the globe and navigating your way around it in social terms is a good thing - encountering change and diversity, the other. Group solidarity is regressive, fearful, a refusal of change and the other. Its solidarity holds you back. It breeds resentment, envy and hate. It makes you into a chav.

In some way China is full of chavs. This is an energetically materialist country where memories of real poverty stretch back less than a decade. An ecological campaigner writes how in his youth he would wait for hours on a road near his village so he could smell the fumes of the occasional car that went past. There are rich and poor, and the index is widening. But this does not tell the whole story. At the moment people, at least in the cities, feel that with some hard work they, or their sons and daughters, can make it. The government is not some retreating authoritarian monster throwing bread at the crowd; it is, for reasons to do with survival as well as ideology, trying to create new citizen consumers with a wider sense of social responsibility and to some extent equality. Is this feasible? Who knows? But it is being done within a cultural context that stresses common aspirations and symbols of achievement. Some of this is about the democracy of the brand - if you have the money you can buy it like anybody else. I wrote last about the consumption of western culture as a marker of status and that the price of this can be exclusionary. But if you can get hold of it, then it's yours to show off as you like. There is growing inequality but not yet those strong divisions of culture and understanding that mark out class in England.

Or in the US. After writing about chavs, Momus writes from New York about fear on the streets, about the threat and the aggression that he found in parts of Harlem. He links this to Richard Florida's new book where Bush and republican America are driving out the creatives with anti-gay, anti-metrosexual agendas. Momus wants a flatter society, like in Japan or Berlin, where the differences in wealth and aspiration do not cause social antagonism. Thus, whilst he says he is not wealthy and pays rent in a poor part of town, he could - if he put his mind to it - get out and make some real money. He has an exit route, which sets him apart from the guys on the street. But as Florida recognizes, this is not just about the religious red-neck Right. Maybe it is the creative class that has lacked social responsibility, which has cut itself off from those who do not have immediate access to these knowledge professions. Now a lot of this results from some of the nonsense that Florida spoke in the first place - what he says about the new duties of the creative class derive from his lumping of all sorts of disparate professions together. But he needed to do this to sell his statistics and models to a willing world, putting him amongst the world's best paid 'scholar-consultants'. But it does point us back to the idea that the values of a mobile, open, cosmopolitan creative class have become the repository of all that is good and the ignorant rump of blue collar factory waste have become the aggressive, vulgar, racist chavs of legend.

I will write later about the 'creative class' in China (or its big cities). The common social bonds are strong in China. Even in a rapaciously competitive city like Shanghai there is a sense that there are rich and poor but these have not stratified into the publicly symbolized elements of class. Communication in public lacks that mix of deference and aggression that marks real class friction. Part of this still goes back to the cultural revolution, which killed off the remaining class divisions of the older type. The new party officials who rose in its wake were certainly privileged and commanded 'respect', but this was the respect of fear and in no way developed the cultural capital of class. The Chinese government has been at pains to try and keep access to consumption open for all aspects of society. The big shopping centre I wrote about recently has posh foreign brands but also cheaper places, smaller shops, smaller restaurants. This is deliberate. In the UK, such large consumption developments are predicated on the systematic exclusion of those who can't pay the full wack. In China there is a strong sense of national solidarity - they simply cannot understand sneers about saluting the flag and being biased at the Olympics. And this can easily become nationalism of the more ideological kind. The biggest popular mobilization since Tiananmen was the anti-Japanese demonstration about a new history textbook that played down their war crimes. And part of this also is the fact of the great racial homogeneity of the Chinese, which works with the sense of social solidarity - immigration not being an issue as yet. The Chinese, in all sorts of different ways, have not yet learned to become homophobic.

This impression of Shanghai is by Justin O'Connor. All Shanghai Diary entries.