Co-create London: showing EnterPride with disused shops

I wrote last week about Co-Create London, a project using "co-creation" methods from advertising & market research to explore what people want to see happen in London - What would you do to make London a better place?.

After a discussion forum last week, the initial results are out. Of dozens of ideas initially suggested by users on Co-Create London, the following three were developed into more comprehensive proposals:

1. BeSpoke Lanes – Cycle Paths running alongside railway lines
2. Enterpride – Turning disused properties & spaces into accessible cultural & retail hubs
3. Swap Stories – A Book Swap System for London Underground

I understand these ideas will soon be presented for voting online, and the one receiving the most votes will be presented to Our Dear Leader Mr Johnson. More news as it comes…

Books, cycling and marginal urban spaces – could they have chosen three topics much closer to my heart?** I was talking about the latter last week with reference to existing projects such as Spacemakers’ Brixton Indoor Market, and it looks like Co-Create London has come up with something pretty similar:

London is full of disused and run-down spaces especially post-recession. Why not allow these spaces to be occupied by start-up businesses, artists, creative individuals and educational workshops?
Enterpride will facilitate the transaction between landlords willing to volunteer their property & Londoners wanting to use the space. Those occupying vacant spaces will have access to the property until they can afford to rent it, or an established business is willing to pay for the space. If users of the Enterpride scheme have their current space bought by an established company they will be assigned a new one. The only cost Enterpride occupants will have to pay are the business rates which are minimal.

The diagram from the co-creation session:


As mentioned, Spacemakers and other groups have laid a lot of the groundwork already, and already know how to build the necessary relationships with councils and landlords.

But of course that’s a massive opportunity if the Co-Create London team are willing to contact these other projects and get them involved too. A group response based on both the public voting & cocreation and the real, practical experience of already doing this could be a really strong pitch. Perhaps contributors to CoCreateLondon.com suggested this idea unawares of parallel developments like Spacemakers, but co-creation isn’t about ‘pure’ ideas or ownership or authorship, or anything so 20th century! I think it’s about mashing up every source of ideas and knowledge available, and in this case there’s a wealth of existing work out there.

I really hope the Co-Creation Hub are serious about making things happen, not just testing their methodology. (Fancy sharing who the “London experts” at last week’s seminar were, by the way?) Go on @cocreatelondon, say hello to @spacemkrs… Though I hope you're ahead of me and already fast friends!



** Actually yes: writing stories on the walls of abandoned urban spaces, although I can see how they might prefer to present more practical possibilities to the mayor…

I Am Here (in a Haggerston council estate)

Back in May I went for a walk round the Regents Canal. The building below stood out: brightly marked as condemned a target for regeneration, yet nothing actually generating there - nothing, in fact, happening since April 2007. It is set for demolition in 2011, so what a strange four years for its remaining residents.



That's what Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and Tristan Fennell thought too. They live there, and have been documenting the Haggerston estate in a programme they are calling FLAT (see http://haggerston-kingsland.blogspot.com/. This is what they did:

Boarded-up and half-empty housing estates have become familiar landmarks in the contemporary urban landscape. Their façades function as projection screens for collective fears and fantasies of troubled and dangerous environments that may lurk behind. This perception is all the more emphasized when rapid redevelopment encircles such estates with new luxury loft apartments and live–work spaces.

I Am Here intervenes in this dynamic of preconception and projection, replacing the 67 bright orange boards – which have covered the windows of empty flats in Samuel House since April 2007 – with large-scale photographs of residents on the estate.

"I am here", echoing the signs around the estate that inform you that "You are here". Perhaps critiquing this representation of 'here' as a geometric diagram, as if that's ever what being-in-place was really about. Claiming subjectivity, "I" - an assertion, an ownership, the right to the city - for all the people who aren't on the map bar a little red dot labelled "You".

What If... void spaces could be greened?

There's a vacant patch of ground near my office. It's not large, an interstitial point behind some offices and next to a a low-rise council block, the post-war kind balcony walkways to the flats. 8x8 metres, let's say, the kind of space that's too small to develop and not big enough to bother about.



Instead, What If projects, an urban sustainability architecture practice, have got 70 half-tonne bags of soil and turned it into an allotment space for the local community. They say it's made the place "a beautiful oasis of green" - green yes, urban oasis yes, beautiful not so sure the plastic bags of soil are really that aesthetically appealing - even if they were commissioned to install the same thing for the opening of the Louis Vuitton store in Westfield shopping centre, see photo below. The latter being such a strange juxtaposition makes somehow the soil bags more appealing - they may be ugly but curation by Jeremy Deller, Turner Prize Winner 2004, makes them art? No, that's too hierarchical an attitude to take - but there's still a joy to be found in this disruption of pristine designer commercial space, even if the fact that it's there at the invitation of the shop itself makes it hardly radical.



This space is distinguished from a void by its big enigmatic white sign, showing only the OS grid reference, an arrow, and their web address. What If call this space Vacant Lot, and they've got more grow bags on another stretch of Chart Street, plus Plant Room on neighbouring East Road and a dozen more projects.



They then do more theoretical work, such as Modesty Screened, looking at temporary inhabitable environments formed without formal architectural intervention. Again, their examples are super-local to me - e.g. the garden centre on Caledonian Road. They write:

PROPOSAL
In UK cities approx. 70% of urban space is residential and planning authorities positively encourage residential-use over other activities. By taking advantage of the slowness of the planning process, areas of the city (i.e. unused sites, disused infrastructure, empty parking garages) could be used temporarily in this way.

This model can be developed in two directions:

1. On a strategic level to encourage the temporary use of existing `unused‘ sites within cities. Activities within these sites can expand to encourage other uses for example: urban agriculture, educational facilities, office / workshop space, arts and entertainment, residential, etc.

2. At a programmatic scale this model can be developed to see how it could influence the spatial and programmatic design of new mixed-use urban developments.

More about this to follow, I hope - I'm really excited by it both theoretically and because, well, I too am an urban dweller without a garden, and I'd love a chance to get my hands dirty with such a practical activism/intervention.

Peckham library (Will Alsop, 2000)

I stumbled across Peckham Library quite unexpectedly the other day. It won the Stirling prize in 2000, and high words are said about its social responsibility - thus an appropriate find when I was in the neighbourhood to explore a charity's work with the socially excluded. But does the building work, does it really change anything? I was unsure.

Undoubtedly it's interesting to look at, and for architecture (a discipline that does not convince me with its political convictions) this might be everything - instead of a mere fragment of the building's impact, a fraction of its function as an assemblage of space-movement-people-meaning in a specific socio-economic context. Some authoritative voice tells us that "Peckham Library is not an irreverent post-modern architectural joke. It is a very serious building with a strong social mission" - and then indicates that said social mission goes as far as some nice but hardly revolutionary sustainable cooling measures. Woo. Critical urban theory has apparently not made enough an impact on designers yet, even though they can buy the latest City journal on this very topic in Borders no fancy academic subscription required.

But despite my scepticism, some of Peckham Library's social misssion seems to be working. It's shown in the increased visits to the library, and Alsop's 'civism'

"where civic space is defined as a place where you can meet someone outside, name the place and know where to go"

would indeed seem to be boosted in Peckham: this is a memorable place, it puts Peckham on the map for the right reasons rather than shootings, and there is indeed outdoor seating for meeting people. Nonetheless, nine years on the public square is a little run down, weeds colonising the paving, repairs needed and not forthcoming. The regeneration the library was supposed to herald does not seem to have arrived - perhaps there have been repairs, but no change of mood, no boost in image - and the locality remains very isolated: even the buses take convoluted routes to get there. The highstreet was covered in litter; so much for reputed Anthony Gormley street art.

This regeneration has entailed £275m in investment; 2500 new homes; a £5m new library (which admittedly Gordon the postman thinks is "beautiful"). But if you want to put an end to the ghetto then stop locking the gates at night - this is what's wrong with many smaller-scale housing projects too: impeding porous movement between neighbouring areas creates a them/us mentality and stops deprived areas integrating into wider society. Peckham needs a tube station and the access to the wider London jobs market that would facilitate; without this the gates are locked and the whole neighbourhood is socially excluded. However lovely the access to knowledge it may promise, a pretty green library is fairly cosmetic.

The places regeneration leaves behind

Just an ordinary North London road, scruffy and shabby with newsagents and kebab shops. When I moved to the City I didn't like these places, so different to the pristine market town where I grew up. But it's home now.

Even before 2008 many shopfronts were battened down or whitewashed over: longer-term shifts in economic geography than recession drove businesses out. Flats on this road are starting to be visibly gentrified - I live in one such block and there's a decent (clearly architect-driven) refurb just round the corner. But there is little demand for business here any more, only corner shop chicken shop pizza place. The odd laundrette; still internet cafes, a reminder that the internet is not exactly the great leveller; many are still economically or culturally excluded. Little more. These are some of the shops shuttered and left behind:



Blackalls Fruiterers and Greengrocers, established over 100 years. Closed now, closed at least fifteen years if its phone number began not 0207 or 0171 but 071. And the tenant just pulled the shutters down and left - the landlord has not re-let the space, has not converted into a fried chicken emporium or poundstore or fought the council for reclassification as in-demand residential. Just left.



W. Plumb the butcher has a beautiful old-fashioned sign with even a little stained glass. Where did he go? How did he feel about closing the business, about giving up hope of becoming W. Plumb & Sons, or perhaps Daughters? I cannot imagine this road with a proper old-fashioned independent butcher on it - what was it like, did it have community that extended beyond council estate dwellers? (Do they still have community, or do I romanticise? I know we middle classes have lost it.) This has always been a working class area, my block of flats one of the few visible signs of gentrification - but for it now to have a proper family butchers like this would be such a posh thing: how Highgate, how Crouch End.



Perhaps a more recent casualty - or not: Sega's Dreamcast (2001) was a failure, and the Saturn (1995) not much better, so would this branding date back to Megadrive days (1991)? I spoke to the chap in North London Models - not a brothel, a model aircraft & toy car shop, a relic still going on no visible sales at all - who dated the loss of these shops to the early Nineties and, presumably, the recession then. Further down the road there was even a bank, the Natwest form now sitting above somebody's kitchen still visible under layers of paint. Was this area once a highstreet, a community, a functioning economy? A destination? Now it is just a road for transit through to other places.