Re*Move

'70s Fords in Camberwell

Just to prove that in Britain we're living right now through a remake of 1978-83, my walk to work through Camberwell and Peckham featured a couple of proper British '70s Fords today - a 1979 Escort MkII estate and a slightly older Cortina MkIII.

Escort.jpg

Cars are a really powerful way to date a photograph - or instil the identity of an era in a photo - because the mix of them usually changes much more quickly than the built environment around them. As a child of '71, these Fords are the tin I grew up surrounded by.

I'm fascinated by ways we might see the market for "classic cars" go more mainstream over the next decade. New technologies make it easier to manufacture (or remanufacture) short run products, the web makes it easier to market and source components or share expertise on repairs and fixes. And it's become easier to share a car like this amongst a devoted fan club, all of whom publish the car's interaction with the world, share responsibility for looking after it, and reinforce its place in their lives with tools like Facebook, Twitter and whatever comes next.

cortina.jpg

In contrast I chatted with Joe Simpson a few weeks ago about the desire in most modern car companies to design cars to specifically target customer categories, nailed down to the last detail. He's seeing a lot of this at the moment, even in the booming Asian markets. This is a folly - society defines the image and role that cars play in their lifetime and there is a limit to how clever designers and marketeers should get. The Golf GTI was a hobby project by German VW engineers, that went on to become an icon of the 1980s yuppie era in Europe. The Volkswagen camper van was never conceived to service America's alternative scene - the surf and hippie scenes took the vehicle and made it their own.

I suggested to Joe that modern car companies should design great vehicles that do a good job and let the customers, and the era they live in, define how they fit in and what they eventually come to mean. Those of us designing digital products right now would never dream of assuming we know exactly how users will take and use what we create - in fact, our success will be defined by how users pick up our products and make them their own.

Kenny (my dad) said recently that he felt that music was losing its connection with time - "new" music is less of a mass experience that crosses generations (listen to a typical '70s or '80s hit and ask if anything equivalent ever crosses multiple generations now) - so instead we slice and dice the past in new, multiple ways. After all, we have access to a massive back catalogue.

Why might the same not happen with cars? One thing's for sure - a proper fashion shoot featuring one of these motors would right now trump something featuring a brand new car design. New is no longer about actually being new - it's more complicated than that.

Posted by Mark Charmer on Tuesday 1 May 2011.

May 03, 2011 in Cities, Design | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vinay Gupta on Wolverhampton: 1

How do you "provide a catalytic intervention" for a city or region? And how do you bring the character and future of a city to life online? Mark Charmer talks to Vinay Gupta about doing both, in Wolverhampton.

Tas EV cafe, Southwark, London. 20 April 2011.

April 20, 2011 in Cities | Permalink | Comments (0)

City Camp presentation on Wolves

At the beginning of last month I had the chance to present mine and Tom's initial thinking on the opportunity in Wolverhampton, to the attendees of City Camp London. Here's the slide deck I used that day (which for obvious reasons starts by explaining how far Wolverhampton is from London).

We're actually now moving ahead with a small funded project to cover Phase 1. Drop me a line if you would like to get involved either via Twitter or at mark[at]movementdesign[dot]org. I really appreciated Dominic Campbell giving me so much time in front of the audience.
City Camp - Wolverhampton presentation
View more presentations from charmermark
Posted by Mark Charmer on 20 April 2011.

April 20, 2011 in Cities | Permalink | Comments (2)

Getting started in Wolverhampton

We're starting a new project in the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton. Eventually I hope it will help the city position itself more vibrantly, get under the skin of its heritage and get a series of funded projects moving that will give the place a buzzing, future focus. We have our first proper project meeting, with the chief executive of Wolverhampton City Council, Simon Warren, and his assistant Joanne Lancaster on 28th April. I first met Simon last autumn while we were both on a panel making the case for smarter cities at The Guardian in Kings Cross, hosted by IBM. We got on right away. Before running cities (Rugby and now Wolverhampton) he was head of Strategic Management for NATO. Enough said.

The output of that 19 October 2010 Guardian panel is online here:

"Getting Cities on Track" round table debate. (quotes are anonymous under Chatham House rules, irritatingly...)

"Getting smart cities connected", 16 November 2010 article. (features some nice quotes from Simon toward the end)

"City design: Transforming tomorrow." 8 September 2010 piece by Terry Kirby, including quotes from me.

Smarter Cities Guardian supplement home page.

This is a perfect project to involve some talented people I've had my eye on for some time. Joe Simpson is tied up on work at the Royal College of Art, Car Design News and secret projects for the auto industry for the time being, though he may get involved later (Joe's great value on Twitter in the interim). So for the first time, I get the chance to work with Tom Wynne-Morgan. Tom and I first started talking a few years ago. He's a designer and researcher with an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. Almost everything he does (such as his blog and the fascinating AlterFutures), and the way he looks at problems, intrigues me so I'm really excited about having him work closely with me. Tom also works at Engine, a well-regarded service design consultancy, based nearby in Bermondsey. Tom also has a very cool bike.

We're going to work hard to share progress with Wolverhampton as we go, so I look forward to having you along for the ride.

tomsbike.jpg
Tom Wynne-Morgan's cool bike. Modelled by Julian Parsons. The Movement Design Bureau. London, Wednesday 20 April 2011.
Posted by Mark Charmer. Wednesday, 20 April 2011.

April 20, 2011 in Cities | Permalink | Comments (0)

On cathedrals, new and old

zweig600.JPG

A friend was telling me this week how he felt that so little of our environment today seems to be have been constructed with an intention of permanence, or even a sense of what a permanent thing should be.

I read Stefan Zweig's description this morning of a journey he took from Paris in 1924, seeking respite from this city "that now explodes into a thousand flying sparks". He makes the hour and a half's journey to Chartres, to see its cathedral.

He is moved by its scale and purpose. I thought what he said was really interesting, and relevant:

"For this church had room for an entire generation and that is its heroic lesson, eternally big enough for all earthly aspirations, eternally able to exceed all possibilities and now forever a symbol of infinity. They simply wished to immortalise their faith, those who raised this cathedral in the heart of this flat country, forging in stone to preserve their pious will beyond their own time.
For never again will such works arise in our epoch, which measures time in a different way and lives at an altogether different pace: man will build no more cathedrals.
Our plans demand accomplishment at speed, our rhythm of life becomes ever more frantic, and there is no single work that lasts beyond a generation and none even that reaches beyond a single life. We who thanks to a spark are capable of communicating with another continent in a second, we no longer know how to articulate our being across the slowness of stones, the infinitude of years.
Our miracles are manageable and intellectual, our dreams more compact. Now the soul takes leave of the huge rising form of something that has become alien to it, like the Pyramids or the Parthenon; we have lost our capacity for the eternal, which the world itself has gained, and our capacity to incarnate the spirit of a whole people or the genius of a time in a single work. So then, it's over: men will build no more cathedrals."

But then Zweig travels back towards Paris:

"And yet, as the return train made its way through the darkening evening landscape, before the sign itself, the presentiment of Paris loomed: the giant city, a glowing cupola atop a reddish vault on the horizon, rising up into an invisible sky...
Indestructable, this glowing dome of light reigns above the seething nocturnal city, this union of countless electrical energies and the ferverently pulsing lives of millions forms the most impressive cathedral of our epoch... Radiant with celestial light and raised on high in the listening night, this new cathedral of Paris would perhaps have appeared to the builders of yesterday just as splendid, as mighty and divine as the works they left seem now to our eyes.
Epochs have used different signs to engrave their face on the landscape of the earth, and nothing is more wonderful than in the space of an hour to read, to understand and to love (as much as they may seem strangers to each other) one sign and the other expressing their will to live."
As I said, Zweig wrote this in 1924. Posted by Mark Charmer. Sunday 6 March 2011.

March 06, 2011 in Cities, Design | Permalink | Comments (0)

The trouble with eight-point plans

bikeshark.jpg

As a fair-weather cyclist - the kind that wonders why everyone else is in such a rush - I'm really at a loss with London's "coordinated" attempts to sort itself out as a great cycling city. Here's the latest campaign, to tackle theft:

LCC's eight-point campaign plan:

1. Creation of a police anti-theft squad A dedicated police team must tackle cycle theft, engaging in pro-active ‘stings’ to find persistent offenders and gangs.

2. Tougher action against selling stolen on websites Websites need tough rules on ID, and sellers must be made to provide real photos and frame numbers.

3. Code of practice for bike shops Bike shops must make proper checks on seller ID and bike provenance. A new code of practice will enable those that sign up to it to demonstrate their good standards.

4. Tougher action against street markets Well-known locations for selling stolen bikes such as Brick Lane market must be policed much more aggressively.

5. A central repository for recovered bikes A central location where people could recover stolen bikes would make it easier to unite owners with the large number of bikes that are recovered.

6. Regular stakeholder meetings Cyclists, police and politicians must meet regularly to ensure that cycle theft is given sufficiently high priority.

7. Increasing secure parking provision Thousands more secure cycle parking spaces need to be built for homes, estates, shops, educational institutions, workplaces and transport hubs.

8. Better education for cyclists Cyclists must be given sensible information to help them protect their bikes, such as registering the frame number online, buying insurance, and using strong locks. They also need tips on avoiding buying stolen bikes.

Why is secure parking for bikes item number 7? An eight-point plan is useless, unless it's set in order of priority. And right now secure infrastructure is item 7. First will come police squads, dealing with cyber crime, canvassing shops with codes of conduct, chasing market holders, building a database, meetings. Unless of course, this list isn't prioritised.

In the Netherlands the reality is that cycle theft is rampant, but most people ride cheap bikes and are used to it, albeit irritated. London's bike boom is a consumer boom as much as it's about getting around - people buying smart bikes and worrying about where to put them. There isn't really any good storage - in Dutch cities there are manned parking stations, there are safe places to park at work and there's plenty of places to hook your bike outside where you need to be. It's not perfect, but it's probably (quite seriously) a five million times better situation than we have in London.

The list, indeed the London Cycling Campaign site, smacks of lots of time spent in brainstorms, or on "advocacy", and no role to play in building infrastructure. The absolutely most important thing that matters if London is to be a great city to cycle in is that infrastructure is reprioritised towards bikes. Most crucially bikes must take priority over pedestrians and cars (which is basically the way it works in Holland - get out of my way, I'm on a bike).

Almost all the lessons we need are close by, in countries like Holland and Denmark. Indeed a study two weeks ago argued that Dutch children were the happiest in Europe - it's not measured, but I have no doubt that a contributing factor is that most cycle to school. Or ride to school with their parents.

Trying to define this stuff ourselves, how London should work as a cycling city, as some kind of exercise in original thought, is a bit like making your own nails to build a fence. Or building your own web browser to display web pages.

We need to gather the best practice lessons fast but step forward, onwards. We don't have the right infrastructure - pathways and storage - and if we're going to build it quickly, when there's no money around, we need to be smart. The London Cycling Campaign website could be about infrastructure and every decision should be visible. Every junction, pavement, post, ramp. Where are improvements planned? What do people want? Which companies are helping co-fund secure storage (in, for example, each office lobby)? Which council budgets, and which taxpayers, are paying for what? Instead we have people trying to change behaviour. In what sounds to me like meetings that will have intangible outcomes. Seven, in fact.

Related reading: If Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, what is a bicycle shed (by Joe Simpson) A lesson in business from the French (by Mark Charmer)

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

May 05, 2010 in Boris Johnson, Cities, Cycling, Design, London, Parking, Sustainability, urban design | Permalink | Comments (4)

Poundbury - an essay in how not to design a new town

Poundbury is Prince Charles' 'exemplar' urban environment, built on the edge of Dorset's county town, Dorchester - in the UK. It is held up in some planning and design circles as a template for how we should design future towns, and in other circles it is ridiculed. As some of our contacts have been discussing it online in the last few days, I thought it would be appropriate to publish my perspective, in the form of a re-worked extract from my 2008 Royal College of Art Thesis - "The future of the car in the city". The short essay follows:

Poundbury panorama1 3Above: Pounbury streetscape - as seen from the green

Introduction

“It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.”

Alain De Botton’s withering description of Poundbury village – a recent extension to the town of Dorchester in Dorset, is typical of those made by both mainstream and architectural media following the opening of Prince Charles’s ‘model’ town.

For many it is purely the architectural form that proves to be Poundbury’s undoing, but the most interesting aspect of this place – and what makes it a worthwhile study, is its urban design principles and attitude towards the car - both in terms of the theories and ideologies its designers used, and in the physical manifestation of the place itself.

Background and history

Poundbury exists today primarily thanks to HRH Prince Charles – the Duchy of Cornwall. His views on architecture, and how in turn the architecture profession has received this, can be read elsewhere. What specifically interested me was that Poundbury’s “…entire masterplan was based upon placing the pedestrian, and not the car, at the centre of the design.” To understand the relevance of Poundbury when considering the relationship between urban environments and the car, it is necessary though, not to focus on Poundbury’s visionary Prince Charles, but Leon Krier – Charles’s masterplanner, and New Urbanist.

Krier’s book – ‘Architecture: choice or fate?’ – sets out the principles that form the basis of New Urbanist theory which he employs at Poundbury. Not a fan of large, modern, metropolitan cities – he argues that they develop in problematic ways – nor Suburban sprawl, Krier instead suggests a model of ‘the city within the city’. These are smaller urban villages, situated close to one another, yet that don’t physically connect. The intention is to “re-establish a precise dialectic between city and countryside.”

Poundbury embodies these ideals, situated approximately two kilometers from the heart of Dorchester town centre. In between the two is a less dense, greener, urban ‘strip’. The place is split into four quarters, being built in phases (currently only phases one and two have been completed). Each quarter comprises it’s own mini-centre - a square intended as a focal point, for people, rather than cars.

Poundbury sketch layout Above: Pounbury schematic layout in relation to Dorchester, as I see it

Experience

Yet visiting Poundbury and observing how people actually live there, reveals deep flaws in Krier and Charles’ model. Poundbury feels like a village that has not yet been through the industrial revolution – yet (paradoxically) it feels dominated by the car. The central squares are not ‘people’ places - they are car parks. The streets around them are deserted of both people and vehicles. Ultimately, you discover the cars have been shoved out of the way, into back alley muses containing nothing but garages, eating up acres of space. The result is that both streets and courtyards are devoid of life and feel soulless.

Walking through Poundbury is analogous to Jim Carey’s chatacter in the Truman show. Life feels somewhat fake. In part, this is unsurprising - The Truman show was based on and filmed in Seaside, Florida which was designed by the ‘fathers’ of New Urbanism – Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and a place which Krier speaks about enthusiastically in his book.

Ultimately, despite being planned as “…a high-density urban quarter of Dorchester which gives priority to people, rather than cars, and where commercial buildings are mixed with residential areas, shops and leisure facilities to create a walkable community”, Poundbury’s fails in three key areas, expanded upon below:

• Services

Richard Rogers argues that for a place to be truly ‘walkable’ one needs the ability to work, live, play, (by inference meet people, eat, shop, entertain and be entertained) within the same (1 mile or so?) area. Although Poundbury was developed as a mixed-use community, as one might expect, many of the people who live there do not work here, and vice-versa. Likewise, the keystone services and amenities taken for granted in cities and towns - the supermarket, cafes, bars, a cinema, restaurants, educational and academic institutions, gyms, theatres, a take-away, a library or bookshop – simply do not exist in Poundbury. Poundbury has a high end hi-fi store, three wedding and bridal shops, and a ‘Budgens’ mini-mart shop masquerading as “Poundbury Village Stores”. Bluntly, being denied the amenities modern people and modern life require, strangulates Poundbury.

• Accessibility

If the designers had truly wanted the residents of Poundbury to use their cars less, then would it not have been more pertinent to explore and create better links, pathways and services between two of the places which Poundbury residents might most frequently be predicted to need access – Dorchester and the nearby Tesco’s supermarket? The supermarket sits only 1.4 km away as the crow flies (fig.26), but there is no path, no route for pedestrians, or other vehicles - so almost everyone drives there, as the supermarket is just around the ring road. Dorchester itself is 1.6 km from Poundbury’s central square. These distances (around 1 mile), equate to around 20 minutes walking time - too great a distance and time to prevent time-pressed people from using their cars. Alternatives options to jumping in the car are needed, and they are notable by their absence.

Dorchester map Above: an annotated aerial view of Poundbury with key landmarks and POIs in Dorchester marked

• Parking and streetscape

This area is the one Poundbury comes closest to getting right. However, some short-sighted ideas, and odd implementation, create issues. Krier is right for suggesting, “The speed of vehicles should be controlled not by signs and technical gadgets (humps, traffic islands, crash barriers, traffic lights, etc.) but by civic and urban character of streets that is created by their geometric configuration, their profile, paving, planting, lighting, street furniture, and architecture.”

Yet somewhere between drawing board and physicality, things have gone wrong. Poundbury does feature narrow, winding streets with ‘dropped kerbs’ that seem to discourage cars drivers from traveling particularly quickly. At the same time however, its lack of real hierarchy and distinction in building types – and the apparent desire to completely remove street signage, or implement any technology – means that the place does, to use his words about certain other places “demonstrate [its] unique capacity to disorientate, confuse…” Poundbury isn’t readable; it isn’t legible to an outsider.

Parking is worse still. The overarching desire to maintain ‘order’ – for everything, including the car – and to be neat and tidy, seems to have created issues when it comes to dealing with where to put stationary vehicles, and how much space they are allowed. Vast parking mews at the rear of houses tends to keep vehicles off the main road, but the benefit of this is questionable. The garage mews take up enormous space in the areas behind houses, occupying huge tracts of land that in ‘real’ cities simply isn’t there. Squares and courtyards have no focus, no life, and where there is some focus like a shop, simply become car parks.

Garage Mews Above: one of the many garage mews, which take up acerages of space in Poundbury

If the intention was to put pedestrians (or even cyclists and other small vehicles) first, Poundbury might have looked at employing the incredibly successful ‘Woonerf’ system seen in Holland – which limit the space for cars on residential streets – and makes the street-spaces vibrant, safe environments in which children can - and do - play. Might it not have been better to move the cars out to two, maybe three main ‘areas’ on the edge of the development? But then this would raise the prospect of creating multi-story car parks, which Krier criticizes for little good reason, but at great length, in what he has written.

Conclusion

Poundbury is an interesting example of an attempt to build a new development in the early twenty-first century. Objectively, its failure is not down to the plain-to-see distaste for modern, nee modernist architecture which its facades embody, and for which it is most commonly criticised. Instead it is the failure to provide any vision or any excitement, about how the future of urban environments might be, and how people and vehicles might move around and share space, that disappoints most. Worryingly, for a place that is intended as a counterpoint to sprawl and overcoming car dependency, Poundbury provides little in the way of a blueprint for how things could be done.

It is also a lesson in why not to look at mobility as only being about cars, and why a creeping agenda of discouraging or limiting movement and mobility could be dangerous. Should others try to ape Poundbury’s developers, they too risk becoming preoccupied with trying to create well meaning solutions that don’t take into account the needs and desires of modern lives. One hope that if future developments try to counteract the car and its impact, they don’t forget about other forms of private mobility, which can complement or repurpose traditional cars. Sadly, for all the anti-car bluster, there is not a hint of a cycle lane, a bike park, a PRT system, a car-share scheme or a Segway to be found here.

An opportunity has been missed here, because of a refusal to embrace and experiment with new ideas, technologies, and products. This place could, and should have been an exemplar or a test bed in how we might live and move in the future. Instead, what best encapsulates the failures of Poundbury is this: its inhabitants appear condemned to a life on Dorchester’s ringroad, traveling to a big-box Tesco’s store, built on a greenfield site, in a car that weighs twenty times their weight, and typically has three empty seats.

One can only hope that those tasked with helping shape future towns and cities - both in the UK and abroad - who are now bussed to this place to ‘learn’ from it as some kind of example, recognise its failures and don’t condemn the inhabitants of their future towns to the same fate.

Published by Joseph Simpson on 17th February 2010

Some notes and information on this piece:

This piece is an adaptation from part of Joseph Simpson's Thesis "The future of the car in the city" - Royal College of Art, June 2008. A full set of references for this piece are available on request, but are not included here in our usual hyperlink fashion as they mainly refer to offline sources.

The piece is not creative commons licensed in the way our usual pieces are, as it is sibject to some copy right from The Royal College of Art. Please contact me if you would like to use or reference it so that I can grant permission. A copy of the original piece in pdf format is available on request.

Joseph Simpson visited Poundbury in October 2007

February 17, 2010 in architecture, Cities, Design, Leon Krier, Observations, Parking, Poundbury, Prince Charles, Sustainability, urban design | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The journey to Veloces of Barnet

As I travelled this lunchtime from Bermondsey to New Barnet, to collect my car from the garage, I fancied snapping photos of the various places I changed transport. So here we go. Click 'continue reading' below to see the full set.

Continue reading "The journey to Veloces of Barnet" »

January 26, 2010 in Cities, London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Five Trends for the Tens

There are some really important changes going on that will shape the process of designing cities, and how we move and interact in them, over the next decade. Here's Mark's shortlist:

1. Huge cuts and a focus on the essential

Everyone - from entrepreneurs to public administrators, needs to adapt to a world where innovation "culture" is no longer focused around the bleeding edge, the piece of the economy that is the "growth" market. Instead, the most important innovation will focus on achieving dramatic cost savings or improvements in the usefulness of essential services - stuff that absolutely has to happen, rather than 'nice to haves'. In other words, the target market will be the "decline" market. Don't be scared. This is surprisingly good news, because we'll focus on solving big problems, instead of peripheral ones.

2. The gulf between skills and jobs

While today's corporates and governments meet at "Cloud Computing" conferences to debate how to put their boring, dated processes online in new ways, a new generation of digitally-empowered workers is approaching over the hill. These people need jobs, and already have, on their own laptops, far more flexible, powerful, communicative tools than almost anything that exists in the firms they're applying to work for. The result is going to be a crisis - new skills and new tools that many firms will resist adopting until it's too late. Young people will be hired into environments, start using 'enterprise' systems, and conclude that everything is lame. Successful firms (and governments) will attract the talent, harness these people and embrace the constantly evolving set of tools these people bring for themselves.

3. Big office space becomes obsolete

We all need somewhere to work - but what most organisations don't need is large buildings with big reception areas and "working" floors packed with desks and computer workstations. Yet today, the office is the definition of modern business and modern cities. This is about to change. Expect great confusion as developers and property owners resist the change (and the resulting fall in building values), while others see the opportunity to create larger, more flexible living and working spaces, possibly made available in completely new ways. You'll also see networks of people who came together digitally move into physical environments for the first time, in a big way. This will be exciting. Remember, New York lofts used to be warehouses and factories. Throughout history, new communication networks, from ships to railways to cars, have always led to the creation of new physical communities built because of them.

4. Consumerism in crisis

This one deserves two paragraphs. A couple of questions will dominate debate over the next few years. Will we expand or reduce the gap between rich and poor? Is a society whose wealth is measured based on the production and consumption of things, or the manipulation of their on-paper value, actually sustainable (economically, not just in terms of resources).

The dramatically changing ability of people to share what they do and think has the potential to reshape the way we decide what to buy, and how we articulate the experience of using those things. We're not saying you won't buy stuff - it just won't be the same hierarchy as it's been for decades. As the ripples from the financial crisis continue, fundamental questions about what wealth is, what it means, and how it should be demonstrated, will make for an interesting era. Notions of ownership have been in flux ever since most people stopped buying music, as an object to own. In an era when an iPhone is now a more useful, cheaper, social vehicle than a Ford Fiesta for many (especially young) people, an "Apps" culture means we are likely to buy lots more virtual stuff, rooted in software, where the emphasis is on doing rather than just having. The authenticity of objects, and the connections and associations they imply, is also likely to become ever more important.

5. Open versus closed

London's teenagers are likely all by themselves to generate and organise far more data than London's public authorities will over the next ten years. As the power of open source collaboration stretches beyond software, as the masses rush to share updates, pictures, and video of what they're doing and what they think, we're going to hit some nasty issues. These might be about security, privacy, lifestyle, even thought. But a lot of them will be about people defending existing approaches, who seek to undermine and discredit those who believe that by sharing ideas, knowledge and resources, we can create more wealth and better cities. Watch this space.

Joe and I would love to talk to people who have views on any of this. Bounce us a note, leave a comment, or please share this with others who may be interested. If you're in London, drop by and we'll film your comments. Or if you want to write a nice guest blog, we'll post it.

Mark Charmer is a researcher at The Movement Design Bureau. He's also a co-founder of Akvo.

December 09, 2009 in Analysis, Cities, Current Affairs, luxury, markets, Observations, Open Source, Sustainability | Permalink | Comments (5)

The pitfalls of sustainability

Paper-city-exhibition-at-the-royal-academy-of-arts-01  Clifton suspension bridge
An image from The Paper City exhibition and Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Miniumum...or Maximum Cities event at the University of Cambridge, which was organised with Blueprint magazine and the Paper Cities exhibition, which moved up to the famous university town having been at the Royal Academy for the past few months.

Tim Abrahams has produced an excellent write-up of the event over on the Blueprint site, which I’d urge you to check out if you’re interested, because I think he raises a series of important points about where we find ourselves in relation to the sustainability debate.

For some time now, Re*Move has proposed an agenda where sustainability was the context rather than an end in itself, and like Tim, alarm bells rang in Cambridge, because we were left with a feeling that the only reason anyone is doing anything today is in an attempt to be “more sustainable”. When it comes to movement and transportation, this approach of sustainability first is clearly causing problems, because it seems to be preventing us from envisioning and demanding the future that we actually want to have, and instead pushing us towards something influenced primarily by guilt over past excess.

For example, a lot of transport debate in the UK today centres around whether or not we should be building a high speed rail line to the north of England. Anyone who suggests this is a daft idea is right now likely to labeled both unprogressive and anti-sustainability . Yet anyone who dares suggest a third runway at Heathrow is a good idea, is obviously hell bent on seeing the planet rapidly burn.

Yet the pitfalls of high-speed 2 are multifold. We can already get from Manchester to London in two hours, so should we really prioritise spending billions on reducing this by half? And while it’s automatically assumed that getting the train is better from a carbon perspective, throw real-world load factors into the bargin, and the reality is that a modern, full Airbus is comparative. Meanwhile, the car (which has apparently lost its number one spot to the airplane, in the planet mauling stakes) has improved so much in the past five years that if you’re driving two-up in a Golf diesel, you’ll definitely produce less carbon than going on the train. For me, the biggest issue with High Speed 2 is that an idea which is fundamentally two-hundred years old seems to be stopping us from pushing the boundaries of imagination about what we might do instead, that would be palpably better.

So some of my talk at Cambridge bemoaned this sense that we’d got stuck with a handful of transport formats, and that – with cars and trains at least, they were monocultural. We’ve sized everything to fit them, and one of the reasons we aren’t all riding round on things like Segways in cities, is that cities are fundamentally designed, and sized, for people to use cars. This might sound like I’m suggesting we simply have to keep using cars – as they are - to get around cities. I’m not, but what I’m pointing out is the need for a systems level approach. Will you enjoy trundling up the A40 in a Renault Twizy? Or would you be altogether more tempted by the idea of La Regie’s concept scooter/car cross if you could zip up and down one of Chris Hardwicke’s Velo-City cycle tubes on your way to the office?

Sustainability is the context we now work in. And we’ve little doubt (and are very happy with the notion) that in 5-10 years time, our cities will all be full of things like electric cars. Which will be great for local emissions, but highlights the problem with today's short-sighted sustainability focus, as it won’t do anything to stop us from spending half of our lives sat in traffic jams.

If we simply focus on sustainability as our end point, we’re likely just to end up with a mildly de-carbonised version of what we have now. And the likelihood is that we won’t even achieve that, because when people know they’re saving carbon, they psychologically feel (and often financially are) able to do more and just end up ‘reusing’ what they’ve saved.

Sustainability has created a psychology of fear, where we fear to dream of real improvement and hesitate to think big. What do we mean by improvement? Things which work more quickly or get us places faster, thus providing us with more free time or time with our families and friends. Things that are measurably more fun, or more exciting to ride in or drive than what we have today. Things which cost us less money to use, own or run. Better means thinking about how we link up travel – so we might spend more time in one place and combine trips – rather than rushing from one short hop flight destination to another. Better might mean finding a way to link leisure and business travel together.

But better also means new. New ideas, new products, services and concepts. In essence, we need to dream, and be allowed to think big. If we think of the figures who created some of our totems of mobility – people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Andre Citroen, Frank Whittle – we still admire and count on the inventions and contributions they made for our mobility backbone today. On Re*Move, we try to highlight and showcase the work of people we hope or think might become modern day IKBs or Whittles. But there are precious few of them around. I’d go as far to argue that the contributions and inventions made by these famous figures, would never have happened had they been around today, working in this world constrained by the fear of sustainability. We are not simply going to solve the predicament we are in by attempting cut, after cut, after cut. We are going to have to dream, and dream big.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 1st December 2009

December 01, 2009 in About us, Analysis, Aviation, Cities, Events and debates, Politics, Renault, Segway, Sustainability, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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