Demos - The big society

Ben Rogers (son of Richard) has set up a new think tank, incubated by Demos, called Centre for London, just in time for the mayoral elections. I went along to a conference they organised with LSE on the Big Society, or rather the importance of the suburbs to the Big Society. Participants were mixed between those who think the suburbs will grow in importance (Laura Vaughan of UCL, who whilst on maternity leave discovered that her suburb of Borehamwood didn't shut down while commuters head to work) and those who think outer London (particularly the East) is getting too much attention.
The event was testing theories ahead of next year's elections. Contributions were interesting, but it was really an excuse to try to attach the topic du jour - Big Society - to what everyone credits for Boris having won the last election - focussing on outer London.

Cities - love 'em or hate 'em?

After a raft of eulogies on city living (Glaeser's Triumph of the City, Andrew Marr's Megacities), Nature magazine has sought to redress the balance by examining the 'city living is not natural and therefore must be harmful' school of thought. A study seems to say that the stresses of city living affect your brain and could explain the higher incidence of mental health in cities as opposed to non urban areas (cited in The Guardian). Certainly a recent to visit to Paris seems to bear this out. Within half an hour, I had spent a fruitless 20 minutes trying to recharge my SFR phone in an SFR shop (which turned out to be 'pas possible'), recoiled in horror at a horrendous queue in the supermarket, witnessed a spitting 'putain de merde' exchange between shop vendor and customer, and had my suitcase kicked off the metro because it was in someone's way. Don't get me wrong, I love Paris. But the city is schizophenic, a crazy mix of all that is good and bad about city life. The study might offer an explanation for why Paris may be be more aggressive than similar cities like New York and London: apparently stress levels are affected by how in control of your life you feel. And with job insecurity at panic levels in France (meaning people cling onto jobs they hate), maybe therein lies the explanation.

How Paris encourages civilised behaviour on its crowded buses

'If everyone made their own rules, everything would go to pieces.' This is how Paris is trying to encourage civilised behaviour on its overcrowded buses. Unlike London buses where you mostly get a seat, you often have to stand on French buses, and at peak times (or most of the time on the number 26 to Paris' 20th district) travel can be an ordeal, especially when it is hot and tempers get frayed. I'm not sure whether this campaign will work, however. In my experience, reason is not always the best tactic to adopt with French people.......

OpenCity Documentary Film Festival

UCL is hosting what they are billing as the "largest and newest documentary film festival in London," OpenCity. In a verbose ramble, Festival Director Michael Stewart seems to be saying that he wanted to focus on the ontold stories of city living. The program looks good however, and for anyone willing to watching a film in a cramped lecture theatre, there was a lot to choose from.I opted for Srdan Keca's Mirage (2010), a short film about the ugly underside of Dubai which won praise from Time Out. It makes life in the glittering Mirage seem highly impersonal: the living quarters of the workers who sweat to built the fancy towers look like prisons (Keca, unable to afford a hotel, lived among them), and their lives are mostly filmed as part of the scenery. Even the heart breaking letters home (genre "I'm miserable, but I hope you are ok. Please write to make it more bearable") are removed from those speaking who we don't see. The charming young Serbian director said he might have gone a little too far, but I think perhaps it works like that. We are reminded of the reality behind those towers from their voices, and the depersonalisation seems somehow fitting. Dubai is willing to pay top dollar for the fanciest materials to show-off its wealth, but when it comes to wages, they will squeeze the workers dry. I couldn't help thinking that someone should publicise the average wage of each tower. Maybe that would embarrass the uber-rich into paying a decent wage.

Next up I went to see the Bartlett's favourite planning professor, Mark Tewdwr-Jones, and panel present a series of short films from the archive about London in an event dubbed Metropolis Reborn. Films screened included:

The City (1939) - How london copes with crowding, delay and more people and movement. Striking for its attempt to manage the flow of traffic and people without a thought for social problems.

All That Mighty Heart (1962) - life in the late 50s; London waking up at 6am and going to bed at midnight, London transport from life on the underground to green, country buses in the suburbs, Steveange new town centre, building the Victoria line. Refreshingly I thought, filmmakers displayed a total lack of cynicism, perhaps because they didn't know the gloom that was around the corner.

Top people (1960) - billed as a "look at life" series, building utopia, living in high rise, building the Barbican and London Wall, accommodating the rise of the car with new roads, underground car parks, bringing life and residents back to the city of London.

The films gave the panel an opportunity to rant at bankers and the general evils of society (including letting Billingsgate market close after 1,000 years on the same site: which sounds terrible until you think that maybe just because something has been done a certain way for a long time doesn't mean there aren't better ways of doing it. Cities do need to move with the times or they risk becoming decaying museums). They did release a few interesting nuggets of information: a tunnel runs from east to west London which shuttled post across the city at great speeds until last year when the almost bankrupt Royal Mail figured it would be cheaper to go by road (not counting costs of congestion that we all pay). The Thames apparently carries as many ships as it ever did, only they are larger and stop at Tilbury. And more of London was destroyed during the 1980s as developers thought to squeeze more money out of the land than during the Blitz.

Life in low-income neighbourhoods

This evening, I went to see what the good folks at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation had to say about life in low-income neighbourhoods. Presenting the results of a three-year study into the relationship between poverty and place at the NLA, researchers from Sheffield Hallam University didn't really have anything new to say (although Professor Ian Cole had a great turn of phrase and should do TV). The idea was to give ordinary people a voice, and what they had to say should be a surprise only to people who are out of touch (and sadly, those people probably aren't listening). Cole and his team used personal narratives from people living in six "ordinary" disadvantaged neighbourhoods (ie not the worst, statistically) including Oxgangs in Edinburgh (pictured) and West Kensington in London, showing them through short films, photographs and visual narratives. I'm in favour of ramming home the message to policy makers that life is so much more varied than housing choices. But the exhibition, Communities Under Pressure, feels more like an art show than a research project. And I was slightly suspicious that researchers found what they wanted to find. According to them, there was no evidence of Broken Britain, and low-income communities are just as disparaging about benefit scroungers and the work-shy as the hawkiest hawk of the Tory party. I'm not sure if I buy that. Sure, employment options for many are probably not that enticing, and in the short term it may seem preferable to claim benefits. But if there was more social pressure to pay your way, I don't think you would see generations of families who have never known work. I think people are more resourceful than that, even those whose options don't look great at birth. I know this view is controversial in England. But having worked in jobs that many people look down their noses at (and been proud to do so), I have respect for the people who do what they have to do to pay the bills, and I know that provided they have a good manager, they get a sense of self worth from it. I agreed with Julia Unwin, the foundation's CEO, that too often the voices of the disadvantaged aren't heard in policy debates. And I agree with Cole that the resurgence of the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor is incredibly distasteful. But let's not gloss over the facts. In some parts of the country, significant numbers of people have given up hope about making a positive contribution to society. We should ask ourselves why.

As for the study's conclusions about the importance of place, architects are going to be disappointed: it's not about fancy new buildings and shiny squares. What researchers found was that if your friends and family are located in one part of the world, it takes a certain kind of person to cut those ties and head to the big unknown city. So policy makers should concentrate on making all of Britain better, and not just the parts that work (ie South East England).

RIP Gin

It was with sadness that my American friend K announced the demise of Gin (the fatter of the two fish pictured above) on facebook. She was not there to witness his final hours. She was in America, but her French partner G communicated the sad news, which reached me in London. When I left Paris nine months ago, I bequeathed the fishes I myself had inherited from an Australian friend S (who was moving back home) to K and G.
As it began with facebook, so it continued. I expressed my condoleances for Gin's surviving partner Tonic on facebook, and also his former guardians K and G, and S (now resident in Sydney), with a thought for Italians A and D, who had looked after Gin and Tonic several times whilst I was travelling. S informed two other people who had looked after the fishes before me. He may have swum most of his life in a small tank, but the ripples of his death spread to the other side of the world.
I mention all this only because Gin is clearly a very modern, cosmopolitan fish, a child of the metropolis. He led an exciting life, for a fish, with many journeys around Paris that exposed him to the truly global nature of the city. He came to understand at least five languages (that I know of): British, French, Italian, Australian and American. His death brought together on Facebook people who have never met each other, but are connected through having cared for him during his short life. His case should be studied by academics.

Andrew Marr's Megacities: Mr Bean vs Indiana Jones

The first installement of Andrew Marr's new series Megacities got interesting about two thirds of the way through. First though, we get to watch an awful lot of a rather skeletal Andrew Marr wandering around London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dhaka and Mexico City with an oversized manbag. He was called Mr Bean in the slums of Dhaka (Bangladesh), but I suspect he'd rather have been taken for Indiana Jones. We saw a Andrew climb solo up a scarily high crane (attached to London's soon-to-be-tallest building The Shard) to speak to the operator about the 'most dangerous job in construction.' We see Andrew being fed in the slums, carrying heavy water jugs in the slums ('No Musharraf, I can manage'), going to the toilet in the slums. Actually we see a lot of Andrew in the slums (quel hero), possibly as the swarms of mosquitos and herds of rats as big as cats kept him awake (what a guy).

Still, it was in this sleepless state that he started to have one of his more interesting thoughts. People in Dhaka aren't real city dwellers, he says, meaning they know and care for those who live next to them (that this surprised him makes me think he's been in London too long). And he latched onto the cliche about putting the village back into the city, but he just about got away with it. Following that thought, he's soon in the distinctly un-villagey Tokyo, the global grandaddy of mega-cities (a moniker I think he also applied to London for being old: here he meant because at over 30 million inhabitants, Japan's capital is the biggest). He visits a very small appartment, which he says is 25 m2 and says he'd be very unhappy living there and feel like a 'nude frog in a box.' Well, I know some real frogs - French people in Paris - who live quite happily in less than 25m2, although admittedly their flats are much better laid out than the glass corridor he visited. Anyway, next he's playing golf on a rooftop with a man who rents himself out for companionship to the friendless. How sad, says Marr. Managing megacities is about getting the balance right between community and efficiency - the implication being Japan has got it wrong. Then woosh, and he's in Mexico City where his inner Indiana comes out. Forget the crime (40 kidnappings and three murders a week) and enjoy the dancing, he says, making friends with persistent females who won't let him finish his piece to camera. He can't keep the smile off his face (maybe this was filmed before the Mega-injunction). This is an incredibly liveable city, inspite of the planners worst efforts, he says. Viva la Mexica (actually he didn't say this, but we get it: he loves Mexico). Grrr, I said to the television, and not because of the dancing. Yes, my dear Andrew, fun of the unplanned kind is often the best. But spontaneous though it may be, you can also help foster fun by creating (dare I say planning) the kinds of environment in which it is likely to thrive. If you want fun, you head to the park or the beach, and not to an underground car park. And while the dances were (or at least appeared to be) relatively unplanned, they were dancing in the zocolas - the town squares - in Mexico City. Someone planned for those, Mr Marr.