The secret life of Shepperton

Some new art stuff.

First up, Mat and I have finally completed our photo essay on Shepperton, where JG Ballard spent most of his adult life. We’ve combined our pictures with text from Ballard’s own novels, autobiography, interviews and other text about the town and its history. In the process we’ve shamelessly taken inspiration from Patrick Keiller, Chris Marker, Iain Sinclair and many others. We hope they, and you, like it.

A shorter version of the essay appeared in Shadows Have Shadows, a limited-run newspaper published earlier this year by the mysterious SFHAA. It’s a nice collection of pieces on street-level urbanism – spanning London, San Francisco, Caracas, fictional cities and cities of the future. The paper itself is an A4 object of beauty, produced with the help of Newspaper Club. Sadly there’s only 100 copies, but you can also read it online here.

Finally, here are my pictures of the astonishing Red Sand sea forts, which I visited with Reuben a few weeks back. More about the forts and how to reach them at the Project RedSand website.

Now, back to the PhD …

On yer Boris Bike

Who actually uses Boris Bikes? Commuters, civil servants and city types. Who doesn’t? Shoppers and posh people. That’s the story so far, as suggested by data from the London Cycle Hire Explorer – flagged in Londonist, and recycled in Wednesday’s Evening Standard.

The Explorer app is simple but powerful: it shows the 10 most and least popular docking stations across the capital. Obviously it’s early days, and usage will change (see below). And I’m just eyeballing the data – no fancy analysis here. First impressions:

1) Commuters are the main users – the most popular spots are mainly around the major stations – Waterloo (354 bikes yesterday), King’s Cross (305), London Bridge (256) and Liverpool Street (226). This is why TfL already wants to spend another £81m on new bikes and docking stations.

2) Biking to meetings and running errands also seem popular – viz heavy daytime (and lunchtime) use during the week in Covent Garden, (196) Strand (189) and Fitzrovia (187).

3) Weekend biking is on – judging by the past week at least, there’s no obvious drop-off on Saturdays or Sundays in the most popular spots. That suggests some tourists might be venturing out too.

4) There’s a bit of an East/West divide – six of the least popular docking stations are in West London, mainly Kensington (28 bikes) and Chelsea (25-29). I would have expected some use around Paddington and White City, but perhaps the Westway is putting people off. Support for scary road theory comes from other cold spots around Elephant and New Kent Road (26 each).

5) Alternatively, bike use is low in well-off neighbourhoods where residents prefer to drive, such as Kensington and Chelsea, Bayswater (27) and St John’s Wood (20). Or where serious shopping is going on (all of the above).  Obviously that’s just postcode stereotyping, but still – I bet there’s something in it.

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The open data is incredibly helpful, and not just for urbanists. At one level the bike scheme is a gigantic social experiment – give people new tools for getting around the city, step back and see what happens.

There are useful parallels here with new technologies, especially portable gear like mobile phones. The lesson from these is that technology changes us, but we change it too, and unpredictably. In the jargon, use is endogenous to the user.  Texting is the classic example of user-driven innovation for mobiles: open platforms like Android are doing something similar for smartphones.

A lot of this happens through experimenting and messing about, and this is already happening with blue bikes – via mashups like the Explorer, or Barley-ish attempts at stunt riding. More interesting stuff is bubbling up at this user forum.

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In turn, that suggests Boris Bike dynamics might look very different in a year’s time. So far, riders are currently making 19,000 journeys per day, not put off by bikes variously described as ‘like flying Ryanair’ (Jon Snow) and ‘like driving a tractor’ (anonymous friend).

That number could rocket up when Pay as You Go rates are introduced, and the early adopters are joined by loads of tourists and casual users. We could see new hotspots around St James’ Park, Baker Street and Tower Hill. And even bike snobs like me might get round to trying the thing …

City in a box, unboxed

Excitement online and in the twittersphere about the Cisco ‘city in a box’ being built in Songdo, South Korea. There seems to be a bit of a utopian city meme at the moment – instant cities,  floating cities and Paul Romer’s Charter Cities (which I discussed a while back). Last week’s Economist even showcased a whole series of prototype ‘cities for 2030′.

As the Economist piece points out, there’s something slightly odd about these kind of exercises. Cities tend to emerge and evolve organically, even chaotically, rather than being built from scratch: and their residents and users tend to be resistant to masterplanning.

A closer look at Cisco’s instant city actually confirms all this quite neatly. First, it’s not a city, it’s a business district – albeit one that could house up to 1m people. Second, it’s neither new or self-contained. Instead, it’s a bolt-on to an existing city, Incheon, the 3rd biggest in S Korea.

This kind of CBD megaproject has been done before – in Canary Wharf, for example, which works pretty well as a financial service cluster, if not as a functioning community. (With a working population of around 90,000 people, it’s over ten times smaller than Songdo.)

I can see the potential for this kind of plug-in planning in China in particular, given the pace of urbanisation there. The developer at Songdo reckons there’s a market for at least 20 more in China and across South East Asia. That’s plausible if the demographics and national economies hold up. But ‘build it and they will come’ is an inherently risky strategy – just look at Dubai.

I’d also love to see Cisco try this in a small, highly urbanised Global North country like the UK. Our biggest urban planning challenges in years to come is going to be greening the cities and buildings we’ve got. The eco-towns initiative doesn’t tackle this, and the programme is basically marginal.

But in growing places, there’s potentially an important role for high-tech, resource-efficient urban extensions – around Greater London, Manchester, York, Cambridge or Brighton, say. The problem will be the total lack of public funds to help actual building. Perhaps Cisco can step up to the Big Society plate and donate one?

ps. I’m now finally on Twitter – find me here.

pps. We’re now on holiday for a bit. Blogging returns in July.

Green cities, green jobs

Green jobs are hot. All three political parties want to shift Britain onto a low-carbon growth path. It’s a powerful meme. Two questions, then: what are green jobs? And where will they be? My guess is: mostly quite boring. But they will be everywhere, and they will be a big deal for towns and cities.

So what are ‘green jobs’? ippr’s new report suggests that ‘all jobs should be green’ in future. I’m not sure. Let’s focus on activities with the biggest carbon footprint: energy, waste, transport and construction. Some jobs in other sectors can be greened too, say if manufacturers adopt more sustainable workflows.

Where will green jobs be? To answer that, we need to consider how the UK moves onto a greener growth trajectory. There are two basic approaches, impling different roles for government – and different levels of political engagement.

Let’s call the first the Green Industries approach. This is about increasing the UK’s global share of high-value green activity – like wind turbines and low-carbon vehicles. It also encompasses major infrastructure like high-speed rail. National Government holds the policy levers: public money, tax breaks, business support (and to an extent, picking winners).

The second approach we could call Green Places. This is about making towns, cities and households more sustainable. The focus is on non-traded activities: buildings, energy and waste systems, local public transport – and things like repairing windmills on roofs.

Local government has a critical role here, alongside Whitehall: via recycling, local planning standards (like the Merton Rule), procurement and PPPs (like the ESCOs in Woking and Birmingham). Whitehall matters behind the scenes – for example, through DECC’s new Feed-In Tariff rules.

Green Industries are the sexy, photogenic things politicians get excited about, and are the focus of Labour’s Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, the Conservatives’ ‘Marine Energy Parks’ idea, and the Lib Dems’ green growth plans. Interestingly, the Tories seem keener on Green Places than Labour – see proposals for a ‘green deal’ for households, and support for micro-generation.

My guess is that Green Industries, though exciting, will only take the UK so far. First, only a few places will have them. The range of green technologies is vast. With no global standards, potential for international growth is capped. Most importantly, geographies of innovation, production and sales already differ. Silicon Valley leads the US in ‘cleantech’ R&D – but large-scale manufacturing is already shifting from the US to China and other cheap locations.

Second, the UK is already lagging. In wind turbines – where Britain should be a leader – the top firms are German and Scandinavian. (From this perspective, one of the saddest things about last year’s Vesta dispute is that Vesta is Danish).

Third, policy options are pretty limited. Green industries in the US are supported by Government stimulus money and a massive VC sector. Other European governments have funded producers for years. Britain has plenty of strategy, but limited cash to back these up. Low Carbon Economic Areas have no funding attached, and rely on existing RDA / LA budgets plus local ingenuity. The experience of Science Cities, a similar approach, doesn’t get my hopes up.

The Green Places approach is much more prosaic, but will have bigger impacts on more people. Cities’ carbon footprint is large: the C40 group estimates that worldwide, urban areas represent around 75% of the world’s energy use and CO2 emissions. Fiscally, Green Places largely involves redirecting existing budgets. (Some costs are passed on to firms and households – but councils should be allowed to use tools like TIF to ease financing constraints.)

Finally, British local government is already on the case. The Merton Rule is a classic example of how local policy innovation has shaped national thinking. Woking is a leader in decentralised energy. And Greater Manchester’s LCEA proposals look pretty good, with a five-year retrofit programme, small-scale renewables and smart meters for thousands of households across the city.

The UK needs both green industries and green places. But let’s not get over-excited about the first, while underplaying the second. Green jobs might be more dull than we thought. But they’re important as ever.

The magic roundabout

Ah, the perils of place branding. Wired have re-upped their ‘Silicon Roundabout’ story, highlighting the cluster of tech and new media firms around the Old Street / City Road junction in East London (thanks to Eric and Mat for pointing me to it).

The magazine reckons there are now about 85 firms in the neighbourhood, including Dopplr, last.fm and moo.com (who make my lovely business cards). That’s exponential growth since Matt Bidduplh’s original 2008 map. Along the way it’s picked up a Wikipedia entry, props in the FT and a (slightly self-conscious) support group.

 There’s only one problem here. Almost none of the firms are *actually on the roundabout*, or even near it. Look at Wired’s picture again. These companies are almost all down the road in, er, Shoreditch – or in one case, way out in Bethnal Green.

Obviously ‘Silicon Roundabout’ is a good meme (here I am writing about it, after all). And it means people don’t have to say they work in Barley-esque Shoreditch. But it fails completely as a descriptor for a real cluster, or even a spot on the map. It’s also nothing like Silicon Valley, which is a continuous sprawl stretching halfway across the Bay Area, including several cities along the way. Silicon Roundabout is  Trumpton to the South Bay’s Sim City. But that’s another story.

A hidden geography

Eleven weeks in, five more to go, and I’m still finding my way around this place. It’s got me thinking about the different ways we can get to know a city. How to get under the skin?

The job of geography is to explain the production of space, place and the everyday life of those places. Jane Jacobs tells us to think about cities as ‘problems in organised complexity’. We should pick an angle and work around it, pick another and connect to the first, and so on.

Why and where

This works for me. My way in is via urban economics and economic geography. The first task is to draw a line. In practice, it’s many overlapping boundaries – from satellite images, terrain maps, political units, transport networks.

We identify hubs and start linking them up. Then we can begin to fill in what happens where and why. At base, economic geography is about understanding the push and pull forces that help explain location. At the heart of successful places are increasing returns – from matching, sharing and learning. Feedback loops amplify these returns; bad luck or bad choices can run them down. Each local recipe is always slightly different.

So we start with people’s ‘demand for urbanness’. Then by looking at who gains and how, we can factor in the institutional, class and political forces shaping production.

The best geography of this kind – Jacobs, Michael Storper, Ian Gordon, David Harvey – succeeds in connecting macro to micro, megatrends to real places.  But a lot of everyday life falls between the lines – the ‘Bay Area-ness’ of the Bay Area is gone. What can bring it back?

The city as conversation

The local mediascape is more powerful than you’d think. As Jane Jacobs says, we should look less at the front pages and more at the small ads to understand what’s truly valued – or what isn’t. Dave Eggers’ San Francisco Panorama is a fantastic piece of street-level writing, if nothing else.

The city as story

Fiction helps us intuit urban experience. Each of the eight million stories in the Naked City reveals a little more of New York. The Wire does the same for Baltimore, to the point that it’s hardly a crime show at all. David Simon says it aims to be “…a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.”

The city as you find it

Benjamin and his disciples in psychogeography show how powerful wandering, image and imagination can be for understanding urbanity. Essentially you are wiring the city into yourself, from your own impressions and resonant memories. These are Lefebvre’s ‘representational spaces’, or lived space. Yours is only one of eight million stories, but if intuition is a kind of hyperlogic, others will share it. This excellent post by Owen Hatherley on seeing Sheffield via Red Riding, brutalist architecture and Warp is a great example.

The city as game

The mobile and social web is – finally – starting to help us multiply urban possibilities. Matt Jones talks about a better kairos – more opportunity, richer knowledge – as technology tells us more about where we are, what’s happened, or who’ll be around. And one level up, we’re using the data itself. Here’s Dan Hill mapping a building from the wifi cloud. Or MIT’s Senseable City Lab using mobile phone data in real-time urban heat maps; or Mapumental linking access, price and quality of neighbourhood life. Urban Tick has masses of interesting real-time stuff.

For me, this is exciting but risky: the danger in this perspective is that urban life reduces to codeable routines or design solutions. A city can’t always be hacked.

Being there

As Benjamin says,  ‘the power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane … Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.’

The most knowledgeable people I’ve met here have simply spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. They’ve walked the roads; they know it inside out. So I leave you with A Hidden Geography, an awesome piece of spatial synthesis by UC Berkeley’s Richard Walker. As a layering of image and text, framework and dot-joining, it’s hard to beat. Enjoy it.

How green is the Valley?

In 2007, Al Gore laid down a challenge to Silicon Valley: invent the technologies to conquer climate change. The Valley has spent the past few years trying to do just that. The green economy and ‘cleantech’ are big deals here: if you believe the hype, this is what Silicon Valley 3.0 will look like.

So can the world’s most innovative region really do it again?

It’s important to pin down what the green economy means. UC Berkeley’s Karen Chapple identifies four components: energy, building, transport and recycling. Each is very broad – e.g. energy covers tidal, wind and solar power, decentralised infrastructure (or ‘smart grids’), and installation and maintenance activity.

The South Bay has rapidly developed a presence in all of these, particularly in solar (which shares technologies with semiconductor manufacture). Joint Venture Silicon Valley recently put out a Greenprint for the Valley [pdf] setting out ‘climate prosperity’ – growing a new generation of innovative, world-beating firms and dealing with climate change on the side. For solar, the upper level jobs target is 20,000 positions by 2017.

The Valley has plenty of first-mover advantages – a big talent pool, strong industry networks, an entrepreneurial culture, lots of venture capital, eco-conscious consumers, and helpful regulation designed to boost local green industries (California recently passed AB32, a state-level cap and trade scheme, and has just passed AB920, a feed-in tariff system).

The area’s cultural diversity helps too. Kim Walesh, San Jose’s Chief Strategist points out that South Bay firms are already plugging into big markets in Chinese cities.

And yet … this may not turn out to be the world’s eco-region. As GBN analyst Olaf Groth told me, the sheer diversity of ‘the green economy’ presents challenges – much of has limited ICT crossover. Geographies of innovation, production and sales are diverse, and don’t really favour a single hot location. There are dozens of distinct cleantech clusters in the US and around the world; production is often outsourced; consumer markets are very localised. It will be hard for Valley firms to access all of these.

Government’s role is also critical. Green technologies need subsidy and regulation to be fully economic: traditional VC won’t invest on a 20 year payback schedule. But the big public contracts that helped kick start ICT 30 years ago will be harder to secure today.

So the Valley’s traditional advantages may be of limited help. And as Karen Chapple and Bill Lester argue in forthcoming research, green industry may not mean local green jobs. The South Bay already has a number of defunct semi-conductor factories, as production shifts to cheaper locations offshore.

What can we Brits learn from this? I think there’s a few key points here. First, ‘green growth’ is feasible. But UK policymakers need to get clearer on which bits can generate growth and jobs. In energy, that means wind and tidal power; and there will be significant waste, construction, transport and maintenance markets in urban areas.

Second, there is an important spatial dimension. The UK is small but highly urbanised; many of the key green markets (in waste and transport, for example) will be in and around cities. London’s Mayor already has powers to combat climate change, and is using these to leverage extra funds for business development; other big cities should get the same.

Third, national policy is hugely important – meaning regulation, planning and tax tools aimed at fostering behaviour change and stimulating green industries. As the Turner Climate Change committee argues, this requires a strong national planning system.
The Opposition stance here is unhelpful: a Cameron Government would probably abolish the Independent Planning Commission, which takes decisions on energy networks.

More broadly, the UK is still seen as a bit soft on cleantech: according to Deutsche Bank, the UK is not seen as a safe bet for international investors, who increasingly prefer China or Germany.

The Silicon Valley story tells us there is unlikely to be a single winner in the green economy. But it also suggests that the UK can do a lot more to push forward its own distinct eco-sectors, and develop greener cities (and valleys) while we’re doing it.

Money for nothing

Some of my photographs have been on sale at Getty Images for a few months now. The other day I received my first royalty cheque. Like Facebook, I finally have a revenue stream, if not a profit margin.

I’m not about to give up the day jobs. Putting most of my pictures online for free, then selling a few of them isn’t really a business model. As Will suggests here and here, it’s hard to see how you can sustain yourself purely through creative / artistic activity. In the case of photography, cheap digital hardware has democratised picture taking, but also flooded the market with images. Sites like Flickr function as a kind of Long Tail art gallery – nothing in the vaults, everything on the walls. And IP is all over the place.

I use a Creative Commons license for most of my pictures, largely because I want to encourage people to use them (with credit) rather than just steal them. So far it’s worked out quite well. Various shots have appeared on sites like Londonist, and on random photo blogs, bringing people back to my Flickr pages. That bumps up my stats and my place in the Flickr universe, which makes me more visible when people like Getty come calling.

As I said, I couldn’t live off this. But most creative people don’t survive purely on their creative work. For example, as part of this report for NESTA, I interviewed various fashion designers, all of whom had a portfolio of fashion-related activity – modelling, consulting, organising shows, lecturing, even some sewing – as well as designing their own collections. The pro-am economy argument has always felt a bit specious: looking back at the history of music, for example, ‘amateur practitioners’ have always been the norm. And the chance to move from ‘am’ to ‘pro’ is going to stay vanishingly small.

For bigger companies the challenges are different. As Matt Mason suggests in The Pirate’s Dilemma, the toughest issue is IP. He suggests companies find ways to embrace ‘pirates’ – by which he means both actual copyright breakers, and people doing radical innovation in the same marketplace. Getty has done this quite neatly. A company selling pictures at a premium is faced with a universe of free or cheaper online content, some of it done by professional photographers. Rather than trying to close down the internet, it imports some of the free content, exploiting its brand power and creating a (fairly) exclusive members’ club [group link]. Those 60,000-odd images then get sold through one of Getty’s existing royalty regimes, giving them a fat 80% of the selling price. Trebles all round!