Crowdsourcing scales up - Who wants to redesign Birmingham?
Image from Plus - blog on this coming soon
I've just come back from an exciting meeting and I'm wired, so rather than sit down and eat my dinner (sorry Emily) and have 1001 things rolling around in my head I'm going to write as much down here as I can.
The meeting was one of the first of what looks set to be a year-long series of meetings, discussions, public debates and events all based around what is being called the "Birmingham City Centre Masterplan".
I was invited to be part of what the consultants,
Urban Initiatives, who are running the project are terming the 'City Team' - basically about twenty people who they see as being good 'ideas people' (well connected, opinion formers, etc etc. - sorry didn't get everyone's names) to come up with good thinking about how Birmingham should change, grow and improve over the coming ten to twenty years.
Here's the invitation I received:
You may be aware that Birmingham City Council has recently appointed a team of consultants to help the city develop its Masterplan for the next 20 years and beyond.
The consultants are led by Urban Initiatives with specialists in the fields of: Design; Town Planning; Regeneration; Transportation; Property; Economics; Culture; Innovation and Delivery.
They will be working closely with the council for at least a year with the objectives of producing a framework for sustainable growth for the city centre that will inevitably inform regional development and prosperity.
Their outputs will be not only a Spatial Plan for the city centre within the ring road, but also a Business Plan and the means of delivering both in the shape of proposals for a Delivery Vehicle.
The goal is to improve Birmingham as a place to live and work. To achieve this, Urban Initiatives and Birmingham City Council acknowledge the need to engage with local business and community leaders, specifically committed individuals who share their enthusiasm and aspirations for Birmingham.
To this end, I am delighted to invite you to become a member of a 'City Team' of such individuals.
This team will be invited to a number of consultation events over the next year and will be instrumental in assisting the Council, its consultants and partners in shaping Birmingham's future.
The inaugural event, run by Urban Initiatives, will be the 'Big Ideas' event on the 1st and 2nd November at the Bond Warehouse in Birmingham. Urban Initiatives will present their objectives and aspirational proposals for discussion and as the genus of a charter that will inform the Masterplan to follow.
It was happening in Alpha Tower, one of Birmingham City Council's main office blocks with a panoramic view of the city (we were on the 16th floor), and it kicked off relatively informally for me, with a chat about architecture with some of the other people who were there.
Then it was on to a short intro from the City Council outlining what the meeting was about and then a ten minute presentation from the lead consultant on the project from
Urban Initiatives.
The thrust of it is that the
Masterplan as it is being called is a piece of work which will be happening over the coming year looking at creating a coherent document (a business plan more or less) for how Birmingham can be designed to grow, change and improve.
How are they going to do that?
Crowdsourcing.
It turns out that what the consultants are going to do from day one is to get some switched on people (and they certainly had a few of those) in a room for two days (1st / 2nd November) to come up with some audacious (their word), ambitious and generally big ideas for what Birmingham needs to do right now to bring it higher up the international rankings and make it the city it's always hinted at being.
Apparently the same thing happened about 20 years ago (before my time) and one of the big results was the loosening of the concrete noose that was the inner city road system, which had huge impact for the city.
So this is big scale - this is "redevelop new street station", "put a big public art space there", "get an international high speed train link there", "close that road", "build more affordable city centre housing", "encourage families to live in the city centre", "don't ruin Digbeth by killing the established culture", "make the city more sustainable", "design a new transport system", "give artists this entire block of the Gun quarter for no rent for five years and see what happens", "create more public space", and that's just off the top of my head.
As Michael Wolff said on Friday (yes - I will write this up!) - design is not just the visual representation of something, it is the business structure, the essence of a thing. A bus shelter isn't an example of good design - an efficient bus system is though.
So I'm looking at this as a vast design project - an opportunity to redesign a city, obviously with constraints, but huge potential for success and impact.
I guess this only dawned on me about ten minutes after we started asking slightly wary questions after the presentation:
Me: "Are you the consultants actually independent in this situation? Are you asking us to get involved in this just so you can rubber stamp decisions that have already been made? Last time I stuck my neck above the parapet I got shot down for my opinions - won't this just happen here too? Isn't there a danger that you're just going to have a talking shop where we'll just be agreeing on things that are presented rather than saying 'no that's just a silly idea'?"
It turns out (taking this at face value obviously) that this is for real - the council have employed an independent firm of consultants to crowdsource opinions from a wide variety of groups (didn't have a copy of the presentation to clarify), but the kernels of the ideas that they are looking for are being sourced from an invited group of people (of which I am one) - people who have an opinion and aren't afraid to air it.
So it's simple - we come up with some radical (or maybe not so radical?) ideas, we come up with some a list of things that we believe in, the consultants take them, flesh them out, present them to other people, get feedback, have dialogues, start debates, etc. and then all of this gets distilled down into a Charter (a statement of intent), a Masterplan (the nitty gritty), and a Business Plan (the long term strategy for the city).
At the end of the discussion I got pretty vocal about my opinions of what I term the 'grey hand' - the powers that be having a negative effect on the culture of the city. You know the kind of things - shutting great music venues because they get a bit loud, not supporting or helping art galleries effectively to thrive, shutting down climbing walls with compulsory purchase orders because they look a bit ugly and then leaving the buildings to rot, etc. etc.
Me, talking about the plans for Digbeth: "What always gets missed out of these kinds of discussions is to talk about the real cultural identity of a place. The 'underground'
matters and the property developers, city council and other powers that be are so removed that they don't know how to support cultural activity at that level. Take Birmingham's music scene - the city's cultural heritage is all about black metal, death metal, industrial techno and more recently bhangra and desi beats. But nobody at the top level even hears those kinds of words. I think that needs to change or we'll end up losing the cultural heritage that we have, and once it's gone it's gone - it won't come back".
Sarah Gee made a good comment at this point - "We don't want Birmingham to suffer from the gastro pub effect. All the original fixtures and fittings are ripped out and false stuff put back in its place." I couldn't agree more.
So - on the 1st and 2nd I'm going to be talking about Authenticity - how can a city be redesigned yet still keep its cultural identity - quite topical given the debate raging around the
Keep Digbeth Vibrant campaign. The fantastic
Blast event redefined how I think about Birmingham - it made it all to clear that we need to embrace the industrial heritage and sense of place rather than airbrushing over it and trying to make the city something it is not.
So this is where I hand the crowdsourcing over to you.
I'm one of the invited few. I want to push good ideas in this forum. I had said 'no more committees' was one of my new rules (blog on this coming soon), but if this piece of work truly turns out to be what I think it could or should be then its an opportunity not to be missed.
If you have a fantastic idea and you want it to be heard by the very top people at the City Council and a bunch of 'very important people' you need to let me know about it. Or if you know someone who should be in this group, you should let me know too - the consultants want a few more names from us as suggestions.
You can't get much of a better open brief than this from the City Council - "help us redesign the city, no strings attached".
If you post a comment and I think it's worth raising I'll be discussing it on the day, so use that comment box...
Let's see where this thing goes.