Brian Frank » brainstorms

My Dundas: Transforming London’s Sentimental Centre

Brian — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 21:03:04 +0000

Revitalizing downtown is an ever-relevant topic in London, as I’m sure it is in most cities.

(There may be cities where downtown isn’t an important part of the story; those are cities I don’t want to live in.)

Last night we had a bit of a thing here as part of Downtown London and the London Downtown Business Association’s annual general meeting. It was billed as an opportunity to start planning “Visions of Dundas” for 2020. Input was solicited on Facebook, and the early risers among London’s emerging leaders kept it going this morning with an ideas salon.

The City’s planning department has also been facilitating discussions for a year or so, starting with some downtown visioning sessions last summer.

One idea that gets a lot of attention is eliminating vehicular traffic on Dundas Street for a few blocks. I’m not sure I know enough to oppose it, but I’m not sure what exactly it’s supposed to accomplish either.

I walk the main stretch of Dundas at least two or three times every week. Not once have I thought my experience would be better without cars. Drivers already avoid it, and it’s one of the easiest streets to walk across (compared to, say, Richmond St., which is far less friendly for pedestrians — and that doesn’t seem to discourage many people).

My other concern is that cars actually add a lot to the feeling of vitality.

Dundas has a buzz and much of it comes from cars. That energy is part of the reason I like being there. There’s a real sense that something’s happening. I don’t know what would replace that with the cars gone — or more precisely, I’m not sure how cars are currently a barrier to any other sustainable activity (in the broadest sense) moving in.

I support the sentiment that says we should change society’s attitudes about cars, but I’m not seeing how closing Dundas Street to traffic is the most effective action to take at this point. I think a lot more narrative, strategy and education has to happen before we see the right shift in public attitude.

The only thing I can really see improved by removing traffic is the livability of second and third floor apartments along the street. I often think it’d be great to live (or work) there but couldn’t stand the constant sound. But it’s the buses that create most of the noise. If we get rid of cars and make it a public transit-only street (like Granville in Vancouver — at least I think it’s Granville, correct me if wrong) then I still won’t want to live there. And if it becomes like Hess Village in Hamilton — a strip of bar & restaurant patios — the noise might be even more disturbing.

Another model of rejuvenation was presented last night by Ron Soskolne, a development consultant who specializes in large mixed-use projects like the Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto: a “bright lights, big city” destination and public space.

There are certainly lessons to take from Yonge-Dundas but I think we should be careful not to fixate on the most prominent features.

For example, I look at it and the first thing I notice is dazzling visual displays. That’s appropriate for Yonge St. with its history of ostentatious facades, but sticking a jumbotron up at Richmond St. would be a bit like bringing in circus elephants to mix with the squirrel population in Victoria Park. It might overwhelm the natural environment.

The other prominent feature at Yonge-Dundas is the large open space.

The key to making that work is that it wasn’t simply conceived as a “build it and they will come” idea; it’s purposefully situated and “programmed” to keep activity flowing through it.

Where would a proportional flow come from in London?

(Consideration of flow is essential, whether we’re thinking of large spaces or small.)

The big lesson I think we should take from Soskolne’s example is that public investment led private investment.

It wasn’t just about tenants moving in and using what the City built; property owners and developers became more ambitious to initiate their own improvements after the City led by example and signaled long-term commitment.

And the funny thing is, we don’t even have to look elsewhere for that lesson.

Look at how the “Market District” has developed since Covent Garden Market’s renewal and the construction of the John Labatt Centre. Look at how Galleria (now Citi Plaza) was rejuvenated as a mixed-use facility since the Central Library moved in.

This line of thought leads me to wonder about a Performing Arts Centre… It isn’t something I’ve felt the need to settle an opinion on yet, so I’ll leave it at the mere mention for now.

Shifting mindsets, something more immediately feasible I have in mind is some kind of location-sensitive digital portal.

Think about how fast mobile and location-based technologies are progressing. I’m not overly optimistic about usefulness or adoption right now, but it’ll quickly become far more powerful and affordable. It has to be on our radar. We have to start to envision the role it’s going to play — and it will play a role — in the way people live, work and play in coming years.

(This is another area where public investment might be needed to lead before private investment catches on.)

Now’s the time to think and talk about possible uses so we know what we want when we see it — so we know which questions to ask and we’re not seduced by something inferior. Let’s not be caught playing copy-cat or catch-up on this one.

Ironically, a lot of the appeal of location-based technology for Dundas is its potential to highlight the City’s history.

Heritage and historical character differentiates London from other cities. We can use as a point of civic pride as well as a selling feature.

A lot of our heritage runs along Dundas Street, or adjacent to it — going all the way back to the day John Graves Simcoe set up camp at the forks of the Askunessippi River (the “antlered river”; we now call it the Thames), where he hoped to establish the capital of Upper Canada.

Et cetera…

I mean, there’s probably at least one good story every 20 feet. Why can’t we use today’s technology to engage with this history on-the-spot, in the present, instead of having to go digging into the archives? (It doesn’t have to cost a lot. Hypothetically a prototype could be done with a free blog and a bunch of QR codes printed off at home).

When our city’s stories are made digital they’re more likely to spread. We have to think of stories as infinite resources or gifts that people are naturally inclined to share; what can we do to ensure they get shared an extra degree or two into people’s social networks?

Stories proliferating outwards means attention, interest and flow coming back in…

But ultimately a digital solution won’t be enough — only part of how we should think of the overall concept.

My vision of Dundas is not a bunch of people staring at Blackberries and blundering into each other. Our focus has to come back to the physical spaces where we meet, work and play.

We also have to think holistically.

There are poverty and substance abuse challenges to address — and not simply brush aside to some other place. There’s also the question of cars and buses, which leads to questions about transportation in general. We have to keep thinking and talking about these issues on a large scale.

What we do on Dundas Street won’t solve those problems, but at the very least we can’t let it become the symbolic centre of something getting worse.

It’s enticing to activists of one cause or another to see Dundas as an opportunity to win a victory. But as the sentimental heart of London we have to be mindful of everyone’s cause. A commercial plaza that wipes out heritage and marginalizes the underprivileged is a net failure. A shelter or clinic that scares away tenants is a net failure.

We should work to improve commerce, social justice, heritage, culture and healthy living as one connected set of initiatives — just as the city ultimately functions as one big system.

What we do on Dundas Street sets a standard for the rest of the city. It has to be part of the narrative, if not the symbolic start or heart of our narrative. Most people don’t visit it every day, but it’s the area most people will visit eventually. Nowhere else has the same symbolic value.

As long as Dundas thrives, people will point to it to argue the city as a whole is thriving. If Dundas dies, people will point to it to argue the city as a whole is dying.

And finally, it should represent the city’s vitality — and not just our ability to do big public projects. The heart of the city needs genuine dynamism and energy in constant circulation. It’s ok to experiment, make mistakes and even let things happen in messy, unplanned ways.

From what I can tell it looks like the City and Downtown London are doing it right. It won’t be right all at once, but as long as we’re moving forward, we’re doing exactly what cities are supposed to do.

If you liked this post, contact me about writing and developing original, persuasive and enduring ideas with you. Get a copy of my book and visit openconceptual.com for more about my work.

Dundas Street Party photo by Scott Webb at nuwomb.com. Heritage photos via the London Public Library Image Gallery.

Follow the ongoing #mydundas discussion on Twitter.

Testing Wave Embeds: With Thoughts On Collaboration

Brian — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:03:49 +0000

Conceptualization: Cyclonic Engagement

Brian — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:28:55 +0000

This post touches on social media engagement but it’s more generally a demonstration of the process of conceptualization itself. The discipline of imagining and developing these kinds of concepts is the deliverable I’ve been developing for the past few years and converting into the Open Conceptual enterprise model. Social media just happens to be one of the most dynamic and opportune domains right now.

One concept that caught my attention recently is the Socialgraphics Engagement Pyramid, developed by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group:

What first struck me was that while I was inclined to interpret these as “stages,” which people can progress up through, the relationships between them are not necessarily continuous. I understand that the folks at Altimeter may not have conceived these as stages like I did, but I think a lot of people at a more advanced level ought to discuss different types of users not just in terms of static segments but as occurring in dynamic processes of becoming something else.

Another notion that struck me was that Watching and Commenting are both ways of giving or contributing in to something, while Sharing and Producing are both ways of generating or distributing out to others. I wondered if these might best be arranged into quandrands — with Curating, which is a bit of everything, occupying the centre.

Doesn’t look very pretty — and it doesn’t convey the size of each group, which the pyramid does quite effectively — nor does it convey the dynamic qualities of how these don’t merely stand in relation to each other but actually flow.

My next thought was that there might be some kind of spiral or fractal pattern that gradually converges in around the centre, which would illustrate the size of the different groups and how they flow into each other. I started doing an image search and that led me to this:

Background image by Dave Stokes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33909700@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

The notion of “cyclonic engagement” may not be best for marketers looking for a sense of stability for framing strategies, but I think we need to talk and think more about how the different types of engagement tend to affect each other: each phase “pulls in” the phases below it, while the lower, more massive phases provide the pressure and momentum that keep the whole process moving.

This would probably be more useful for thinking about media, rather than marketing. Marketers have more control over the whole process — they can dip in and out a little more freely, addressing specific types of people at will (though I expect this will change, as marketers are increasingly becoming media themselves) — whereas media folks swim deep inside the process and never really get outside or above it.

I’m not talking about how media people market themselves, I’m talking about media as it pertains to the real value and uses of actual news and knowledge — how it affects our discussions about culture, politics, economics, etc…

Just some things to think about for now. I’ll have to dive deeper another time.

Notes:

• Technically it would have been more appropriate to call this an “Engagement Vortex” (a cyclone is just a special kind of vortex) but I didn’t want it to turn into calculus homework — nor did I like the “black hole” connotations.

• Also for the sake of avoiding the wrong connotations, I turned the picture on its side to make it look less like a toilet being flushed.

• And I changed “Commenting” to “Replying” because the longer word played havoc on the aesthetic proportions.

• Lastly, I stuck with “curation” for the sake of not bringing too many discussions into one, but the meanings and merits of that term in this context are worth discussing. Read Joanne McNeil’s post at Tomorrow Museum if you haven’t yet.

Essays That Help Write Themselves

Brian — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:19:52 +0000

I just reached 5130 words on a blog post… a little to long to still qualify as a “blog post,” methinks.

It’s an essay really, but still long enough I should explain.

When I’m writing an essay, I often start adding a sentence or a paragraph in the middle or close to the start, and that just keeps flowing into new sentences until I’ve written almost a whole new draft, pushing the first one down in the process.

After doing that a few times it turns into a cut-and-paste carnival, using blocks of text from all the different drafts — eventually becoming a very different essay than the one I intended to write.

Out of the 5130 words I have now, I’ll probably write a few thousand more and end up with something like 2000…

The idea of pushing the text down reminded me of the origins of blogging — when proto-bloggers simply started typing today’s updates above yesterdays, pushing the whole page down — before people started writing applications that presented a box to type into automatically added date and time stamps, separating entries into distinct posts.

Then I thought, instead of the box being what we use to type into, what if there were applications that made boxes for deleting?

Or exporting, I should say — or moving, or something.

I mean, it would be useful (for me) to have an application that removes blocks of text from view and organizes them with contextual metadata making them restorable and accessible for importing anywhere else back into the document.

In a way I’m already using an application for keeping the thousands of words I delete but don’t want to lose altogether — either plain old TextEdit or Google Docs — but it would be nice if it all that was better organized and associated with places in the essay.

I guess that’s basically what a wiki does — just maybe not as well for my specific uses. Google Wave might be better.

Then I wondered…

What if the application didn’t just keep track of placement within the original/final/whole text. What if it was continuously figuring out new semantic associations — i.e. “reading” text and interpreting the relations among the different parts — and making suggestions for fitting them together?

London, City of Opportunity: Journalism Edition

Brian — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:13:42 +0000

Part of a new series I’m starting to explore social, creative, and economic opportunities specific to London Ontario.

Recently I posted about the benefits of educating citizens to think like journalists. Since then I found a lot of great examples of a collaborative approach to journalism — not just between professionals and amateurs, but between organizations and (in a sense) collectively.

First, I loved this story of what happened after a small-town librarian in Colombia worked with a media professor to teach ten regular library users how to blog & podcast of what happened to a citizen journalism training initiative in Madagascar:

They were mostly writing about what donors would consider “non-serious” content. Occasionally they would post short videos about environmental and social challenges in Madagascar, but a lot of the content is what would be considered diary writing. Then something unexpected happened: on March 17 a coup deposed president Marc Ravalomanana. 15,000 protesters took to the streets, many countries froze their aid programs, and misinformation was frequently spreading on the airwaves of the radio stations that managed to continue broadcasting. Amid all the chaos, this group of Foko bloggers became the go-to sources of information for the international press. They were featured on CNN live, the BBC, New York Times, and Reuters.

Another interesting example is LePost.fr (subisidiary to Le Monde), as explained in this interview:

Each journalist is also in charge of a small group of active amateurs. He is their coach and teaches them the basics of the journalist job, tries to encourage them and even meets them in person. He understands that information is a conversation. He does not produce an article but more a process.

According to this, that 2 year-old French site has a readership of 2 million, built from a newsroom consisting of 1 editor and 8 specialized journalists who work with a community of 25,000 members (only about 1 or 2% provide the majority of content).

All of these links are via Jay Rosen.

What got me thinking about it (this time) was the coverage of Orchestra London’s opening night. By London’s standards it was “polyphonic,” with several different voices registering around the same time & topic. Apart from Free Press, Larry Cornies wrote about it on his own site; Stuart Thompson wrote about it for The Beat; Philip McLeod wrote about it on his own site, and I also watched Greg Fowler tweet from the last council meeting where it was discussed.

A lot of reporting, with some opinion, and zero conversation.

[Update: After sleeping on it I wonder if that criticism might have been counterproductive -- could have emphasized the positive aspect a little more.]

We need to connect more. As it is now, dialog either takes place a) in official settings, where isn’t really dialog at all, or b) in private, where it isn’t as accountable or potent as points being made online with links to each other, which anybody can find and follow-up on and try to improve.

[Added: We need to bring the dialog out into the open, make our views as accountable and articulate as the reporting is. We need to show leadership -- demonstrate that commentary on emerging policies is a process, not merely a series of products. And hopefully more people will participate when they see that example.]

Meanwhile, in other cities the mainstream news outlets are already starting to do collaborative journalism. Jay Rosen (again) points to a project in Madison, Wisconson:

When our jobs were secure, it was easier for us to bicker with each other. Now we are more inclined to see that we’re all in this together.

… The idea: Get individual Madison media to all do enterprise reporting on the same topic, to show what we are capable of as a community.

We could achieve collectively more than any of our outlets could individually. And we could demonstrate our ability to advance a common purpose, with each outlet doing what it does best.

They’re calling it All Together Now, or ATNMadison if you’re versed in the vernacular of social media tags. The story is here and the project’s home is here.

A major cooperative non-profit news organization also formed in Chicago (the purpose being to syndicate content to a Chicago edition of the New York Times). HuffPo has the commentary.

London seems to have a pretty good character and size to develop an open collaborative media community — or at least one with a lot of complementarity and mutual knowledge — something really original and noteworthy.

Stepping back to a more general view for a moment, Daniel Little outlines the benefits of cooperation:

If a number of the members of a group agree to contribute our efforts to a common project we may find that the total results are greater — for both common goods and private goods — than if we had each pursued these goods through individual efforts. Cooperation can lead to improvement in the overall production of a good for a given level of sacrifice of time and effort. This description uses the word “agree”; but Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Cooperation) and David Lewis (Convention: A Philosophical Study) observe that many examples of cooperation depend on “convention” and tacit agreement rather than an explicit understanding among participants.

So cooperation can lead to better outcomes for a group and each individual in the group than would be achievable through entirely private efforts.

Making things more interesting, it’s no minor detail that UWO is home to one of the province’s two graduate journalism schools and a number of complementary programs at Fanshawe College.

On that point, following the release of the Downie-Schudson report on The Reconstruction of American Journalism [pdf] [abridged], Nieman Lab posted a breakdown into six main points which included the suggestion,

Universities already run teaching hospitals, why not news orgs?

Partnerships between news outlets and universities aren’t new, and they appear to be going through a metamorphosis of sorts, with investors, public/private organizations, and schools pooling resources for hybrid newsgathering. The report recommends bold and compelling steps beyond current efforts: the authors want to see full-fledged, year-round news operations run by faculty and students. Similar organizations already exist to some degree, but the picture painted by the report’s authors looks more like a teaching hospital than a college-based newsroom.

There must be something in all of this worth exchanging points on and trying to sustain… maybe a “meta” discussion like this is where we start.

Learning to Lead via Generational Circumstances

OpenConceptual — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:59:56 +0000

At HarvardBusiness.org, Tammy Erickson writes,

Future leaders in all spheres will have to contend with a world with finite limits, no easy answers, and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points of view. There will be no dominant voice.

In this context, I’m convinced that Gen X’ers will be the leaders we need. The experiences that shaped those of you who were teens in the late ’70s and ’80s, as I’ve outlined in past posts, translate into valuable contemporary traits and perspectives.

After some reflection it seems obvious — and there’s maybe some insight into the philosophy of history here: there’s a kind of symbiosis that occurs as we grow up: the world forms around us while we form within the world.

The challenges and opportunities we face now are not spontaneous accidents, they developed over the course of decades. Likewise, people’s competences, attitudes, values, and habits have developed over a long course of time and it seems only natural that generational characteristics will correspond with dominant challenges at their moment of full maturity.

There might be some further psychological or sociological insight here as well: as we grow up, how much are we affected by novel, incongruous, and emergent features of the world, which our elders (whose faculties of perception were already fixed by their upbringing) fail to notice — or notice in any generative way?

Still further, I’d guess that some people tend to notice novelty and incongruity more than others; how much does that affect which individuals eventually emerge as leaders?…

This isn’t to take anything away from Erickson’s work. If these suggestions have merit, we’d still have to go on and investigate and articulate exactly what features and characteristics are becoming dominant — which is precisely what Erickson has done for her forthcoming book.

Brian Frank » brainstorms

My Dundas: Transforming London’s Sentimental Centre

Related Posts:

Testing Wave Embeds: With Thoughts On Collaboration

Related Posts:

Conceptualization: Cyclonic Engagement

Related Posts:

Essays That Help Write Themselves

Related Posts:

London, City of Opportunity: Journalism Edition

Related Posts:

Learning to Lead via Generational Circumstances

Related Posts: