[P2P-F] renew newcastle, urbanism as hacking

Tue May 24 20:19:33 CEST 2011

see:
http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-05-23-cities-as-software-and-hacking-the-urban-landscape

What if saving a rundown city wasn't about building expensive new
infrastructure -- hardware, so to speak -- but instead reprogramming the
existing infrastructure? Changing the software of the place?

That's the analogy used by Marcus Westbury, founder of Renew
Newcastle<http://renewnewcastle.org/about>,
an innovative initiative that has breathed life into the vacant downtown of
that Australian city.

Newcastle, which grew up around the coal and steel industries, suffers from
a lot of the same problems as Rust Belt cities in the United States. Its
major employers shut down in the latter half of the 20th century, its
transportation systems were dismantled, and retail decamped for the
sprawling suburbs. The core of the city was vacant and neglected.

But Renew Newcastle has turned that around by making it easy for
entrepreneurs and artists to move into vacant spaces and make creative use
of them. The result? Lonely Planet recently named it one of the top 10
cities to visit in
2011<http://www.smh.com.au/travel/traveller-tips/worlds-top-10-cities-for-2011-named-20101104-17fc8.html>
.

Here's an excerpt from an excellent piece by Westbury called "Cities as
Software <http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2011/05/23/cities-as-software/>"
(originally published in the Dutch architecture and design magazine
*Volume<http://volumeproject.org/>
*):

[Y]ou need to start by rewriting -- or hacking -- the software to change not
what the city *is* but how it *behaves* ...

Renew Newcastle <http://www.renewnewcastle.org/>, the not-for-profit company
that we established in late 2008, is a piece of software. It is a broker. It
is an enabler. It is an interface between the aging, decaying, and at times
boarded-up built environment and those who seek to use and activate it. It
connects the many empty spaces in the city with the passion of people who
want to experiment and try things in them. It has facilitated more than 60
projects in more than 30 once empty spaces in just over two years. It has
done so without building, buying or owning anything other than some
computers and some second hand furnishings. It does not fund things -- nor
was it funded itself in its early stages -- it just allows them to happen.

It has done so by changing the software of the city. Not in the slow and
traditional way -- the hard way -- of seeking the political power to amend
the rules, change the laws and rewrite the operating system. It has done so
in an easier but less obvious way -- it has followed the path of least
resistance. Rather than rewrite the operating system it has hacked it and
made it work in new
ways<http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/diy-urban-development-step-one-start-facebook-group>
.

Renew Newcastle started by hacking how much spaces cost and the terms they
were available on. While there were over 150 empty buildings in Newcastle
few if any of them were cheap or simple to access. They were bound up in
complex rules -- from bad tax incentives to complex, costly and long-term
commercial leases that made it difficult to access them flexibly. Renew
Newcastle traded cost for security. We created new rules, new contracts, and
convinced owners to make spaces available for what was effectively barter --
we would find people to clean them use them and clean them and activate them
and they could have them back if and when they needed them. We stepped
outside the default legal framework in which most property in Australia is
managed and created a new one. We used licenses not leases, we asked for
access not tenancy and exploited the loopholes those kinds of arrangements
enabled. ...

Yet cheap space is not in itself enough. It is not enough to simply change
how much space costs, it is also vitally important to change how it behaves
in the face of initiative. Renew Newcastle created a whole system to lower
barriers to initiative and experimentation. We created another layer --
between the operating system and the users to make it simpler and easier to
enable experimentation and risk.

Again we followed the path of least resistance. We decided to make things
simple that could be made simple and not butt up against what would remain
impenetrably hard. We managed to do what is easy rather than get caught up
in waiting for the ideal -- to find spaces that were usable and use them.
Renew Newcastle designed systems -- an API in programming terms -- that made
activation simple. We took spaces, brokered cheap access to them and gauged
what could be done in them easily -- what they were already approved for --
and set out to find it and plant and water it.

In doing so we effectively made a whole system to make space behave as
quickly and responsively. To allow people with enthusiasm and passion to
direct it into the city. We made it quick for people to try and cheap for
them to fail. We removed capital and complexity from the equation and in
doing so we seeded more than 60 experiments -- unleashing the energy of
hundreds of people.

We made the city work for people for whom it had not worked in a long time.
People without capital for whom low barriers to entry and not certainty of
outcome were the defining issues. Those who were operating digital cottage
industries and Etsy stores, artists and fashion designers, bedroom record
labels and Flickr photographers <http://renewnewcastle.org/projects>. In
effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did -- easy
to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most
importantly full of tools and structures and plugins designed to make it
simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about.

As cities age, the challenge is not always to rebuild them physically but to
re-imagine how they might function and adapt. In Newcastle in many respects
nothing has changed since 2008. The buildings are mostly the same. The
hardware is unchanged. Nothing has been built. No government has fallen. No
revolution has taken place. Yet, on another level much has changed -- dead
parts of the city are active and vibrant, 60 projects have started, hundreds
of new events have been created, and whole new communities are directly
engaged in creating whatever it is that the city will become. The software
-- the legal templates, the contracts and the thinking -- that has enabled
has changed Newcastle is becoming a kind of shareware -- downloaded, hacked
and implemented in cities and towns across Australia from
Townsville<http://renewtownsville.wordpress.com/>to
Adelaide <http://renewadelaide.wordpress.com/>.

Similar nimble, flexible approaches to improving the urban environment are
emerging all over the United States -- the Better
Block<http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-24-one-dallas-neighborhood-remakes-its-streets-with-some-diy-energy>projects
that started in Dallas, the Park(ing)
Day <http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-16-parking-day-slideshow>movement,
the Pavement
to Parks<http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/05/09/andres-power-helps-lead-a-streets-renaissance-one-parklet-at-a-time/>initiative
in San Francisco. The new guide to Tactical
Urbanism<http://www.grist.org/urbanism/tactical-urbanism-guide-for-guerrilla-urbanists>is
filled with examples, and there are more coming along all the time,
many
spearheaded by people in their 20s and 30s.

Maybe a generation that has come of age in a digital world is fundamentally
predisposed to seeing urban space as hackable.

Sarah Goodyear is Grist’s cities editor. She’s also on
Twitter<http://twitter.com/buttermilk1>
.

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