<div dir="ltr">see: <a href="http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-05-23-cities-as-software-and-hacking-the-urban-landscape">http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-05-23-cities-as-software-and-hacking-the-urban-landscape</a><br><br><br>
<p>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?</p>
<p>That's the analogy used by Marcus Westbury, founder of <a href="http://renewnewcastle.org/about">Renew Newcastle</a>, an
innovative
initiative that has breathed life into the vacant downtown of that
Australian
city.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/travel/traveller-tips/worlds-top-10-cities-for-2011-named-20101104-17fc8.html">top
10
cities to visit in 2011</a>.</p>
<p>Here's an excerpt from an excellent piece by Westbury called "<a href="http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2011/05/23/cities-as-software/">Cities
as
Software</a>" (originally published in the Dutch architecture and design
magazine <em><a href="http://volumeproject.org/">Volume</a></em>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Y]ou need to start by rewriting -- or hacking -- the
software to change not what the city <em>is</em> but how it <em>behaves</em>
...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.renewnewcastle.org/">Renew Newcastle</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/diy-urban-development-step-one-start-facebook-group">it
has hacked it and made it work in new ways</a>.</p>
<p>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. ...</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <a href="http://renewnewcastle.org/projects">Those
who
were operating digital cottage industries and Etsy stores, artists and
fashion designers, bedroom record labels and Flickr photographers</a>.
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://renewtownsville.wordpress.com/">Townsville</a> to <a href="http://renewadelaide.wordpress.com/">Adelaide</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similar nimble, flexible approaches to improving the urban
environment are emerging all over the United States -- the <a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-24-one-dallas-neighborhood-remakes-its-streets-with-some-diy-energy">Better
Block</a> projects that started in Dallas, the <a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-16-parking-day-slideshow">Park(ing)
Day</a> movement, the <a href="http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/05/09/andres-power-helps-lead-a-streets-renaissance-one-parklet-at-a-time/">Pavement
to
Parks</a> initiative in San Francisco. The new guide to <a href="http://www.grist.org/urbanism/tactical-urbanism-guide-for-guerrilla-urbanists">Tactical
Urbanism</a> is filled with examples, and there are more coming along
all the
time, many spearheaded by people in their 20s and 30s.</p>
<p>Maybe a generation that has come of age in a digital world is
fundamentally predisposed to seeing urban space as hackable.</p>
<div class="author-bio">
<p>Sarah Goodyear is Grist�s cities editor. She�s also
on <a href="http://twitter.com/buttermilk1">Twitter</a>.</p>
</div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>� - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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