The failure strategy
By Marcus Westbury
This article originally featured in the book Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. (Freerange Press, 2014.) Marcus recently launch his highly acclaimed book Creating Cities. Print and digital forms are available here. (Freerange highly recommends this book!)
Marcus Westbury is a broadcaster, writer, media maker and festival director who has been responsible for some of Australia’s more innovative, unconventional and successful cultural projects and events. He has also worked across a range of media as a writer, producer, director and presenter covering fields as diverse as culture, art, media, urban planning, sport and politics. In 2008 Marcus founded Renew Newcastle with his own funds and energy.
For most of my adult life, I watched my home town of Newcastle, Australia — a city roughly the same size as Christchurch — lurch from crisis to crisis and from disaster to disaster. There were the physical shocks. Australia’s largest earthquake (at the time the most expensive natural disaster in Australia) in 1989 broke the city and catalysed the permanent move of retail and commercial business from the city to the suburbs. There were the economic shocks. The BHP steelworks and associated industries closed and shed 20,000 jobs in two decades. The shipyards closed and thousands of other manufacturing jobs went with them. Less visible were slow burning structural problems that rendered the city centre less and less fit for purpose. I woke up one day in 2008 and found myself walking down the two main streets and casually counting 150 empty buildings — shops and offices with ‘For Lease’ signs, and derelict sites.
That experience led to the establishment of Renew Newcastle. It’s a not-for-profit company that ‘borrows’ empty buildings on a rolling short term basis and lends them to creative projects — art galleries, studios, community groups, co-working spaces, jewellers, craftspeople, film makers, design studios, fashion labels and the like — looking for a toehold, a cheap place to start and a low risk way of trying an often high risk idea. Five years later, Renew Newcastle has done — at last count — 140 projects in 60 empty buildings. Dozens of successful business and initiatives have been given a start. Two have gone on to buy buildings in a city that has since changed around them. Once regarded as Sydney’s rough, tough working-class cousin, Newcastle increasingly appears on lists of the world’s ‘hippest’ and ‘most bohemian’ cities and Australia’s ‘coolest’ neighbourhoods. (Editors note: Marcus tells me that this last sentence reads far more earnestly than he meant it to.)
There are various ways you can think about what we have done through Renew Newcastle. Renew is an art project, an economic development project and an empty space project. But to understand the deeper logic of it, it helps to think of it as a failure project. It’s about creating a city, a system and a dynamic that allows people to try unlikely things. The idea is not to ensure that things fail — but it begins by letting go of the assumption that everything will succeed. It creates a space for the emergence of things that might not. It allows failure by lowering the price and risk of it. Renew allows people to try things with uncertain or unknown outcomes. Through the seeding of unpredictable ideas and experiments, interesting and unanticipated possibilities begin to emerge.
Cities are experiments. The most successful cities are the accumulated remains of hundreds, thousands or even millions of failed experiments. They are layer upon layer of business ideas, community groups, social movements, supportive or divided communities, entrepreneurialism, innovations and other forms of possibilities translated into actions. Those actions build up over time. Even in a city that hasn’t experienced the abrupt disruption of Newcastle, or the devastation of Christchurch, most of the things that have ever made any city aren’t actually there anymore. Yet their legacies live on in the DNA of people’s inspiration and lived experiences, in the built environment, in the serendipitous chains of events where someone’s first job becomes the precursor to founding a multi-million dollar company or enduring community project two decades later.
Natural and economic disasters abruptly break this chain of continuous experiments. Part of the problem with Newcastle in 2008 was that the city had become so beaten up that no one was trying anything much anymore. It had become so fixated with grand plans it had forgotten to address the small ones. Those with capital were holding back waiting for big developments and infrastructure plays — many of which have never happened and never will. Others still remain two, five or ten years away as they pretty much always have been. In order for Newcastle to succeed in the short term it needed people to try new things. It needed people to fail fast, fail cheap and fail often — to use a well-worn Silicon Valley cliché.
In times of crisis there is too often a tendency to seek certainty in fixed plans and big schemes. But cities are dynamic and endlessly changing labs of possibilities. They are not predictable. Master planning can only get you so far. There are no ‘right’ answers a lot of the time. In my experience no solution ever arrives fully formed. No plan — no matter how well conceived and perfectly implemented (and rarely do both of those conditions apply) — actually solves every problem. Once you admit that limitation, it becomes instantly obvious that the best way to find out what works is to do lots of things.
Christchurch, as Newcastle did, needs innovation. Not in the sexy high tech sense where a billion dollar company might develop their app or their widget there, but in the grounded sense, where lots of people are incrementally toying with ideas, communities and business models that weren’t there before. In a perverse way, Christchurch is uniquely positioned to seed experimentation and imagination now. A lot of actual innovation is really perseverance, trial, error, good ideas and good luck. While good ideas and good luck are hard to mandate, the trial and error bit is something you can plan for — and Kiwi resilience and resourcefulness is begrudgingly acknowledged and admired, even from across Tasman.
Newcastle needed then, and Christchurch needs now, to find better ways to experiment, innovate and fail. Yet it is tricky to make that a policy imperative and, under the traditional rules of the game, it is a huge burden to place the cost of each failed venture upon individuals, artists, small companies and others. Then there is the reality that many of those who contemplate trying something will do so elsewhere — somewhere less run down and despairing — where the equation of potential payoff makes a lot more sense.
Five years ago, Renew Newcastle began to create ways to reduce the scale and risk of individual failure down to one that could be distributed cheaply among the community. We created a space — physically, legally and psychologically — where it was cheap to fail and easy to experiment. No one individual needed to lose their house, break up their family, over-capitalise, sign a five year lease or take a hundred thousand dollar loan. No government department needed to write a cheque with six or seven zeroes on the end and then try and justify the smoking ruins left behind as a valuable learning experience.
By lowering the cost, you change the equation of risk and reward. You diversify who can experiment. The people with the money don’t always have the ideas. In most cities and towns it is usually a relatively small subset of the population who are sufficiently entrepreneurial and sufficiently resourced to open new shops, pet projects, new spaces and new businesses. They aren’t always the most imaginative or innovative. Add the problems of broken infrastructure, poverty or other structural issues found in many communities and there are very few people who have the capacity to risk the kind of experimentation that struggling places desperately need.
Rarely do policymakers view the processes of initiative and experimentation on the small scale as something they can catalyse and control. To a community that has lost thousands of jobs, buildings and businesses, the idea of building up many marginal initiatives as an economic development strategy is counterintuitive. It is often politically difficult to sell and explain when there are headlines to be grabbed with a metaphorical monorail. They fail to simply ask: what can people do here and how do we allow them to do it?
What experimentation should a city like Christchurch encourage? It needs pioneers to develop new ways of building, using and adapting spaces. It needs creativity, community and imagination. In needs innovative building techniques, lateral solutions and low cost problem solving. It needs improvisation and innovation. It needs ingenuity as much as it needs engineering.
Artists and creative communities are a vital part of the picture and in this context they are pragmatically ideal. They bring new layers of life, economy and activity to communities. They are willing to take initiative and engage in a process of experimentation precisely because they aren’t primarily concerned with commercial returns.
Christchurch is already building a reputation — unwanted but not unwarranted — as one of the great urban laboratories of the early twenty-first century. It is attracting leaders and thinkers from across the region and around the world. It should never lose sight of its own ingenuity, and it should never cease to bring out the best from the bedrooms, spare rooms and garages by encouraging the initiatives and ideas that already exist. It cannot fall into the trap of betting big on a single thing, a single demographic or a single idea where all succeeds or all fails. It cannot risk the danger of waiting five, ten or twenty years for big changes at the expense of accumulating the smaller ones.
Christchurch is in a unique position. It is faced with a potentially stark choice. On one path there is the danger that it will become a twenty-first century anywhere. There is the risk of becoming a perfect international amalgam of best practice planning and efficient, appropriate but uninspiring architecture. But just as with Newcastle in 2008, or Berlin in 1989, Christchurch has been given an opportunity to create something that can only happen there — a generational challenge and an historic opportunity. It is not something to squander. It is these things, and not the generic plans of ideal cities, that will ultimately define what the city will become. It would be a tragedy if Christchurch were to fail for failing to fail enough.
