Recoding Cities and Crowdsourcing Sustainability
Why Developing Self-Reliant Places Could Be a Better Road to the Sustainability We’re Looking For
I went to speak at Near Future, about my take at how to make sustainability viral and why perhaps it needs to be a deep cultural effort developed through experiential learning rather than a top-down surface communication campaign. Following Bill McDonough’s powerful and poetic presentation on how to do good rather than less bad, it was an honor to join the group of Futitects, or architects of the future section, at this stunning conference I felt right at home in.
I wanted to share a vision I have been pushing for a few years which combines many trends into a slow but steady social and environmental impact cocktail. It isn’t the Tesla effect but rather in tone with ‘small is beautiful’ if one should chose to refer to classics such as EF Schumacher and Bucky Fuller. I hope you will forgive the passionate prose to come as it sits deep in me.
It is my feeling that the convergence between Maker Tech, co-working spaces, material science, open source and low-cost bio-hacking is a happy wedding of opportunities with a growing tidal effect. I eagerly expect a great number of DIY entrepreneurial journeys that may help citizens play a significant role in local resilience and sustainability like never before, both in the BOP sector and privileged settings.
Much like solar has popped up on roofs all over and with it the potential of a distributed energy grid going into the remotest parts of the world has become a reality, likewise we could see in the very near future citizens collecting their packaging trash, shred it, heat-press it, reform it or using up-cycled filament to 3d print their open source flat pack furniture. Not only is this already technically possible in my space in London, it will be a major alternative way for developing economies to leapfrog into material abundance in ways similar to how 4G networks have made terrestrial cables redundant in most of Africa.
Before I go further I have to take a step back in time. In 2008 I took a sharp turn in what would have been a purely design-driven career ejecting myself from the goal of taking part in the major league of zero carbon master-planning and green architecture, both of which I felt would only lead to a greater divide and take forever to scale, building signature eco-neighborhoods where the chosen ones would live. Why would it matter if only the 10% would participate in sustainability? So I decided to join the ranks of an emergent group of co-creation and community oriented pioneers to concentrate on a more social and people-centric micro-planning. My organization Clear Village has been a frontrunner of tactical urbanism with programmatic interventions — also called pop-up or acupuncture architecture.
Amongst peers we have come to accept this as participatory placemaking, a burgeoning appreciative science I have named Recoding with a diverse and eclectic global body of work on which I recently published a book with Lucy Bullivant for Routledge, Recoded City: Co-creating Urban Futures. The big picture idea in this is that by helping heal or patch-up neighborhoods in distress or just improving the public realm, one can engineer new commons in neglected or overseen spaces that have tremendous intangible value for cities and society at large. This could be compared to how parks are a new indicator of wealth and wellbeing.
As I did this work I realized that there is a gap in communities and a need for new institutions that supports the style of gathering that has shaped human societies for as long as we can remember : the bonfire. Churches, temples and other places of religious representation have their issues but also an extraordinary power of community building. Doctrine and dogma, particularly when abused, obviously cause the problems we know but I simply refer to these places for their inherent power of gathering. Town halls disapoint, Starbucks scratch the surface in a mercantile way, and shopping malls are certainly not a great humanistic achievement.
After having been a regular at conferences like TED, seen different kinds of innovation environments, and analyzed the formation of new commons in communities, I decided I wanted to imagine a new type of cultural center. So in 2012 I took another sharp turn and founded the Limewharf, a complex of Victorian warehouses on London’s Regent Canal set to become a neighborhood scale cultural innovation place devoted to the experimental and combining curated co-working and co-living.
This is not WeWork or SecondHome, both of which surf on a trend of somewhat superficial co-working just like New York and other global cities are building serviced apartments with common amenities to differentiate real estate developments. They are all nice and enjoyable but they do not, in my humble opinion, build core neighborhood value. They provide a super-lucrative business model pretending to be of a sharing economy style and as such they remain extractive in nature rather than additive and identity shaping.
Aimed to be a sort of DIY futures incubator and community center, the Limewharf is situated in the gentrifying area of Hackney in East London which had been a crime ridden part of town with abandoned light industrial buildings converted into art studios. With the financial crash in 2008 the Richard Florida theory about the ‘creative class’ got hard hit as landlords had to raise rents to make up for losses and evicted many of those who had made Vyner Street, my street, into the beating heart of the Brit Modern art movement. Professional developers started to see the area as a goldmine because the nearby Shoreditch had gone mad and the Olympic site was only a mile away.
This meant that as in so many cases, those who created the special sauce and sought after intangible values of an area would either get priced out or kicked out — all that to the benefit a few hands making a profit off foreign investment and tax evasion led real estate appreciation. This phenomenon affects many global capitals, but London to an extraordinary extent and could be seen as the mixed legacy of Mayor Boris Johnson who had grand ideas but failed to recognize an uncontrolled influx of capital from fragile states with week currencies which has led to massive financial pressure and a sharp rise in inequalities and geographical segregation.
It sparked in me the desire to be as independent as possible rather than rely on public funding and grant schemes to demonstrate that one could take advantage of a toxic market to turn it into an inclusive growth strategy and smart philanthropy scheme, where money would come slowly but surely while helping mitigate the perverse effects of gentrification. So I continued vehemently as an obstinate Don Quixote.
In 2014 I opened London’s first Fablab in the Limewharf, the Machines Room, to act as a open space to inspire people to connect with technology differently and act as a back-up generator for the area’s mutation. This finished the vision I had to start with of a new hybrid institution, both offering a glimpse of the future to locals and building a bridge to the blossoming open and sharing digital economy.
Today we host some of the UK’s most promising start-ups such as TWSU, SAMlabs and Opendesk. We also welcome and curate conferences and corporate away days for leading institutions and train the next generation of entrepreneurs and what we are calling ‘fabcitizens’. Fabcitizenship is a blend of skills and perspectives we put forward to experienced makers as well as newbies to understand the possibilities of distributed manufacturing and how to hack systems in order to design products with a conscience that find they way into more circular economies.
The power of all this is how it draws from the vast free resources available online and in networked communities. The speed of adoption of new services, products and entire ecosystems is truly extraordinary and crushes the spread of mobile phones. The Internet of Things is making every device and object around us and on us part of something allowing for collaborative consumption models we have been hoping to see emerge for years. Maker spaces can help identify how we can actually make this useful to people’s lives, analyzing the data, looking at lifecycles of products, utility vs ownership, how we deal with waste streams and idleness. All in all we can actually become smart citizens helping the greater resource equations with resourcefulness. We can unhinge little by little from the inefficient comforts and dive into the design of efficient comforts.
The final piece of the puzzle has been to curate the street and build a local network of likeminded businesses. The Machines Room now sits as the anchor of London’s, and perhaps Europe’s first, self organizing Maker Technology and Maker Culture cluster we call the Maker Mile. It is a square mile of companies centered around making, some of which are traditional, and others cutting edge. The Maker Mile has the potential to become a true vector for circularity and neighborhood resilience, fundamentally aligned with the values of the Fabcity initiative which will guide cities in how to wisely use maker spaces and how to bring fabrication back while solving complex resource and waste issues they face.
Interestingly, history keeps repeating itself and we should be more attentive to that. In the Italian renaissance, Florence, but many other city-states formed craft clusters some of which have lasted until today. An article in Harvard Business Review recently made an eloquent case of how working clusters concentrating necessary skills for specialized fabrication have an incredible resilience. What is new is that digital fabrication is permeating into every aspect of life, and literally reshaping the way we can design, manufacture, distribute and repurpose stuff. It is the missing link we have been looking which has the potential to unleash exceptional diversity of knowledge to the far corners of the world for a fraction of the price while retaining both quality and avoiding the unfortunate legacy of the current extractive supply chains.
I know you may say this is happening all over the place. It is in some shape or fashion but what matters is how instead of being a random and disorganized process, there is an intent which is not policy related or top down, but rather the product of a curated process with an impresario who devotes himself to a form of non-commercial continuity to allow for a community disruption to occur.
The data is there to prove now that in 5 years my work has contributed to create and relocate over 500 jobs, double the real estate value while supporting the existing community through up-skilling, incubated and accelerated some of the UK’s leading VC funded hardware startups, started the largest private cultural activation center within a mile, and set a course for the area to be widely acknowledged as a center of excellence in technology, arts, crafts and impact venturing.
This is not what I found when I started. In fact it was a rather bleak picture ready to be bought up by developers and turned into a residential district. This is the result of work I am proud of with my team and partners and it will continue to expand and take a new form with an iconic building as we prepare to develop the Limewharf 2.0 plan I have co-designed with Carmody Groarke architects.
Getting back to my allusion to the roads and paths towards sustainability we have undertaken in the past 50 years, many attempts have definitely led to significant awareness about how unsustainable we have become. COP21 was a win for the eco-community in the way it forced everyone including hardcore skeptics to acknowledge a massive effort needs to be initiated to de-risk societies in the face of climate change and man made calamities. All this is well and good but my concerns lie more with the hundreds of millions of victims clumsy and official ‘efforts’ will not prepare or save from the various storms ahead. I think we need to cross-bread a kind of Madmax slash Martian style survivalism doing what you can with your tribe, and a Star Wars slash Ex Machina intelligence of situations being crafty with technology while avoiding to lose our humanity in the process. And to do so we need places where the self reliant tribes will form not against anything but rather for themselves.
The idea that we may be prepared as global citizens to finally become a Gaian civilization in which abundance, efficiency and frugality can combine our production, consumption and waste supply chains into a kind homeostatic harmony truly appeals to me. It is a pragmatic and engaging utopia I wish to believe in because it has some poetry in it. Much like a craft attached to everyone in their own little way, I see the multitude finding both joy and meaning in this sustainability pursuit which has been lacking in the decade long struggle to halt or slow down things. Instead this is about personal acceleration at a grand scale, both collective and individual, nicely in tune with a personal favorite book of the past months, Parag Khanna’s Connectography.
I want to see in citizens and cities the ability to evolve a planetary civilization where networks of intent and our collective imagination can propel us into a new age of virtuous and circular hyperlocal industrialism, where big and small players will be as symbiotic in purpose and endeavors as Whales and Cleaner wrasse. This elegant parasitic relation we see so many cases of in nature is an evolutionary positive externality we may be able to incrementally engineer for human systems. But the next few decades of exponential change could turn out to be a nasty historical period if we don’t educate, prepare and get our hands dirty.
If we simply wait for the established institutions and corporate leaders to perform the needed paradigm shifts it will likely be by dubious transactional efforts like Smart Cities that COP21, SDGs, and the soon Habitat3 agendas will be somehow slowly and unequally fulfilled. Millions of folks could become, and especially the most vulnerable who had no say ever in the reasons of the tragedy, victims of an elitist materialistic Darwinism, where a sad brew of dirty politics, unethical robotics, AI, big data, and genetics, go hand in hand with corrupt capitalistic interests in a minority clinging on to an illusory status quo leading to mass dependence and exclusion. I would not put one against the other, I simply aim to point the importance of preparedness and community designs which empower citizens to own the changes and ability to adapt better. Schools, universities, and other learning bodies are ill equipped to do this job. We need a completely new set of places to learn through experiences.
What I propose is to create a network of these neighborhood institutions, supported by public-private and philanthropic means, which would act as a parallel force to promote certain values, knowledges and critical experiences that could help train a generation of able fabcitizens. This is what I have set out to do in the Limewharf. Now we need more people to join this effort to amplify its impact to bring people as much out of all forms of poverty as into true prosperity.
Thomas Ermacora FRSA is a Danish-italian urbanist, futurist and technologist, author of Recoded City : Co-creating Urban futures for Routledge, founder of Clear Village regeneration agency, and the Limewharf / Machines Room cultural innovation & Fablab complex in London. Advisor to numerous organisations and start-ups, he is a LEAD fellow at the Clinton Global Initiative, founding member of the Maker Mile and Fabcity initiative with the MIT Bits & Atoms Center, and director of neighborhood design & circular economics for Architecture 00.
To read more work from the Near Future Summit, check out the publication on Medium.
