Recently in Property & Architecture Category

Dr Laura James, foundation coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation

What is open data? asks Dr James. They have the Open Definition. Open data is open. You can use it whatever organisation you're in. Data? Not personal data. There shouldn't be any personal privacy issues (most of the time).

We have lots of data, and powerful IT systems. To many eyes, all data problems will be fixed. Data needs to be open to be interwoven. It doesn't need to be semantic - it can be - but it does need to be well enough described to weave it with other information. You'll need a range of skills: developers, designers, ethnographers, to get the most from the data. But open data means we can scale.

We're in really early days for this. It's still new in government - it's barely heard of in business. There are whole new sets of activities - like data wrangling - that bring new costs. Many of those costs are because we're retrofitting open onto existing data.

This is scary disruption. We get to experiment, take risks and occasionally succeed.

Open data leads to more sustainable cities. You understand more about what's happening - so it's easier to get all kinds of organisations to work together to solve the problems.  Who can make the city data useful to people? Startups, SMEs, schools, arts groups, libraries - open data brings them all together. The UK government now shares transactions over £25k monthly. Before they released this data, civil servants couldn't access it. Now they can - so civil servants can see where better deals are to be had.

But it's not a magic potion. It's got to be used  - it needs individuals and organisations to build apps and services to allow it to be accessed and used. We need to collect advice around using it. And if it's open data - you want open tools. And that means open source software. Select a robust open source software project, and you have a sustainable project. You don't need to worry about a propriety vendor putting up prices or going bust. The code is free - services probably won't be. That's fine. Pay more, get better service.

We went from hand-writing html to content management systems, like WordPress. Now we need to go from hand-managed data to data management systems. And there will be a whole range of them, from propriety to open source, from basic to expert. They'll allow management, analysis, proven ace checking, data cleaning... They'll be used right through the lifespan of that data.

CKAN - an open data management system. What's it good for? Sharing, finding and using data. For example - http://publicdata.eu, http://thedatahub.org. dataGM.org - mentioned earlier - was built on it. And it's not just the Open Knowledge Foundation - you can download it yourself, work with other partners, etc.

Opening data can be good for your organisation. wheredoesmymoneygo.org had a lot of downtime when they first launched - and the treasury kept phoning to complain. It was the best way of accessing their own information...

Ian Holt, senior developer programme manager at Ordnance Survey

Two years ago the OS was asked to release mapping data as open data for the first time.

They have data, tools and a network, GeoVation, which is underpinned by their data. They offer location data for Great Britain which supports web and mobile access models by developers. Comes under the "very permissive" open government license. You can grab the data from OS OpenData. When it was first launched, all you could do was get the data. In the years they've been running the API, they've realised you need more than that - like examples of how people have used it, and forums for discussing working methods and problems.

The data's a mix of contextual products - which look like maps - and more analytical data, like boundary lines.

Examples of use:

icoast - created a product with activities along the Dorset coast.

Free iPhone app for Winchester Hat Fair.

Facebook.com/nationaltreasures - game using the data

Most used data sets: OS Street View, OS VectorMap District Raster, and OS VectorMap District Vector.

The analytical stuff is accessed less. How can they encourage more use? Or is it a phased thing? When another data set is released, suddenly the others might become more relevant.

Biggest learning? Just releasing the dataset is not the same a getting people to use it. You need to communicate about it, and you need to provide tools. And data is not just for developers - you need to think about who else might want to use it, and how they will need to engage with it. For example, a wizard that allows you to build a map with markers on it...

You can incentivise people to use the data through global competitions. They've also run workshops called "Open Data Master Classes" - they encourage use of both OS and other government data sets.

GeoVation has a challenge process, which encourages people to pitch solutions to problems. The best ideas are invited to GeoVation camps, and the winners get money to produce their solutions. They've just closed a transforming neighbourhoods project. One around the Welsh Costal Path is running now.

Remember: publication is not the same as communication. And that goes both ways; they like to hear (and publicise) how people are using the data.

Lean Doody, associate at Arup

10 years ago she did a masters at LSE  - then the only talk about IT and cities was about the death of place. Ubiquitous broadband would mean people could work from anywhere - why would they come to the cities.

Ed Glazer's book: Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Made us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier argues that they allow face to face conversations with a diverse number of people - with a range of skills. They enable large numbers of small company sot collaborate, and provide an excellent experience of space - both in safety and in the range of spaces available.

How do smart cities contribute to this?

1. Economic development
2. great places to live and work
3. Growth in the ecological age - they're resource efficient

Report: Information Marketplaces, the new economics of cities. They wrote the report because there had been a lot of discussion of smart cities, but they weren't seeing that translated onto the ground in cities. They wanted to try and help to fill that gap.

ARUP did a report with the C40 - the 38 largest cities in the world committed to making changes around climate change. Many cities are doing things like smart grid, energy metering, water metering and real-time transport information. That all yields data. But these efforts are very silted. They've developed a framework for viewing cities from Level 1 to Level 4 based on how integrated their technology efforts are. San Francisco is a 3.5. Most UK cities are a 1 to 2.

San Francisco has mayoral support for initiatives, and a CIO in place. The look strategically at the problems facing the city, and how technology might eb able to solve that. Congestion is one example. One big driver of congestion is people looking for parking space. So they put sensors in every parking space owned by the city - giving them real-time availability. And now they have variable pricing of parking, to manage demand.

Aarhus in Denmark launched a smart city program in January. No chairs at the launch event - they all stood for 90 minutes... "They're vikings..."  They have a partnership between the University, academic institution, the mayor and local government. And they're spending a year thinking about what they want the city to be. This is a bottom up approach, rather than SF's top down.

Birmingham City council are looking at how they can better connect silos of information with technology, and create a more integrated system of thinking. It's too easy to end up with multiple, unconnected tech projects. Can you use common infrastructure? Common apps? Where can you get efficiencies. All European cities are having to do more with less... Open data fits in positive externalities. Can we release data to let the public achieve economic aims with it.

Cautionary Tales: Sydney had an open hack day, and the winner built a bus arrival app. It was popular and successful - but it was withdrawn two weeks later, because the back end couldn't cope. The city should have thought about that in advance. What will council IT have to put in place to support apps from open data? Developers are going to want SLAs around the data - and you could charge for that. When you procure a service from outside entities, what's the contractual agreement around the data? Cities need to think about this.

The number of open APIs around cities has exploded in recent years. Access to public data is estimated to be worth around €27 billion across Europe.

Three steps for cities:

1. Set a vision and metrics. Think about what you're doing and how technology can fit on.
2. Appoint someone with an overview and vision of what the city is trying to achieve. They need to be an informed client for vendors.
3. Create an information marketplace, and the back end systems to allow it to work.

Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety

mySociety is a charitable enterprise that exists to make people more powerful by giving them access to democratic process - like being able to contact their MPs. WriteToThem allows you to find out who all your political representatives are. It needed data: postcodes, where postcodes are in Britain, and which political unit each geographic point is in. And you also need who has been elected - and the government has the first two bits, but it doesn't have the last in an organised fashion, so they had to go to third parties.

Intially, they had to scrape - steal - some of the data, because it just wasn't available publicly.

FixMyStreet - which allowed people to pinpoint local infrastructure issues - another site they had to steal data to get the product to work. They were committing crimes to create a charitable, public good organisation going. The parts of government that should have been facilitating this just weren't working. And that's how he became passionate about open data. And he's ended up writing policy for both Labour and Collation governments about this.

What has he learnt?

Don't expect to win arguments on economic grounds. Economic decisions are not made on evidence - they're made on evidence and prejudice. And most open data research is new, and doesn't have clear economic evidence yet. By all means, mention economics, but don't expect it to convert the unconverted. Instead, show them tools that will improve their lives.

Don't emphasise making things more accountable. People who are already busy trying to deal with cuts and politics, don't want you to make their lives harder. Instead point out that open web tools -like Google - are often better at finding information than their internal tools are. That makes their lives better. If you can persuade them than a website will stop the phone ringing, with people asking for things, you'll persuade them.

But what happens when you have someone ready to have a go? While the likes of hack days, and data stores are useful, it's far more useful to be good at requests that are already coming through all sorts of channels. Having a hack day while freedom of information requests are building up is an issue.

WhatDoTheyKnow.com - makes it easier to submit freedom of information requests. It has 20 people accessing the data there for every person submitting. it gets many more times traffic than the US initiative - because it's all data people want, rather than data people have chosen to release. You need to empower someone to go looking for these requests, and making sure they happen. They need to bribe/flatter/lunch the relevant people until the information emerges. They should be looking for ways of responding to FoI data requests that's better than asked - if they want a spreadsheet, give them a feed that's already up to date.

Councils need to get into the business of collaborating to build tools that help author the information the needs to come out in a structured way. MySociety is working with a system to help author that sort of structured data. It's easier to author a page on a politician with their system than it is to write it on paper... That's how easy it needs to be.

MySociety is now legit. He had to ask and lobby and campaign. If you can get a button on your site that allows people to ask what they want - and then you to go an away and provide it, then you're there. If your city has a button that says "give me the data I need:" and you have an 8/10 chance of getting it after you press it - you're an open data city.

Jonathan Carr-West, director of Local Government Information Unit

How do we deal with the financial crisis? With climate change?  How do we train our children for jobs that don't exist yet. Think about ageing: there are 10,000 people over 100 in the UK. 2071? there could be a million. Life expectancy increases by five hours a day. These are real problems.

And solutions happen at a local level. These are existential problems - societies don't always survive. Ask the East Islanders. Or the Maya. Some fail to adapt and innovate. There's nothing given about the society we live in. We need to solve these problems.

It's also a question of democracy - giving people the power to respond to these problems - and to respond creatively to local context. We need adaptation and selection of innovation - how do ideas connect? How can people pool their resources? Connected localism - local projects connecting with one another, so we can learn from others' successes and failure. That's how innovation can spread from one neighbourhood to another. We need to be cosmopolitan and local at the same time. For that to work we need other things - a field of exchange.

Historically the city has functioned as a field of exchange - goods, commodities and thinking are exchanged. But new see new digital fields of exchange are emerging. Mumsnet is a brilliant example. You can connect with a paediatric nurse in Australia - or a mother in the same street as you.

Let's think about openness in that context. Field theory - a structured social space in which people interact. These spaces are defined by individual habits and social rules, both informal and formal, We need to adopt openness as part of the habit - and as part of the rules that underpin our interactions.

We don't always know what will be useful. Whatever size of organisation you need to adopt the principle of openness, and that creates a field of exchange, which allows innovation to happen. Don't worry is data is useful - people will find uses for it. Open data is a new city - and allows us to radically transform social services and the way we live.

Leigh Dodds, chief technology officer of Kasabi

Leigh is talking about the foundations of digital cities. But he's starting with Robert Hooke - an early member of the Royal Society - a natural philosopher, inventor, surveyor and architect. he had the hacker ethic. He was closely involved in the rebuilding of London after the great fire.  It was an organic city before the fire, a mix of tangled street and random building. The fire was seen as a chance to rebuild the city, after a terrible period of plague and fire. If their plans had gone ahead, it would have looked much more like Paris: big, wide boulevards. But there was a lack of funds to support the work and the relocations it would involve. Charles II called the rebuilding project to a halt, and moved to an iterative process based on legislated city standards.: width of streets, bricks for construction and so on. And it empowered Hooke to go and work with the community.

Now the fire is data. We have almost an embarrassment of riches in data available: but there's more that could and should be opened up. We need some better infrastructure: ubiquitous wireless, better broadband. And local services need to become more timely and efficient. Data underpins all of that.

We've created lots of data hub - but he has a problem with them. They're about governments publishing to a single community: developers. They need to be more multi-tenent. More organisations need to share their information through it, and more communities interact with the published data.  We need to make them more engaging places for the whole community.

A key aspect of a linked data approach is about giving everything unique identifiers: places buses, organisations, trains. Everything you want to describe. And they already have them - in propriety systems or behind paywalls. So it's hard to combine data because of those barriers. A lot of the open data push is about open identifiers. Tim Berners-Lee is advocating a set of technologies, but the important thing is a common code. An URL for each thing is one approach. Context make sit easier to maintain and link data.

We need to encourage digital graffiti - if there's a standard for identification, then the community can come along and start annotating it.

Data isn't just data sets - it's a useful piece of infrastructure we can build upon. And it's an evolution of the role public authorities have always done: defining spaces, and building within it, digitally or physically.

An audience member asks about privacy concerns around personal data. Leigh replies that there's an initiative around creating data hubs around yourself: managing your own data and who can access it.

Who should publish identifiers? Leigh suggests that whoever is mandated to create them, should own them and have responsibility for making sure they stay around and are sustainable.

Data quality? There's been lots of examples of data quality being improved with lots of eyes on it. Maybe the solution is not to clean it before publication, but to publish and let collaborative cleaning happen. We'll see an Open Street Maps type collaboration happen.

I'm at the Open Data Cities conference all day. And this is the opening session:

Sadly, John Barradell, chief executive of Brighton and Hove City Council isn't with us, as he's sick. He's got stand ins: Charlie Stewart, strategic director and John Shewell, head of communications at Brighton and Hove City Council.

John:

Busy week: 3rd Brighton marathon last weekend. This conference comes at an important time for public services. We're at an interesting change - not just in the UK, but across the globe. The future of local government - and how opening up public data - can nudge people into opening up about what's important to them. That's our goal: connecting the city with the place. Inovolving people in design and delivery of public services.

It's an iterative process - a journey that will continue for years to come. In May, we'll have the Brighton festival, which has become one of the great cultural festivals of the world. It was proposed in 1964, and was first held in 1967. It's brought together by collaborate - private and public, community groups and cities. It gets more ambitious every year - the spirit of the city. Collaboration works. It reaches into every part of the city - from schools to housing estates. That sort of collaboration lies at the heart of open data cities.

The concept of cities as systems: harnessing human and social capital, with infrastructure, to fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life. Democracy really matters - not just at elections, but a conversation every day. Open data is part of that process.

750,000 people are members of a political organisation. 7.5m want to be more involved in decisions that effect their lives. The challenges is in finding ways of allowing that that suit them. This is about creating a democratic organisation; one that is open to discussion and scrutiny, and which is accountable. It needs to protect the functions of the state we value the most, while allowing more social action. We need to understand the difference between the state as provider and the role of arbitrating democratically between equally valid needs. The second role is connecting the citizens: facilitating dialogue so we can shape the future together. We need to create space to allow those conversations to happen.

How do we unlock data so citizens han influence decisions before they're made? There is a golden triangle:

• public serives
• citizens
• innovation

We want to connect these to create a healthier city. We want to cede control to citizens in return for active collaboration. It's as much a shift in attitude as the way we want to work.

Companies as ecosystems, not as top down machines. Strong values. Responsive to needs of customers. These are the principles we feel are right for the city council.

Charlie:

Two years into a change process at the council. It's not finished - and it may never be: it's a journey. The  main aim is to bring the council closer to the community. They've been involved in initiative alike CityCampyBrighton. Another project is Patchwork: using social media to join up professionals to support families. They're trying to work collaboratively across agencies. The worked with practitioners to design an app allowing the agencies to see who is involved with which family.

We Live Here - building systems using traditional and new media, and the basis for neighbourhood councils.

Beside sthe publication of various data sets on the website, there's the Brighton and Hove  Local Information Service (BHLis), for use of everyone across the city. They want to improve their transparency and therefore their accountability. There at the start of a journey, to become a curator of the city's needs and data, and to work with all organisations in the city to improve the outcomes. It's about loose connections and networked organisations.

They need to move beyond FoI requests to really accessible datasets.

I'm in the midst of a small but interesting piece of work for some old property industry contacts, and it's really caught my imagination. I'm talking to some businesses that have successfully transformed their company with input from a firm of consultants, and the stories that are emerging are compelling and inspiring.

I've long wondered about the way publishing businesses have tried to go through this period of transition. Change management is hard. It is, in essence, a whole set of skills in it own right, a discipline if you like. And I've seen precious few - if any - publishing businesses call in the professionals. They've instead relied on internal change agents, people who agitate for change from within. People like I was for RBI, for example.

There are two problems with this:

1. The change agents often have the required craft skills, but have to learn change management as they go along.
2. They are part of the company's hierarchy, so anything they say will be filtered through the internal politics of the organisation.

The advantage of bringing in an outsider to do some or all of this work is a powerful combination of skills, focus on change management and providing someone to challenge and provoke who isn't invested into the political infrastructure of the company. 

This isn't any great insight, I admit. But having worked as an internal change agent, who is now doing some initial projects as an external change consultant, I'm beginning to see that the latter might be the more effective role. 

It's a rare pleasure when multiple elements of my interests intersect in one event. Pleasingly, that's happening with next Friday's Open Data Cities event.

10 years as a commercial property journalist left me with an abiding interest in our urban fabric, and specifically the planning, design and urban development approach, as much as the building developing and letting which was the bread-and-butter of the journalism I was doing. And that's why this conference excites me so much -  certainly enough to cough up for the early bird ticket back in December.

Greg Hadfield, the conference organiser, has been arguing for more and more public data to come into the open, in usable, structured formats, so other bodies, be they private, public, charitable or journalistic, can dig into them and find ways of making our communities work better. And he's pulled together a good panel of speakers to explore the issues. 

The potential for journalism is obvious - if we have more information about our cities, we have more to analyse and compare. But honestly, my main interest in attending will be in finding out how to make our cities better places to live. Having more information in the public domain about how our cities are used, how are inhabitants use these spaces, interact in them, conduct business in them, can only help us make more informed decisions as we develop and redevelop them. One major theme that I see emerging this year is how we rework our towns in the light of the cyclical and structural changes (see posts passim). More brains working on more information can only help us get to more intelligent solutions.

Anyway, that's my little bugbear, and I hope to catch up with some property people while I'm there to do a little brainstorming on the subject.

I'll quote Greg on the bigger picture:

Emerging technologies are heralding an era of open-data cities - where data is used to build applications and services, to help citizens lead more creative and prosperous lives in more democratic and cohesive communities.

Hard to argue with...

Tickets are still on sale. If you're interested in our urban landscapes, I think it's a good investment of time and money. Plus: after event drinkies in Brighton on a Friday night are always fun. ;-)

(And yes, I'll be liveblogging it)

If you're interested in our urban infrastructure, Julian Dobson is always worth a read. His latest post is a good summary of the challenges facing various initiatives to regenerate our high streets:

The real problem is that neither today's announcement nor the NPPF address the underlying issue, which is that the high street is on a long term trajectory of change. The Genecon report, Understanding High Street Performance, made that crystal clear. If you don't have time to read it, watch the news instead: a record number of vacant shops, and retailers continuing to struggle.

Hard not to agree with this part of it:

The core of our argument was that we need to begin by thinking of the high street as the social heart of a town or suburb, not just the commercial heart. We need to reclaim town centres for community activity, learning, leisure and living. Viable retail and economic uses can then cluster around activities that people want to engage in, and in places they want to go to. Our main shopping spend went out of town years ago, and is now going online.

My local high street is increasingly dominated by social eating places - and is all the better for it:

One of the advantages of often using the RSA House as my London office is that there are some really excellent lunchtime events in my workplace. Today, Avner de-Shalit, professor of democracy and human rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was talking about the The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, a book he co-authored with Daniel Bell on the identity of cities in a global age.

We live in an global era - it is flat in the sense that it is easy to move from one place to another, he suggested. But it's also flat in he sense that it's not profound. There's less debate about ideology than there used to be. However different states try to be from one another, the demands of the global market, the IMF, international law, etc, actually drive them into a stae of relative similarity. What does it mean to be French, German or Italian? It matters less and less, he suggested, but people want to feel particularity. Cities shape our lives because they promote radically different lives.

The book argues empirically that the urban identity is supplanting the national one, and that it's a positive thing. The authors studied nine cities, and compared them with other cities in the same countries.

He floated some nice ideas:

• The stroller as the botanist of the street.
• Why no children in the public specs of New York? You cannot walk in the streets if you are a child. At child height all you can see is legs moving.
• Civicism - a sense of pride, love and desire to contribute to a city. Use this local patriotism to start to restrict the power of the state. Cities cannot fight each other - just complain.
  

And he had some definitions of the spirits of cities for us. Paris is the non-pasteurised city, leaving pasteurised to the bourgeois. Berlin is intolerance and acceptance - but mixed with intolerance. He explained this one in some detail. All modern buildings in the city are built with glass and are transparent; a stark contradiction of the Nazi era. However, there have been peaks and troughs of tolerance in Berlin. Tolerance has meant indifference rather than inclusion. On a different path now? We believe so. Berliners are no longer trying to be perfect.

The city as metaphor for corruption and crime is an outdated idea, he suggested. The idea of a city needs to be meaningful to local communities.

Some more ideas from the Q&A, moderated by Dr Fran Tonkiss, Reader in Sociology, and Director of the Cities Programme, LSE:

• If the idea of a city is engineered top down as a marketing exercise, it needs to be done in a way which allows people to be involved in the process.
  
• Cities have the right size - but not the right budget, so there are some problems with which they can't cope.
  
• When we go to a city for the first time, we walk and walk and walk until we collapse - because we want to get a sense of the city.
  
• London has different, competing stories. London was more like a federation until the arrival of the mayor. After the war, London decided to be a global city - the sane alternative to New York. A cosmopolitan city. Other cities like London: Tokyo. Maybe there's room for a book about neighbourhoods.
  
• Transport - some cities are good to walk, some are lousy to walk. Lots of books about the workable city.
  
• Climate effect on cities? Detroit was doomed by the cold. Cities that flourish in America are often determined by climate. The warmer the better.
  

I suppose, as a journalist and writer, the idea of cities having, in effect, a narrative of self appeals to me deeply. But the underlying principle, that of the city replacing the nation state as a point of identification, is compelling. I suppose I'd better read the book now...

If you thought I was quiet towards the end of last week and over the weekend, there was a good reason why: I was preparing myself to open the RICS Social Media Conference 2011. It was very lovely of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors to invite me to introduce the indutry I wrote about for a decade to the ideas that have been central to my working life for the last five years. And I had a blast doing it.

Fellow speaker Kimm Tasso has blogged about the day, and I've posted something on What Works Online, a group blog written by RBI staff to help businesses learn, well, what works online…

A word of warning: things may well be quiet this week over here on One Man & His Blog. It's MIPIM week, and that means a busy week for Estates Gazette, the magazine that I spend several days a week working with.

A good chunk of their team is off to Cannes already, and I'm doing what I can to provide support for their digital journalism efforts from London. I'll also be doing regular aggregation posts, rounding up the best of MIPIM blogging from around the web.

And that's not going to leave me much free time for blogging here…

be2camp Brum vignette from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.

A brief flavour of be2camp Brum

Fowey from Polruan, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

You see that odd little piece of architecture on the building to the left of the church?

It was built solely so that the house would be taller than he church, after a dispute between the owner and the vicar…

I'm sticking more photos from my Cornwall holiday up on Coffee & Complexity, my new general interest blog.

Practical Blogging talks about the coffee shop as an ideal place to write, based on an article in USA Today.

This is a familiar idea. In fact, it's been something of an obsession for me since I ran an article in Estates Gazette on the idea of coffee shops becoming the new offices for mobile workers nearly three years ago. But lately, my thinking has been turning on its head. Why are these places more conducive to writing than more conventional work environments? I certainly find it easier to do any form of writing in a coffee shop, or on a train, or on a sofa, than I do in my work or home office.

What's the psychology of that, and how could we use it to improve our work environments?

Ah, I love the fact that the almost daily press releases from the residential property firms still drop into my work inbox. Othewise I'd miss gems like this:

NUDE BRITANNIA

84% of Brits would buy a home next door to naturists

The great heatwave of 2006 may already seem like a distant memory, but as the summer draws to a close, a new survey by property website propertyfinder.com reveals that millions of Britons have been stripping off completely on terraces, balconies and in gardens all over the UK.

A startling 19.7% of respondents say they have got their kit off outside while at home on at least one occasion, equivalent to around 11 million people. The figures also suggest people are not going to great lengths to ensure nobody sees them, with 21% saying that they have caught their neighbours in the altogether at some point.

Thanks to Primelocation for that little insight into the great British public...

Blogging seems to have hit the built environment in a big way in recent months. I've just had to reorganize my "Built Environment" category in my RSS feed reader into a number of sub-categories, because the list of worthwhile blogs was getting unwieldy.

Is this going to have an impact on my day job? Time will tell.

Technorati Tags: architecture, property, built environment

The Office, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

I'm back in the office today, after a week working remotely.

Much as I enjoy working from home, or other locations, I am glad to be back in EG's Procter Street hub. Working from home is an excellent way of concentrating on particualr tasks, getting copy edited and sent to the sub-editing desks and clearing e-mail.

But the social buzz of the office is still the best way of generating ideas. If we do, as a culture, shift towards a more mobile working paradigim, then our office spaces are going to have to develop to reflect their primarily social role.

Jane Jacobs, one of the most interesting writers on urban environments, has died, aged 89. She was the author of books such as the Death and Life of Great American Cities and Dark Age Ahead, both of which I recommend highly.

The world is poorer for her passing, but richer for her writing.

[via Panchromatica]

Technorati Tags: jane jacobs, urbanism, writers

1. I think I scared a lot of people this morning. I got onto my normal morning train at Lewisham, to find an unattended bad sat in the entrance way. I asked the assembled commuters if it belonged to anyone, and got no reply. Slowly, dozens of eyes widened in fear, as they realised what that could mean. Luckily, a small, embarrassed voice from the other end of the carriage said that it was theirs. People forget all too quickly, don't they?

2. How come, when I give a book a bad review in print, the first enquiry we get about it is someone asking where they can buy it? (The book in question is 30 St Mary Axe: A Tower For London. While it's not much use for the property professional, the more lay readers here may well enjoy it.)

3. Is there a single woman in London who looks good in those mid-calf length trousers that are all the rage at the moment? If so, I haven't seen here.

Norfolk and Nowich Hospital, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

Off taking Mum to hospital for an appointment and some tests. And bored, while waiting. So, phone pic time. It's a dull, corporate looking hospital from the outside, but inside it's the most impressive hospital I've been in. Friendly, spacious, efficient and, based on Mum's treatment, I'm very impressed.

Heritage buildings and hospitals are not good partners, in my book. New build all the way.

If anyone is still reading this blog because of my property industry connections, they might want to check out a couple of links to property-related developments from the Chancellor's pre-budget statement from my work blog today.

Technorati Tags: tax, budget, gordon brown, pre-budget report, development, land tax, property, real estate, politics

I used my precious free time in Madrid to walk down Paseo de la Castellana, the main road that forms a spine down the centre of the city. One of the first things I encountered was Bernabeu Stadium, where Real Madrid play. Normally, I'm neither a fan of football nor of concrete buildings, but this one caught my attention.

Perhaps it was the striking design. Perhaps it was the copious open space around it. Maybe it was just the light - but I did like it.

Lewisham roadworks, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

What great timing some people have. Just as the roads get busy after the summer break, the road through the heart of Lewisham is about to be dug up.

Ah, well, soon we won't have any petrol to drive down the dug-up streets.

{I'm not sure the generators running those signs are doing much for Lewisham's commitment to protecting the environment, either.)

The Wharf, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

The other morning, I was forced to catch the DLR to work, rather than my accustomed train. I changed from the Jubilee Line at Heron Quays, and was immediately struck by how much more aesthetically pleasing Canary Wharf has become since the towers proliferated.

Just for a moment, I felt I was looking up at a film backdrop, not a real view at all. And that pleased me.

Technorati Tags: architecture, buildings, canary wharf, london, property

This looks like a very interesting book.

Technorati Tags: books, london

Tarmac is shit, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

Spotted in a park in Bristol.

Architectural criticism gets everywhere these days.

Yesterday, I rather cryptically mentioned that I wouldn't be writing about property and architecture on this blog anymore.

To understand why, we need to take a step backwards. During the day, I'm the features editor of Estates Gazette, a weekly magazine covering the commercial property magazine, and one of the biggest business magazines in the country. A couple of weeks ago, the executive editor of New Scientist, a stablemate to EG, turned up for a meeting with my editor. I was called into the meeting. Our publisher, Reed Business Information, was getting into blogging. Would I be interested in helping?

Silly question, really.

So, as of the weekend just gone, Reed's new site, full of blogs from the editors and senior staff of several business magazines, is live. It's called Bizbuzzmedia.

The reason that I won't be covering property and architecture here any more is that I'll be doing it on company time, for a company blog. The EG Blog is born. Go visit.

Incidentally, the last entry may well be the last "Property & Architecture" post on this blog for a while.

This is good news, trust me.

More details tomorrow.

John Massengale makes a compelling argument for the extension of congestion charging to New York:

Why do we allow millions of New Yorkers to be inconvenienced and poisoned by a small number of drivers who would rather sit in traffic jams in their own cars than take public transport or a taxi?

He goes on to argue for a reassignment of space on NYC's avenues with photos. Well worth a look.

CNN.com - Tokyo tops list of world's costliest cities - Jun 21, 2005:

LONDON, England (AP) -- Japan's Tokyo and Osaka are the world's most expensive cities with London in third place, according to a survey released Monday. New York, the most costly of American cities, placed 13th.

So, my American friends, never again tell me how expensive the East / West coast is. You're not a patch on us here. Only the Japanese can manage to make their city lives more expensive - but they have even less land than us.

Technorati Tags: cities, london, property

Neighbourhoods

Found via Panchromatica

Technorati Tags: property, urbandesign

An interesting property-related blog:

urban cartography

Found via City Comforts.

Technorati Tags: property, urbandesign

I was driving back through Deptford, returning from one of the many, many journeys I've been making to the local skip in recent weeks, when I noticed how, well, upmarket parts of it are beginning to look. I know, I know, Deptford and �upmarket� are not ideas you'd normally associate with one another, but the signs are clear: Deptford is gentrifying.

This is the second time I've seen a part of London suddenly start to regenerate. A decade ago, I lived in the East End, just prior to the sudden gentrification of the areas within easy Central Line reach of the city. In my visits back since, it's become steadily unrecognizable. In that same decade my local area, Lewisham, has stayed much the same. Oh, sure, there have been changes. The huge influx of East Europeans into the area around Lee High Road has been very noticeable, as the noticeably growing ethnic diversity of the area. The secondary shops around the town centre are much better occupied than they were a decade ago. But, fundamentally, Lewisham remains in much the same physical level it was back then. Regeneration on building stock has been, at best, small and incremental.

What separates Lewisham from the other two, I suspect, is that Lewisham never sank quite so low. It never became quite so run down. It's an odd thought, but areas which want to go up-market, probably have to go very down-market first.

Technorati Tags: deptford, lewisham, property, regeneration, urbandesign

As I walked to work this morning, Lee High Road was ablaze. Or, to be more accurate, the former Hartwell Ford garage that's being demolished was ablaze. Lorna reports seeing an unfortunate cigarette / diesel incident that caused the fire. Whoops. Whoosh.

Now, I don't mean to criticise the team taking down the building. Actually, I lie. I do. In the past few weeks, they've had planned fires belching out nasty black smoke. They've brought a kid with them during half term and allowed him to play on the site. They wander around using welding torches without the slighted sign of protective equipment.

Glad as I am to see something being done with the site, these guys make me nervous.

Technorati Tags: cons, demolition, fire, leehighroad, lewisham

And we're not talking about the magazine:

BBC NEWS | Business | Country life key for homebuyers:
Homebuyers value being near green open space more than living close to shops or other amenities, a survey from Halifax Estate Agents suggests.
More than one in four homebuyers chose proximity to the countryside as the most important factor when choosing where to live.
Fewer than one in five said that being near shops, a good school or transport links was the key deciding factor.

Technorati Tags: countryside, homes, property, residential

Edinburgh Police Box, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

Dr Who may be back on our tellies after a 15 year hiatus, but the police box has never left the streets of Scotland.

Did you know that Edinburgh Council even has guidelines for maintaining them?

Technorati Tags: policebox, tardis, streetfurniture, urbandesign, edinburgh, property

Brown admits that UK housing market is screwed:

BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown unveils cheap mortgage plan:
More than 100,000 people could get onto the property ladder in the next five years thanks to a part-ownership plan, Chancellor Gordon Brown has said.
Buyers would have to raise as little as half the cost of homes sold on the open market, he said.
The remaining equity in the house would be shared by the government and the bank or building society.

So, you owe the bank for half your house, it owns another chunk outright, and the government owns the rest. Nice, simple solution there, Gordon.

Technorati Tags: economy, politics, property, UK

Interesting reflection on parking within the urban context from Veritas et Venustas:

Parking in Paris and Detroit:
Another response is underground parking. Urban purists oppose this, because it caters to the car. Paris has used underground parking very well. Squares like the Place Vend�me that used to be cluttered with cars now have underground parking with formal, stone caps paving the plaza. Less formal squares like the Place Henri IV have less formal solutions, like pea gravel and trees in orderly patterns - see above. The formal and less formal solutions are another illustration of the Transect.

I'm thinking about car use in cities after experiencing the horror of Edinburgh's roads. They've become exponentially more crowded since I was last a regular visitor, 15 years ago.

Technorati Tags: architecture, property, regeneration

Possibly not the best located B'n'B in the world right now�

I grabbed this one from a bus from Edinburgh airport to Waverley Bridge. House prices have rocketed in the Scottish capital to London-like proportions. Still, there were plenty of properties near the centre still in the process of being renovated, or in need of some attention. If the market holds up, there's some money to be made there.

Technorati Tags: edinburgh, property, regeneration

One interesting observation from the day so far - the Scottish Parliament here in Edinburgh has a completely different context to the London equivalent.

Not only is there greenery a very short distance away from the front door, as show in the picture, but just round the corner is what looks a lot like council housing - and is certainly not expensive residential development by any stretch of the imagination.

Sure, it's just off the Royal Mile, and adjacent to the old palace of Holyrood, but you get more of a feeling of diverse community around it than you ever do in Edinburgh.

Whatever you think of the design of this unusual building, you can't argue with its context. The MSPs aren't caught in a little bubble of privilege and urban life in the same way the Westminster types are. That pleases me.

Technorati Tags: architecture, edinburgh, scotland, parliament, property

Selfridge's in the Bullring, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

For a long time I've been very unsure about the very distinctive design of the Selfridge's store in Birmingham. I saw it for myself yesterday, and I now see that no photograph really does it justice. It's a lovely piece of work, and one that fits into the urban context far better than I expected.

Google has launched its map service in the UK. And it's rather good.

It has the clarity of design and ease of searching that are Google hallmarks. A quick search of a few locations I'm very familiar with proves that the maps are good. Let's see how they pan out in regular use.

Committed contrarians, protestors and activists' news site Indymedia has decalred Lewisham a "rotten borough" because it's allowing developers to build on part of Deptford Park:

The Rotten Borough of Lewisham is failing its local community with its planning policy, with its housing policy. It is though the developers best friend, providing ideal development opportunities. In practice it is no different to many other Councils that fail to act in the best interests of the local community but are quick to provide development and get rich quick opportunities for property developers.

Ah-ha! Nasty council and eeeevil developers in league again!

Of course, there's almost certainly another side of this story, and I note that Indymedia only links to its own news stories, and a handful of other protest-related sites.

Any comments Councillors Brown or Milton?

By Borough Market, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

As promised, a few pics from Borough Market.

One of the charms of the place is the feeling that a small portion of Victorian London survives surprisingly unchanged. This pic catches some of that.

New Ikea, New danger:

BBC NEWS | England | London | Man stabbed in Ikea opening chaos:
One man was stabbed near Ikea's newest store and several people were hurt in the crush as thousands flocked to its midnight opening.

Nine ambulances went to the Edmonton store, north London, after reports that up to 20 people were suffering from heat exhaustion and minor injuries.

Amazing the effect that flat packed, semi-disposable Swedish furniture has on people, isn't it?

Apparently, a coat of paint and a ant-social behaviour hotline is all it needs to lift a sink estate out of deriliction and crime.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | A deprived area fights back: From a distance, Strathmore Crescent in Newcastle resembles a well-ordered community. But look a little closer and you'll spot the fake front doors, painted by artists disguising derelict houses as respectable homes. This is north Benwell in Newcastle: An area blighted by crime where terrace houses were once sold for �1. Today, some of those houses which were boarded up are being renovated as part of the drive to rebuild communities and combat anti-social behaviour.

Does that article feel a little too glib to anyone else?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Urban underground 'faces risks':
Natural disasters can be a threat to the growing expansion of big cities underground, the United Nations says.

It says developers often burrow beneath the surface without knowing enough of the risks and with inadequate plans to lessen the effects of any disaster.

I imagine this will be taken more seriously than it would have been a month ago.

I like the green roof concept. Now, this probably isn't a proper green roof. It's probably just a building with some trees on pots on the roof. But I still like it.

It adds an organic note to the otherwise artificial environment of Red Lion Street and somehow hints that the inside is also partially on the outside. You get the feeling there's a space up there for humans to enjoy.

Anyway, it's just cool.

Click on the pic for a bigger version if you fancy it.

I know that everyone from the LSE to Terry Farrell has been calling for increased urban density, but is 25 metres square too samll?

This design suggests not:

MoCo Loco: Optibo

Where do they keep all their stuff?

[via .point5b.]

Given the current obsession with affordable housing in the UK, these thoughts by David Sucher make for interesting reading:

City Comforts Blog: Who really wants Affordable Housing?

Remember that business about a student suing the architect of the new Freedom Tower on the World Trade Centre site? Brian Micklethwaite comments here, and very interesting it is, too.

While on the intellectual property front, interested readers might wish to note that Marvel Comics (creators of Spider-man, the Hulk, the X-Men and Daredevil) are suing the companies behind the online game City of Heroes, on the basis that the game can be used to recreate their characters, despite the fact that doing so is against the game's terms and conditions. Students might want to discuss the possibility of Marvel extending its efforts to manufacturers of pen and paper, for example.

Gothamist links to some very interesting news on the Freedom Tower, the putative replacement for the World Trade Centre which is under construction in New York:

Ex-Yale student sues designer of Freedom Tower, alleges copyright infringement

Yes, it appears that a student is claiming that he showed some of his designs to David Childs, the architect of the Ground Zero site (which was masterplanned by Daniel Libeskind, who has his own legal issues around the development). Those designs bear a remarkable resemblance to finished product, or so he maintains.

So, that's an architect suing the developer and a student suing an architect. What a noble symbol this building will be.

I should have blogged this a few days ago:

Brian comments on the latest GRID.

External feedback on the magazine remains good. Does it have a long term future? Time will tell.

Real-estate agents have been on the endangered-profession list for a while (thanks, Internet and 2% brokers), but Home Depot may make them extinct. In seven southern states, the DIY store will be testing home-selling kits aimed at the growing for-sale-by-owner market. For $12.95, you get a sign to put in your yard, but more important, you get a listing and photos on Owners.com, which claims to be the largest for-sale-by-owner site, with 5 million customers

Funnily enough, I'm running a piece in Saturday's EG that shows some early moves in this direction in the UK, too.

[via Ben Hammersley]

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Risk-taking architect bailed out after projects founder:

Alsop Architects, one of Britain's most colourful and internationally renowned practices, has been forced into receivership by a financial crisis. Directors of the practice headed by the outspoken architect and artist Will Alsop have sold 40% of the business to R Capital, a London-based firm of venture capitalists, as part of a rescue plan after a string of dramatic and costly projects worldwide came to nothing, according to a report in today's Building Design magazine.

Designing large boiled sweets clearly isn't as profitable as it once was.

Found on my travels - CamberwellOnline Blog:

I noticed while I was walking today that the old Mary Datchelor School (which then became the Save The Children head office) and the Butterfly tennis courts between Grove Lane and Camberwell Grove have both been acquired by St George PLC. Looks like there’s going to be a big new development there, and judging by their website they deal in pretty high-end housing. Is Camberwell about to become super-chic?

(More here.)

If St George are involved, almost certainly. They don't deal in low and stuff and they tend to pick up-and-coming new markets with some accuracy.

I'm sending out copies of the latest issue of GRID, which hit the stands with EG a few weeks ago. If anyone would like a copy, leave a comment, and I'll get in contact for an address.

The Mercator Estate, very near One Flat, my humble abode, has recently developed a striking new look. How could I resist popping out to take a quick photo of it? A fine example of the penal school of architecture, the new fence has given the recently-refurbished estate that much sought-after "concentration camp" aesthetic that's so popular in urban design circles these days.

Snarking aside, I do realise that there are some serious crime issues around the estate (and in the near vicinity, I might add), but was this really the best way to deal with them? It's ugly, it's brutal and, frankly, I'm less than convinced that it'd actually keep the determined little brats that make up much of the crime problem around here out.

Time will, as always, tell, but I'm not holding our much hope.

The Environment Agency now allows you to find out the flood risk of your home via a postcode search on it's website. I've known about the technology and research that underlies this sit for a while, but its good to see it live and available to the general public:

Environment Agency - Home page

Y'know, one of the things that really brings home man's achievements in the areas of science, design and construction is a really awe-inspiring picture of a new office tower from the air. The amount of technology and creative human thought that allows that image to exist really is incredible, if you start thinking about it.

Wow.

Oh, look. Deptford is the new Left Bank:

First Came The Artists...

I'd have a whole lot more confidence in the story, though, if it didn't contain this line:

Hales Gallery, a go-ahead contemporary art venue, run by Paul Hedge and Paul Maslin (where celebrated Brit-artists Jake & Dinos Chapman launched their first show) and the Museum of Installation, dedicated to installation art, are also putting Deptford on London's cultural map.

That'll be the Hales Gallery that moved out and headed for the East End six months ago, right? Oh, dear.

And, now I think about it, what about that standfirst?

A creative revolution is taking place in Deptford, Del Boy's old stamping ground in south London

Now, wasn't Peckham Del Boy's preferred haunt? Never mind. Who expects research in a puff piece about £360,000 apartments in a converted mill?

Students of property marketing might also like to note this development's web address:

http://www.themillgreenwich.co.uk/. [Warning, annoying sound when site opens]

Land Securities discusses swap with Slough

The BBC finds out what the public would like to see demolished. Some surprising choices in there.

Ah, now this is interesting. Radio 3 is doing a series of shows themed around the built environment.

[via no, 2 self]

I've been applying my architectural eye to my own neighbourhood, wondering quite what it is that makes parts of Lewisham so problematic. One of them really leapt out at me. Lewisham suffers badly from visual clutter.

The problem is particularly pronounced on Lee High Road, where the above pictures were taken. The combination of gaudy façades and multiples extrusions of signage into the space above the street make the whole place feel busy and, frankly, cheap. It's almost certainly counter-productive, too. That sort of visual clutter discourages people from exploring. There's a reason why the best shopping streets are cleanly and simply signed and some councils ruthlessly control the visual aspect of the retail areas.

A change is afoot in the planning laws. The government has issues a new Planning Policy Statement which favours modern design over traditional design in new country houses. This is a placement of Gummer's Law, the planning policy which loosened restraints to allow more country house development.

In the constant battle between architectural innovation and our nostalgic heritage, it look like Labour has taken a side.

In the late 1980s, I went to Yugoslavia for what would be my last family holiday. I was about to start University, and the four of us never went on holiday all together again.

During that wonderful two weeks, we visited a spectacular bridge in Mostar. Five years later, it was rubble, destroyed on the Balkans conflicts that raged through the area.

Now, it's back.

Another small step towards healing the region.

Another blog dies, this time in the property arena. It must be the time of year for it.

The Grauniad gets all excited about the idea that coffee shops are becoming a transitory space between work and home, where you can relax or carry out business:

Guardian Unlimited Shopping | Food & drink. | Whipless or Skinny? Our flirtation with the bean gets serious

Fair enough. I ran a feature on a similar theme nine months ago and, as we pointed out at the time, it's hardly a new idea. After all, the coffee shops of the 17th Century played almost exactly the same role.

Ken Shuttleworth, subject of a profile in the last GRID, has a new scheme to rival the gherkin up his sleeve.

Brian covers all the bases here and here.

A few days back I posted a picture and asked people to guess where I was. Well, I was up at the very top floor of 30 St Mary Axe, better known to the good people of London as the gherkin.

I can't blog about what I was doing there, but I did take the opportunity to grab some photos. Odd internal reflections and some haze mean they didn't come out as well as I would have liked, but they're still quite fun. Enjoy!

I really must get around to putting my blogroll back into my template. Oh, and doing something about the dull header. Ah, well, after this weekend, I'll have much more time on my hands.

On the property and architecture front:

Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity is an interesting blog. In fact, it's more like two blogs, running in parallel. It reminds me of The Guardian's Wonders & Blunders.

The site was linked from Pancromatica, the blog of a reformed planner. I've had a chance to interview many planners for Estates Gazette down the years. His blog carries the experiences from that part of his life clearly...

I really should have mentioned this before, but the New City Architecture exhibition opened at the end of last week. It's a fascinating exhibition looking at current and future architecture within the City of London, with plenty of models.

EG TV has done a piece on the show, which will give you a feel for it. (People using Macs or on browsers other than Internet Explorer might want to click here instead.)

David Sucher points out that all might not be well for the planned redevelopment of the WTC site in New York:

City Comforts Blog: WTC Update

This nifty little mixed-use (but mainly residential) tower is due to rise into the air near Deptford Broadway soon. Certainly, the relevant planning decisions seem to have been granted. Strange as it may seem, Deptford is something of a hotbed of regeneration right now because, as someone pointed out to me at a mixed-use drinks reception recently, it has bags of potential. In this case "potential" means great swathes of redundant industrial land, and a good selection of buildings that could do with being knocked down as soon as possible.

A tower seems a brave move in the area, but in the context of the coloured blocks that make up the interesting, if isolated, One SE8 development, not as out of place at it might have been once. No doubt there will be the normal clashes between disgruntled locals and incoming yuppies, but soon Deptford will become the new Southwark and will be full of trendy restaurants and a branch of Starbucks. We've got them in Greenwich and Blackheath already, and you know how they spread...

The design of this tower comes courtesy of John MacAslan & Partners, and you can find out more at the firm's website. The developer is Brookmill Estates.

(This post in response to a promise made to Inspector Sands of Casino Avenue)

With May's GRID on the presses, my sections of the weekly beast we call EG running smoothly (for now), my mind is turning towards plotting out the next few months for both. I had a brief chat with Sir Richard Rogers at a recent breakfast meeting (I did the typical journalist thing of not paying enough attention to the invite, turning up half-awake and bleary eyed and finding myself talking to the Lord Mayor of London before my first coffee), it occurred to me that I need to read around urban theory a little more.

When I find some of my favourite built environment blogs are all talking about the same book, as is a blog I don't normally associate with urban development issues, I can take a hint. I think I should check out Jane Jacob's Dark Age Ahead.

Off to Amazon with the corporate credit card...

More thoughts and reactions once I have it. Any other suggestions for my bookshelf?

A walk through Brimingham.

A friend's musical experimentation.

A post about Cardinal Place (just in case any of the LandSec people who read this blog drop by).

I blundered across Skyscraper News UK while fact-checking the latest issue of GRID. It collects information (and seems to positively support) new skyscrapers in the UK. It's the sort of site Mr Micklethwait would probably approve of, in fact. He loves landmarks.

I'm working on the next GRID, so it's time to beef up my collection of built environment links:

The Slatin Report - what GRID US's editor did next

A Daily Dose of Architecture - just what it says

architecture.com - RIBA's web presence

CoolTown Studios - urban villages with a good financial basis?

ArchNewsNow - a round-up of today's architecture news

archlog - an architecture blog (possibly moribund)

Those who read this blog because of my built environment links my find my employer's latest venture of interest:

EG TV.

The Prescott interview and speech in the MIPIM section are of particular interest.

Scaryduck talks about the BBC/LandSec outsourcing deal in passing:

The sale of BBC Technology killed of the illusion of St Greg in some quarters, as did the outsourcing of property management and the construction of the Grey Lubyanka in White City, where jobs would mysteriously disappear en route from other locations.

Rural housing market in 'crisis' says the BBC's Scotland site.

A tree isn't just a tree for urbanists

A politician say that us journalists really run the country. Excellent. All will change immediatly.

Nice to see someone's doing something to connect politicians and people

Casino Avenue has a nice collection of links to derelict buildings, of which Derelict London is the first and best.

The site reminds me of Brian Micklethwait's comments about recording "the god-awful waste land bombsite, total dump places, and the most hideously nothing buildings you can find, because they are the ones that will change."

It's good advice and it makes for a good site.

There's a new architecture blog in the blogosphere, courtesy of journalist James S. Russell:

ArtsJournal: STICKS & STONES

[via City Comforts]

Guardian architecture correspondent Jonathan Glancey has done a worthwhile round up of architectural developments in 2003: Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Attack of the blobs

Goodness only knows why the online version was done without pictures. How very stupid.

Over on City Comforts, David Sucher is getting wound up over some rather elderly Hastings proposals:

City Comforts Blog: Oh god, not another one!

First up, Findlay is hardly 'on the path to success' - she's been in the trade for over 20 years, and can be considered a success. The design is under revision at the moment (you can find details on her firm's website, if you can be bothered digging through the Flash). More to the point, David's comments do make me wonder what he thinks of some of the work of more extablished architects, like, say, Will Alsop's Fourth Grace in Liverpool.

Personally, I think it looks like a half-sucked sweet.

Uh-oh:

BBC NEWS | Business | Bank warning on negative equity

Here we go again.

I was reading through some of my occasional blog reads today, when I came across this post on Technovia, the weblog of former MacUser editor Ian Betteridge. He tells the tale of a developer in Brighton which has violated its planning permission and is suffering as a result. From this he draws the rather mysterious conclusion that all property developers are scum.

Now, maybe it's because I've just spent a day in a conference centre full of property developers, and maybe it's because they form a large part of the readership of EG, and thus help keep me employed, but I really don't think property developers are scum. Commercial property development is a risky game. You put all the money up front, often buying sites without the planning permission you need. You then have to run the gauntlet of the council's planning process, which can vary wildly from county to county. You have to agree a Section 106 agreement which, in essence, means you agree to give up some of your profit to improve the locality in a way the council directs, before you see a single penny of that profit. Then, once your building is done, you have to rely on the vagaries of the property letting market. Property development takes years. Misjudge your start point - or have it pushed back too far by the planning process - and suddenly you can find yourself with a multi-million pound investment with no return, as many developers in the City of London are finding right now. (Too many buildings, not enough occupiers in the market.) And you have to put up with the opinion of every member of the public and local newspaper hack who decides that just because something is big and obvious, they understand the issues involved.

Sure, there are a lot of very rich people in property development, as our recent Rich List in EG proved. However, a lot of people lose a lot of money too. Without property developers, our built environment would never more forwards. Have you seen council-built developments? Would you like to live or work in one? No, I thought not. Property developers are businessmen like any other. Sure, some are scum. Most, however, are decent people committed to decent improvements to our built environment.

Simon Perry's got some great architectural detail shots over on his Buzznet photoblog:

He's also got some interesting thoughts about Gaudi on his main blog.

Here's an interesting idea from the Building Centre:

For a short period of time The Building Centre Trust is giving over its gallery to three working exhibits to allow designers, manufacturers, students of design and construction as well as those interested in careers to experience contemporary manufacturing techniques and craftsmanship through live demonstrations.

Designers are encouraged to come and meet with some of the experts and practitioners and see how their own designs might be turned into constructed objects.

City Comforts describes an innovative project in the US to turn an overpass into a normal street.

City Comforts Blog: Hello Columbus to the I-670 Cap

Of course, those with a sense of history will know that this is far from a new concept. Only a few centuries ago, London's Bridges were covered with buildings in exactly this manner. Still it's an interesting idea and one I've stored away for potential use in Estates Gazette at some point.

The BBC has done a rather nice photographic round-up of the top 10 UK buildings, as chosen by the Commision for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE).

BBC NEWS | In Depth | Photo Gallery | In pictures: UK's top 10 new buildings

I'm looking at a pile of cuttings right now. We get these once or twice a day in the office and I've fallen behind in going through them for one reason or another. In particular, I'm looking at a page from last Monday, with cuttings from two seperate papers. The two headlines?

Housing market pick-up lessens negative equity fear

and

House prices stall as bubble effect fades

Well, that's cleared things up.

I tend to avoid writing about things close to my day job here, but I found this post on Samizdata.net interesting. Brian Micklethwait has some insightful things to say about Terry Farrell, Broadway Malyan and certain architectural choices.

All this is very much in my mind as I pull together the first issue of GRID, the magazine for finance, development, design and construction of office buildings.

He also sings the praises of the Erotic Gherkin, a building that we devoted 6 pages to in the last issue of Office Trends, which GRID is replacing.