urban therapist

These are a few of my favourite things. The people and places that inspire me and make it all worthwhile:

ANGEL OF THE NORTH
Anyone who has travelled by mainline rail or road through the north-east of England will have passed this towering statue. Aside from being a great work of art by Antony Gormley, it is a powerful symbol of how the industrial town of Gateshead resolved to shake off it aura of decline and embrace a new future. It triggered a remarkable culture-led revival of the riverside with the Sage music centre, Baltic art gallery and Millennium bridge. The next stage will hopefully be a revival of the town centre of Gateshead which must be one of the most hideous in Europe. Initially ridiculed, the Angel is now a source of enormous pride for the whole Tyneside region. It took great courage and risk from the leader of the Council, George Gill. I think we need many more city leaders of his quality. Read the Gateshead story.

APPS FOR DEMOCRACY
It’s often said we trust and care for each other less than we used to do. If this is so then information technology has to bear much of the blame for the decline in conviviality and civic participation, as we are all drawn inexorably closer to the TV and computer screen. But technology can also be a force for good. The Chief Technology Officer of Washington DC, Vivek Kundra, realised the city was gathering and sitting on vast amounts of data that it barely used nor even knew what to do with. It included real-time crime feeds, school test scores, and poverty indicators, making it the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. He asked iStrategyLabs how it could make it useful for the citizens, visitors, businesses and they suggested Apps for Democracy – a contest that cost $50,000 and returned 47 iPhone, Facebook and web applications with an estimated value in excess of $2,600,000 to the city. Take for example, an add-on to Facebook that allows commuters to share cars, thus reducing congestion. The city now hopes to attract new ideas from at least 5000 citizens of Washington, DC Incentives include a $1000 “Social Citizen Award” and public recognition for their participation. Read more.

ARTSCAPE NORDLAND
I make no apologies for including a second work by Antony Gormley - the Havmannen rearing from a fjord in Mo-i-Rana, Norway. He is one of 33 sculptors invited to create large works in prominent locations along the awesome coastline of Nordland county, straddling the Arctic Circle. This is an area few people know combining stunning nature with a series of isolated heavily industrialised towns facing an uncertain future. Whilst the towns engaged in petty squabbling and rivalries the population were leaving the region in droves. Something was needed to unite them and put Nordland on the international map. It seems to me the county’s culture chief Aaslaug Vaa had an amazing vision, and determination too, as she pulled this off in the face of heavy opposition. I keep on returning to this area and you should too, but if not you can always take a virtual tour.

BARCELONA
I know what you’re thinking. ‘Barcelona – that’s so 1990s’. Well of course, Barcelona has been the top of everyone’s list of places that re-invented themselves as post-industrial cities, thanks to the 1992 Olympics. There have been many copy cats since. But really great cities don’t just find a solution to one challenge – they keep doing it again and again. Barcelona isn’t just a cool place to be, it thinks and works very hard. But in doing so they haven’t forgotten that a city should be a community of people living FOR each other. For example, whilst most top British football clubs have been sold off to the highest bidder, Barça is owned by 150,000 ordinary people. The thing that’s impressing me about Barcelona at the moment is how it has reacted to a massive change in its population over the last decade. From being quite homogenous it now has many migrants, and has taken a very positive and practical approach. It’s new Intercultural Plan, developed by my friend Daniel De Torres would put to shame many other cities that have supposedly been dealing with diversity for decades.

CASA DEI CONFLITTI
You might think conflict was a strange thing to be giving prominence to but in my opinion it is normal and natural aspect of urban life that we ignore at our peril. Take any space with a high concentration of people of different backgrounds and you will always have differences of opinion and the potential for conflict. In much of northern Europe we are very uneasy with this. We prefer to maintain a pretence that everything is happy and would encourage avoidance rather than engagement to keep it this way. But sweeping conflict under the carpet does not solve it – it can even make it worse – as we learnt with the riots that swept the UK in 2001. In southern Europe, particularly Italy, they understand these things much better. The city of Torino has street wardens employed to anticipate possible family or communal disagreements and operates a House of Conflicts where mediation and conciliation can take place. They also appreciate that a well-managed process of dispute between initially warring factions can eventually bring the antagonists together and may reveal solutions previously unimagined. Too often we delegate this to the lawyers and the criminal justice system – to our collective loss. This is active citizenship enacted by the city and the citizens themselves.

CITY SAFARI
Think of your own city. I’ll bet there are many buildings or institutions you would like to explore or people you would like to know, but you are just too shy or reserved to approach them, or maybe you are worried about causing embarrassment to them or yourself by making a social or cultural mistake. As a consequence, most people only know very specific parts of their city and may well be ignorant or even suspicious of outher parts. Marjolijn Masselink had these feelings about her city of Rotterdam, so she created a new company called City Safari. It is directed at Rotterdamers themselves and says to them ‘Be a tourist in your own city’. As an individual or a group of friends you can tell Marjolijn what kinds of things you are interested in and she will design a personalised tour of the city, visiting 5 places you could never normally go to – the house of a migrant, the house of a born-and-bred local, of a transvestite, a mosque, a church, whatever, in order to know and understand them better. Every city should have a City Safari.

EDI RAMA
Edi Rama been Mayor of Tirana, Albania since 2000 and was voted World Mayor 2004. City politicians get a bad press, often deservedly, but when you get a good one they should be celebrated. I am sure one of the reasons I like him is because he was an artist who reluctantly came to politics. He took on one of the poorest and most unpromising cities in Europe, and had to face more than one attempt on his life before achieving office. He has worked hard to eradicate some of the most fundamental issues of poverty and squalor in his city, but I am drawn to him because of the style in which he has done it. The Tirana he inherited was possibly also the ugliest capital city in Europe and he had no money to build glitzy new downtown quarters. But Rana understands the power of symbolism and creativity so he bought large amounts of paint and brushes and said decorate the city. "It's the most exciting job in the world, because I get to invent and to fight for good causes everyday. Being the mayor of Tirana is the highest form of conceptual art. It's art in a pure state” he says. See more pictures.

EMSCHER PARK
When Britain realised that the game was up for heavy industry it went on an orgy of destruction of the industrial buildings and communities. It was crude and cruel, sending a message to those communities “you no longer matter” (see the films Brassed Off and Full Monty if you want to know what I mean). Only a few ‘heritage centres’ remained to testify what these areas had once achieved. In Germany, they did things rather differently. The Ruhr, based on Essen, was the biggest industrial area in Europe and it was turned into a gigantic 10 year experiment to save the infrastructure, the communities the memories and self-respect, but to find a new economy and sense of purpose. It was called IBA Emscher Park and I think it is one of the most ambitious and creative projects I have ever seen. Empty coal mines, steel works and gasometers were adapted for the most unlikely of new uses and everything was geared to ensuring local people still had a stake and a pride in their place. And it looks amazing too (see photos). In 2010 The Ruhr is the European Capital of Culture.

IDEA STORES
The first job I ever had was to encourage unemployed people to make use of their local library. Libraries are wonderful places but often the buildings, and even some of the librarians were not as welcoming and accessible as they might be. Sadly, it now seems that if libraries don’t make themselves more relevant to their communities they may start to disappear. This is why I was so glad to visit the Idea Stores. Tower Hamlets is London’s most diverse borough and is undergoing a process of gradually replacing each of its branch libraries with Idea Stores. Designed especially by the architect David Adjaye to stress, accessibility, transparency and flexibility they are located next to major shops and keep the same opening hours (including Sundays) to encourage maximum usage. They have high staff numbers including ‘meeters and greeters’ there to encourage first time users to feel welcome and comfortable. Although still holding large book stocks they also have space available for a wide variety of other usages, to ensure they are seen by people in the neighbourhood as the centre of their community.

JASMIN IMAMOVIC
Here’s another Balkan mayor who is also an artist and is still massively popular with his people after 10 years in power. Jasmin Imamovic, a Muslim, took over the industrially defunct, and war-torn city of Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2000. He breathed new life into local politics with a massive process of listening to people and groups beyond the usual political circles. He then set up a Mayoral Advisory Council of 25 unelected advisors representing the ethnic, religious, cultural, age, sexual and professional diversity of the city. Tuzla translates as ‘salt’ and it was from mining this staple of life that the city was built. In doing so, however, the city had eaten away its own foundations and large areas of the city centre were sinking. In a stroke of brilliance the Mayor declared the city’s greatest weakness would be turned into its strength by transforming the sunken land into a Great Salt Lake. It’s now a great asset to the town. This flair has been adapted to bringing large amounts of new foreign investment making it one of the most prosperous parts of this still-troubled country. And how do the people of Tuzla respond to the unconventional approach of their Mayor? Well in November 2008 he stood for election for his third 4-year term. His share of the vote went up to 76% and he received as many votes in predominantly Catholic and Orthodox neighbourhoods as he did in Muslim areas. And when asked recently, what he thought was the most important thing he had given the people of Tuzla he said “love”.

PIER GIORGIO DI CICCO
Pier is a man of many talents. A Roman Catholic priest, museum curator, university language teacher, poet and a very nice guy. But I’ve picked him out because not only is he the poet laureate of a city (in this case Toronto), but in my opinion he represents the conscience of all communities where strangers try and make a life together. I’ll

“If we are to come together as different people in a migratory age, we must share a common ethic. It cannot be religious, political, socio-cultural or ideological. In today’s diversity, such commonality is found only in creativity and common delight. Creativity means a way of thinking, being, interacting, trusting, by which the citizen sees daily enterprise in a context of adventure, allowance, mutuality and beauty. People must emerge from the heritage and lifestyles into a common forum, where their uniqueness is a given, but where their universality is defined.”

From Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City

SNØHETTA
I have a love/hate ralationship with architects. I have no time for that macho part of the architecture profession which assumes that it single-handedly shapes and breathes life into our cities. I am finding increasingly tiresome the so-called 'iconic' look-at-me buildings that some cities seem to assume they need, in the same way a footballer needs a trophy wife. On the other hand, I know other architects and buildings whose work is life- and place-enhancing, who give rather than take, and respect the role of others in making cities - not least the citizens themselves. My current favourite is the Norwegian company Snøhetta. They did the new Opera House in Oslo which is pictured on my home page. I love the way that the design allows the general public to wander all over such a supposedly exclusive institution as an opera. On this page I have pictured the Petter Dass Museum in northern Norway. A much smaller building but exquisite in desgn and execution. It had to have minimal impact upon its environment so Snøhetta slid it into the side of a mountain like a drawer. They did the Library in Alexandria too. A message to the profession: great architecture can be understated and remain great.

STEVAN NIKOLIC
We should never ignore the power of the outsider to bring positive change to a place. It very often needs the sharper eye of the outsider to see what is missing or to point out the absurdity of what exists. Take the north Serbian city of Subotica. The Yugoslav war had led to a chaotic period of emigration immigration and widespread neglect and disrepair of the civic infrastructure. In the neighbourhood of Pescara, Serbs, Croats and Hungarians lived side by side amongst derelict houses and impassable roads, but such was their suspicion of each other that none were prepared to take action to rectify the situation, even though they very often could not reach the shops or schools. Also worried about this was Stevan Nikolic, leader of the local (and outcast) Roma community, many of whom has been displaced to Subotica from other parts of the former Yugoslavia. One day he persuaded a friend to lend him an excavator and some tools and road material and a small group of Roma people began repairing the road. As other (non-Roma people) passed by Nikolic persuaded them to join in and, over the course of a week, this multi-ethnic group of neighbours who had never spoken before had created a new road for their district. So impressed was the local authority that it allowed the creation of a neighbourhood council to improve the district, and now many other parts of the city have followed suit.

TIMES SQUARE
We often take our public space for granted and too easily surrender it to control by others: commerce, the state, the car, the criminal. Active citizenship is about taking it back and bringing it to life. Anyone who has been to New York City will have been to Times Square because it has iconic status. But like me you may have been disappointed because it seems dominated by traffic which make is almost impossible to wander around the space freely. Property owners in the area evidently felt the same way which is why they initiated a massive experiment last summer. For three months they simply declared Broadway ‘closed’ by erecting temporary barriers. They all contributed some money and bought a large batch of the cheapest deck chairs they could find, littered them around the empty car-free streets and then stood back to see what happened next. It wasn’t long before the people of New York took over and turned the area into a vibrant new ‘park’ full of all kinds of strange and familiar social activities. Although some snobs complained about it, the high risk experiment was deemed such a success that it is to be repeated next year.

TORONTO
I don’t actually much like the part of Toronto that most visitors see, its downtown. Dominated by the usual rather brutal modernist blocks, it is probably not helped by its winter climate which rather discourages street level urbanity for many months of the year. However, Toronto more than makes up for it with its neighbourhoods which are thriving and fascinating. Particularly in contrast to cities just across Lake Ontario in the US, Toronto is on a human scale, where many people seem to walk and patronise local shops and services. Maybe we should not be surprised as it was the home of Jane Jacobs for the last 30 years of her life, but the city seems to understand the power of density, dynamism and diversity of tenure, function and people. Some the shopping districts have been ethnically-badged such as Little Italy, Korea Town, Danforth (Greek) and Gerrard Street (little India). Such places sometimes make me suspicious. On the one hand they risk being phoney marketing facades. On the other hand, in some cities they can be the outward sign of rigid spatial segregation, but I sensed neither of these in Toronto.